Leaving Amsterdam at 4:30 am is not a good life plan.   Leaving Amsterdam at 4:30 am when you were at a fancy dinner with really surprisingly delicious Dutch wine until 11 pm the night before is an even worse idea.   Leaving Amsterdam at 4:30 am when you had to walk down a street in the Red Light district after dinner the night before because your husband didn’t believe they actually had red lights in the window giving it the name is still a worse idea.   And yet the idea that won out over all of them was the one made several months prior…

As I said previously, we had no real desire to see anything between London and Prague, but we wanted to stay on the trains and that would have been a long trip….so we broke it up with a few stops.   And since we were already doing a random jaunt in Brussels and Amsterdam, our brains told us it would be fine to book our train with a 5 hour layover in Berlin where we could just rent a locker for our backpacks and explore the city for a bit before getting to Prague late that night.

So I found myself in a scene from Eurotrip, trying to sleep in 6 person enclosed train car with a shoeless German man turning on and off the lights and the loud Dutch businessmen obviously having enjoyed their morning coffee very much before entering our cabin.   And unlike our lovely ride to Amsterdam where we were served a surprise 3 course lunch with wine, the little snack car available here only provided water and soggy croissants.   

Enter Berlin:  I’m exhausted, hungry, and severely under-caffeinated.  We know even less about this city than our last 2 stops (yup, research fail on my part, but 88 days is a lot to plan and something had to give…).  Oh, and it was supposed to start pouring rain at any moment.  Germany, you never had a chance.

My husband assessed the situation and realized that he didn’t have long before this 5 hour layover crumbled into a very long and uncomfortable wait on the train platform. First rule: find food.   Which we did, along with beer.   And then we wandered…

I have no clue what we saw honestly, I was too tired to focus my eyes on the historical markers to read the long information pages in 4 languages, so apologies to all my history buffs…But if you want to take a stop for a REALLY good lunch, I can tell you where to find amazing currywurst!

[ed. note: We ate lunch at a divine cafe just next to the Brandenburg gate. We got there by walking past the magnificent German Parliament building – where they handed us a 45 page English booklet about how the German government is formed and operates. From there, we meandered towards the giant square surrounding the beautiful Berlin Concert Hall. Then it was a quick .75 km over to Checkpoint Charlie. ProTip – the shack is stupid, but there is a lot of good history about the splitting of Berlin by the Allies and the eventual reunification of the City after the wall came down. All in all, I found it delightful. Maybe 6 or 7km roundtrip from the train station? And it didn’t rain on us!]