After we left Prague, we took a 4-hour train ride through the snow-filled Czech Republic into Berlin, Germany. Here’s what we ate, drank, saw & did during our three day stay — during the winter!
I’d been to Munich before, so I was expecting lots of beer halls, century old buildings and lots of pretzels and sauerkraut, but Berlin and Munich couldn’t be more different!
Berlin was a mixture of very modern and new, but also partly stuck in the grungy 80s — if that makes sense. It had much more of a city vibe, but there are so many green garden, parks and outdoor spaces too.
Not gonna lie… we were a little overwhelmed when we first got into the city, realizing it wasn’t as walkable as we are use to when traveling in other European cities. Renting bikes or their public transportation is the easiest way to get around for sure. However, we still walked A LOT (thank goodness for marathon training)!
Our first night, we just roamed around. We ate dinner at Transit, which was some of the best Thai food I’ve ever had. Actually, we ate A LOT of Asian cuisine while we were in Berlin… and it was all so good.
I knew with Berlin being as big as it is with SO much history, we needed to start our first full day with a city tour. We chose a hop on / hop off bus so we could see as much as we could. We rode the bus for most of the time just looking around, then used our second day to go back to a lot of the stops.
We saw the normal tourist spots like the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, (the meeting place of the German Parliament), Museum Island, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, the Fernsehturm (Television Tower), the Berlin Cathedral and lots more. It’s obvious we could have spent DAYS in Berlin and still have not seen everything.
We took a detour from the bus tour and headed to the East Side Gallery, which has over 100 murals painted on part of the Berlin Wall.
We crossed the river to go to a hamburger place that’s in a former tiny public restroom called Burgermeister. Be prepared to wait in LINE and then be crammed in to the space, but it’s so worth it. We got burgers, cheese fries and beer. Just don’t think about the fact that you’re in an old bathroom.
Our second full day it was raining, so we visited the Jewish Museum and the Topography of Terror (which was the former headquarters of the Gestapo). Once the rain cleared we walked around more to visit more of the sites we’d seen on our tour. We stopped also by a chocolate shop, beer hall and finished with dinner at a Korean restaurant.
Our next stop was Krakow, Poland, which I’ll share next!