Day one in Berlin.

The Posh Toilets

4:15am... beep beep beep a very tired Scott and Ashleigh drag themselves out of bed and begin to get ready. We leave Eastbourne at 5:15am, kindly driven to Gatwick by Ashleigh’s dad again. Even though we are flying out of North Terminal We get dropped off at South... why you ask? Me and Ashleigh have a very strange tradition that’s been going on for years now... every time we fly we use the ‘posh’ South Terminal toilets (these are 10 times better than the ones in North Terminal). We get the free shuttle train over to North Terminal and go straight through security, we find a water bottle refill station (you can take an empty bottle through security, the refill station is right by the toilets where you walk through to the boarding gates) and we then wait around for our gate number. Gate 52 is shown and we walk down to board, being EasyJet, it’s late of course but we start to board the plane 30 minutes later than expected. We have to walk on the tarmac to board and it’s utterly freezing! As we are about to take off, the girl next to Ashleigh is crying her eyes out and we have absolutely no idea why, all I'm thinking is great I have to get past her crying to go for a wee. There are also 3 guys behind us who wouldn’t shut up the whole flight, even during the safety instructions, which I know most people don’t listen too but was super rude. We had a bit of a foggy take off but then clear blue skies and we could even see London in the distance. It was one of the smoothest flights I’ve been on and hardly noticed we were in the air - I’m not the best flyer so for me this was AMAZING, also the flight time was about a 1.5 hours and it went really quick!

The Christmas Markets

We land in a sunny Berlin, depart the plane and are bused over to the terminal. Once we finally get through security, we step out into the smallest arrivals terminal I’ve ever seen, there was no tourist info just a small shop, a Berlin Card sales desk and a coffee shop. I honestly for a minute thought we had booked a flight to the wrong airport as I thought Schönefeld was much bigger, it wasn’t until we walked outside, we noticed we were at Terminal D of Schönefeld. Now granted we hadn’t done a whole lot of research into the transport but we knew roughly that we needed an ABC zones weekly pass to get about, but as we’ve traveled a fair amount we decided to just figure it out when we get here. We actually found it very difficult to find out where you go to get the train (we had to ask someone in the main airport terminal) you basically follow a long glass walkway to a huge ‘S’ which is the S- Line overground trains. We then struggle to work out the machines at the station so decided to ask the lady at the desk. She is really helpful and explains it’s cheaper to buy a weekly AB pass and then single travel to and from the airport to the city. She sorted all of our tickets and saved us about €10 altogether. Even with her help we still question if the train we are going to board is the right one but luckily after about 30 minutes we arrive in Alexanderplatz.

One of the reasons I booked to come to Berlin in late November, was to see the Christmas markets, as we walk round the corner near the World Clock in Alexanderplatz, the markets are still being put up and won’t be open till after we leave. I kinda just assumed the Christmas markets would already be up, so I was a bit gutted! Anyway we wander around looking at the World Clock and the TV Tower and stumble across a little crepe van and have an oreo crepe (which was delicious). As we are waiting for our food we have a wasp buzzing around us... A WASP IN NOVEMBER?! After dodging the most lost wasp in Germany, Ashleigh wanted to find the Lush shop as this was a ‘naked lush’ meaning it was a zero plastic packaging Lush. She bought a couple of bits and then we just chose a direction and walked. We ended up near Museum Island which I wanted to see so we tried to walk towards it, I say tried because every time we got to a road it was closed as part of some construction site (there is a massive amount of construction going on).

We literally couldn’t find a way over there, we pretty much walked around the whole of the island before we found a bridge to get over. There was definitely some sort of protest going on outside Berliner Dom (which is a beautiful Cathedral- which yep was under construction)

As there were lots of people with signs and whistles and a huge police presence. We make our way over to Hackescher market which has lots of restaurants and lots of street food, we try vegan currywurst from ‘Curry 61’ which was really tasty… I couldn’t tell it wasn’t real meat!

Yeah… the inside wasnt great either

By this time, we can nearly check in so we head to the closest train station and try to work out how to get there, which was an adventure itself. We eventually decided that we need an ‘S Train’ to Savignyplatz which doesn’t take too long, then we have about a 10 minute walk to our hotel, we find a Lidl’s on the way so stock up on treats and drinks before finding our hotel. We are staying at ‘Mark Apart Hotel’ and was booked through EasyJet holidays, we can’t really remember booking this or even looking massively into the hotel and from the outside I’m not gonna lie it didn’t look great. But on the inside.... yeah it wasn’t great either. When we first walked in, we actually see a really spacious room with a decent bathroom and a balcony. It’s only after a few minutes we notice there are no proper lights just a few lamps, we notice it’s two single beds pushed together with two single duvets rather than a double, the curtain doesn’t quite close and there’s a lot of marks on the walls. We decided as we are going to be out of the room for most of our time awake in Berlin, we will just deal with it and we drop our bags off, Ashleigh puts on about 100 layers and we head out.

“I prescribe sandals and socks” It surprisingly doesn’t feel that cold even now it’s dark and on our way to the train station, we see a very strangely dressed pharmacist.. Ashleigh blurts out “I prescribe sandals and socks” lets hope she didn’t speak English. We get our train to Haupbahnhof where we walk 5 minutes until we are at the Reichstag.

We are coming back properly on Saturday morning, so we only briefly stop to look, we continue 5 minutes further and are at the Brandenburg Gate. It’s very quiet here compared to most photos/videos I’ve seen (maybe because it’s dark now) annoyingly the bottom of the gate has (shock) construction so we take a few photos and walk towards Potsdamer Platz, on the way Ashleigh make makes some ‘wurst’ jokes and thinks she’s hilarious! We get to the Mall of Berlin and find a Lindt shop that sells hot chocolate and OMG it’s outrageously good! After we walk into the heart of Potsdamer Platz and we actually stumble across a Christmas market!! It’s not the best or biggest but I’m ticking it off my bucket list anyway… Berlin Christmas market ✅

We demolish a HUGE cheesy pretzel from the market which is delicious and then find a McDonald’s as we have heard they sell a McVegan burger, it was a little dry but it definitely hit that McDonalds craving I've been having lately (we are vegetarian)! I think with some extra sauce it would have been fine!

We explore the little market again and then get a train back to the hotel. We have an interesting little old woman in front of us, who was tipping choco milk into lots of different bottles and then started to eat some McDonald’s apple pieces, she polished off a huge cup full and then from her handbag pulled out another cup full.... How much Apple can you eat? We’ve also noticed that after using the transport multiple times we have not had our tickets checked once, there’s not even barriers at the station. When we get off we walk to Lidl and pick up some €1.99 luxury white wine and have a glass before crashing out in bed... we have walked 25,560 steps today!! (15.4km)