Berlin was amazing, but certainly more so because the town is exploding with Christmas spirit! There were lights, decorations and Christmas markets everywhere. All this on top of a city with such a history lesson – wonderful!
I went to Berlin with my friend from work, Mark, and his two friends Paul and Christina. Christina is German, so there was no language barrier whatsoever. We had our own personal translator!
Our first stop after checking into the hotel was a little family owned Turkish restaurant. The population of Berlin is approximately 30% Turks! We ate like kings for only about €8 each. We had a mixed salad plate, Turkish bread and Tzatziki sauce (my favorite) and these lamb sausages with potatoes. Beautiful! We sat for a while just chatting away and absorbing the very friendly atmosphere. They even brought us a complimentary Turkish pizza to try. So nice!
Next, we headed closer toward the Sony Centre in Potsdamer Platz, where we encountered our first Christmas market and where I tried my first mulled wine, or “Gluhwein,” which is red wine heated and spiced with cinnamon sticks, vanilla, cloves, citrus and sugar. I am sad to report that I didn’t like it. It reminded me too much of sangria heated in the microwave. Too sweet. However, we found a booth selling chestnuts (roasting on an open fire) and THEY were delicious!
After we left Potsdamer Platz, we made our way to the remains of the Berlin Wall. There were guys there offering to stamp passports with official East Berlin stamps. I didn’t get a stamp because it seemed a little shady.
Across the street, there was a snow slide set up near yet another Christmas market. We watched people sliding down on their rafts for a while and found out we could get tickets for just over a euro. So we took our turn sliding down ourselves! It was the most fun ever. We got going pretty fast down that hill and just as I was wondering how we would stop before sliding right into the intersection, the guys at the bottom sort of stopped us with their feet – possibly the most dangerous job ever – and dumped us out! I had images of Chevy Chase sliding through town on his greased up sled.
We met a friend of Mark’s and Paul’s (Azim) for dinner that night and just after that I got super-tired and went back to the hotel for bed.
The next morning, Christina had left to meet her brother and his girlfriend, so the guys and I went into town intending to get the hop-on, hop-off tour bus, but went for a walking tour instead after having brats and coffee for breakfast. Strange combo, but when in Berlin, do what the Berliners do.
The walking tour was really good. We started at the Brandenburg Gate, where the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled the baby over the balcony is located. You get all kinds of history on the tour I guess. We learned about the war, the wall, the Holocaust and the burning of the books in 1933. We saw more of the wall, the parliament house, the site where Hitler’s bunker used to be, the Holocaust Memorial, Checkpoint Charlie and more. It was an amazing tour.
We met back up with Christina and met her brother and his girlfriend and had a coffee with them, then went to another Christmas Market and got some more food – some kind of fried potato cake thing with bacon in it – to die for. Later we met back up with Azim and went to a club and had a great time dancing and drinking Beck’s. We stopped for kebabs on the way home and hit the sack shortly after.
Our last day in Berlin, we decided to take the hop-on, hop-off tour. We rode it around the city until the heat in the bus was too much for us, then got off on the Kurfurstendamm, which is the main shopping street in Berlin. We saw the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche, which is the cathedral that was bombed in 1943 and was allowed to stand as a memorial and museum. We had a lunch of ham, sauerkraut and potatoes, then went shopping at some funky shops for souvenirs and then to the biggest Christmas market of them all – the Gendarmenmarkt. We spent the whole afternoon there, trying food and wandering the various stalls full of jewelry, candles, Christmas ornaments and all kinds of other stuff.
Our last experience in Berlin was at Azim’s apartment, where he hosted a dinner to celebrate Eid ul-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice, celebrated in honor of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God and marking the end of the Hajj, which is the pilgrimage to Mecca. He cooked Indian food, which we ate without forks or spoons, scooping it with pieces of bread. He told the story of Abraham to us while he prepared to serve us. The food was delicious and we all felt honored to have been invited to celebrate with him. The evening was relaxing, filled with conversations about differences in cultures, as there were six nationalities represented at the table. We are the world!
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