Berlin
Our train to Berlin was long and the entire journey made us wish we had booked seat reservations so we could have been guaranteed seats together. We decided we would learn from our mistake, so the first thing that we did when we made it to Berlin was head to the rail line’s information office to book reservations for our next leg. After over an hour, we finally made it to the front of the line and made our reservation with ease before heading over to the hostel.
On the way, we grabbed some food (to go) and checking into the hostel, we were finally able to take a few minutes to relax and get settled before starting laundry and taking a walk to get to know the neighborhood.
In the morning, we got up and found a cute cafe for breakfast before heading to the spy museum. The first floor was a prologue to the rest of the museum which consisted of a lot of the history about spies and spy software, particularly those used in Germany. The second floor integrated the history of spies with interactive exhibits to keep everyone entertained. These exhibits included an invisible ink activity, puzzles, Morse code encoding, and code breaking. Our favorite exhibit was, by far, the laser maze. We both were even able to do it fast enough to make it on the leaderboard for the day.
After the museum, we had a bit of time before our Segway tour to walk around and find lunch. We headed toward Brandenburg gate and the memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe. We started getting hungry for lunch and noticed a beer garden next to Brandenburg gate. We got Bavarian sausages, pretzels, and of course beer. After we finished lunch, we started to wander again, this time towards Alexanderplatz which had a carnival and a lot of shopping.
Soon after, we had to head over to the meeting point for the Segway tour. Luckily, when we got there we noticed there was only four Segways outside ready to go. Once the tour was about to start the other people still hadn’t shown up, which meant we got a private tour.
We quickly learned that private tour also means personal photographer. Our guide wasn’t the best at giving information, but he was a great photographer and had a great route that we rode to see all of the sights. Some of the highlights were the synagogue, Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall Memorial, the TV tower, and the parliament building. We also returned to the memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe and learned that the architect was the same man who designed the 9/11 memorial in New York.
It was a fun tour and we really enjoyed the segways. We also decided that we liked the fact that it ended up being less history because we had done so many history tours recently. It was also a really cool way to see everything in such a big city quickly.
When the tour was over, we sat in a nearby park to give our legs a break and figure out our evening. After a bit, we headed back to the hotel to drop our bags and prepare for dinner. There was a very popular Korean bbq restaurant a few doors down from the hotel that looked amazing, so we decided to give it a try. We both loved it and got a very good meal within a short walk of the hostel.
Luckily, we didn’t have any partiers in our room so we got another night’s slept before an insanely early morning to catch our train to Amsterdam.
