Berlin

The part of the trip everything else had to revolve around. Kinda. Like I said in my first post in this series, I decided to travel across Europe during my winter break because Pete and Vlada were coming across to visit her family in St. Petersburg. Because it's rather expensive to fly directly to St. Pete's, Vlada had decided to first go to Berlin, then travel through some of the Baltics before heading across to Russia, and I was up for that, so decided to join them. We left Pete out of most of the planning because of course. (This is a guy whose sisters remind him of any birthdays in the family: Pete, it's Mum's/Dad's/Scott's/Grandma's/etc. birthday today... and here is the number in case you forgot/lost it.) But the itinerary was pretty much what they had organised, which turned out quite nicely. I had assumed that Vlada had been to these places before, but apparently she hadn't. Pete had spent a grand total of about 15 hours in Berlin on a band tour a year or so ago, and I'd visited Riga 13 years ago.

I honestly spent a lot more time in Berlin just relaxing in the Airbnb apartment we'd rented, because I hadn't had any proper down time in the entire trip thus far, so it was nice to be able to do that. Pete and Vlada therefore saw a few more places than I did, but I was cool with that.

I saw: Holocaust Memorial.

This is what you see when you approach the memorial from the street. I was not expecting...

... this. We didn't want to take any selfies or anything at the memorial, but I did get this photo of Pete, who's 6'3" or something, just to give some perspective to how "deep" it gets.

Checkpoint Charlie.

Well placed there, McDonald's. Well placed.

Eastside Gallery (a part of the Berlin Wall that has been converted into an outdoor gallery. A large chunk of it has been graffitied, hence the fences. Most pictures have something to do with the division of Berlin, the Cold War or the reunification.)

New Year's Eve involved buying and setting off our own fireworks, but we didn't go into the city centre because the other two were still very jet lagged and none of us felt like dealing with the crowds.

I also spent a day shopping, and another at church. This was probably one of my favourite days of the whole trip. I have made a few new friends, and moving to Berlin in the future is an attractive idea now.