Ah, the joys of a 4am start to the airport. It’s close enough to taxi but at £43 the parking works out cheaper than the return trip. No checked luggage means no aerosols or shampoo for the week. Which is a silly constraint, and that’s why I forgot to omit these items from my carry-on. Luckily a kind man in a security uniform helped me out and only looked at me as though I’m an idiot instead of actually suggesting it. I wouldn’t mind but that was bloody expensive ‘stop me scratching my head’ shampoo 🙁

Sat in the Airport, waiting for the obligatory ‘start of foreign holiday’ cooked breakfast. Lady walks past, pushing in front of her an empty pushchair. I look at it, look up at her, catch her eye, wonder if she can tell I’m thinking, “You’ve forgotten something.”

Sadly the people behind me didn’t forget. Thinking to myself, “If it doesn’t stop screaming I may not get breakfast”, then wondering if that’ll be in the seat behind me on the aircraft, nearly missed breakfast anyway. It took a reminder to the waitress for it to turn up ten minutes before I was due to board. It was passable, although being sat on the hot counter for half an hour probably didn’t help.

The ticket said, “Gate closes 30 minutes before take-off.” It lied; last passenger boarded ten minutes before take-off. It’s not that I took that long to get to the gate (although I did only reach it 30 minutes before scheduled departure), I just took a seat and watched the human snake shuffle lifelessly in a barriered zigzag across the terminal floor. Joyfully despite showing such inhuman patience (also known as ‘laziness’) I found an overhead locker almost empty for my bag, my other bag, my jacket and my sunhat.

Then I was at Berlin.

No small children on the flight in the end. Well, lots of small children, but they were all quiet. Until they got off. For some reason this caused one small girl to keep running to the terminal window and go ‘airwyplane!’ then turning to look wistfully at her parents, get called back to them and repeat. Her brother, still in nappies, finally escaped the confines of the baby rucksack his mother was wearing and ran out of the room to the top of the steps back down to the pan. His mother panicked. His sister pointed and went, “Airwyplane!”

The trip from the airport to the hotel was complicated by the aircraft landing at the wrong airport. The flight is listed as ‘East Midlands to Berlin Schönefeld‘ but I got off at an airport that described itself as Berlin Brandenburg. All the trolleys, the signs, the tape used to create passenger lanes used that name. Allegedly it isn’t yet built (despite my neighbour flying over to help them with it) so maybe they just gave all the collateral to Schönefeld so that it could be used before it wears out. I shall have to plan my return trip carefully.

The German train system was however its fabled efficient self. €3.70 for a ticket to the station near my hotel, with one change needed. That’s 18km; in the UK that’s a £24 fare. Here I could have had a 4 day ‘unlimited’ ticket covering the rail, S-Bahn, U-Bahn and Bus services across the whole of Berlin for that £24.

Instead I got off the train, cheated by taking a lift to the surface and found myself literally 80 yards from my hotel. Naturally I walked in at 11.30 in the morning and asked for a room. They offered me two, which was nice. I went for the one with a shower.

Ten minutes later I was back out, this time on foot. “Checkpoint Charlie is up there, turn left, about ten minutes walk” said the nice lady on reception. I went up there, turned left, must’ve walked too fast.

I’d expected a mix of emotions coming back to Berlin. Last time i was in Checkpoint Charlie armed men were poised and ready to shoot me, and there were also East German border forces there as well as the Americans. I thought I’d be sad, maybe relieved, interested and probably a bit happy.

I didn’t expect to be angry. Very angry.

Dismantling the checkpoint was one thing. I can understand them wanting to reclaim prime real estate, put that part of the city’s history behind them. Turning what was left into a pastiche of a Disney tourist attraction so that brainless millenials can pay to put an East German peaked cap on and pose for selfies with cosplayers in US uniform? No.

I’m bloody angry. Over a thousand people died trying to cross that border and they’re remembered by a clown posing for selfies?

The Checkpoint Charlie museum was far more respectful, giving the story of the wall, the broader border, the world events that led to it and the stories of many of those that tried to cross. It’s a bit of a mishmash though, some of its exhibits and writings clearly predating the wall coming down. Finding an optimal route through the museum was impossible, with the chronology all jumbled and backtracking inevitable. It wasn’t just me, I overheard another visitor expressing confusion to his partner.

I could understand them, not because my German has improved so dramatically but because they were speaking in English. It’s rather strange, walking through Berlin I’m hearing a higher proportion of random passers by conversing in English than I do when I’m in London. Even when I eventually sat down in a cafe in the corner of a shopping centre in between multiple office blocks, eight Americans soon sat down at the next table. (I’ll put actual money on the sole male member of that group liking men rather more than at least half his companions.)

After the touristique tombeau grotesque that the serious and dangerous interface between the major cold war powers has become I needed some light relief. I present to you the perfect antidote:

My delight that this place exists was not however matched by my willingness to hand over €11 to actually go inside. I’m sure it’s lovely.

There followed just one more obligatory activity for me in Berlin. Not the walk down Unter Den Linden, but the chunk of masonry part way down it.

Which the heartless bastards have fenced off to create a ‘fan mile’ for the football. I shall now be petty and hope all the vendors and other people involved have lost a lot of money due to Germany’s embarrassing failure at the World Cup, as that would be at least the start of some justice for preventing me walking through that Tor. Last time it was a 12 foot high fortified and heavily guarded twin wall winding through the city. This time it’s wire fencing and a radio station. The whole of Berlin available and they actually close off access to the gate? Idiots.

I did though still pass underneath the structure. Not the main arches, but on the side, and I could touch the stonework, and I could still pass from East to West without getting shot. So success.

That mandatory visit complete I nipped through the tiergarten and headed back to the hotel, stopping only to take an elevator up 24 floors in (literally) 20 seconds and walking up stairs for another two floors to reach a rather nice view of most of Berlin. I took photographs.

There was a cafe up there too but I’d been in Germany for over four hours by then and still hadn’t even seen an Eis Bistro, let alone taken advantage. So when I cut through a shopping centre on the way back to the hotel and spotted a sign proclaiming Caffè e Gelato, I decided to take a risk on shopping centre food. Twelve quid got me a large black coffee and ‘Hazelnut of Piedmont I.G.P. ice-cream, chocolate ice-cream, whipped cream, home made zambaione liquer, hazelnuts, bitter and white chocolate decoration’, which I decided was on the expensive end of things until it turned up. You know how you sometimes order something hoping it’ll even pretend to resemble the picture in the menu? The photograph at the top of this page needs to replace the one in the menu, they’re seriously underselling this thing.

Even though there were plenty of hours of daylight remaining I called a halt there. Over 14km walked, left knee painfully going ‘click’ every time I go up or down a step and the half hour snooze on the aircraft insufficient to compensate for being up since Sunday morning.

Dinner was a very expensive fillet steak at a restaurant that charged by the 100g. It was a nice steak, but nowhere near worth the price charged.

Tonight’s hotel is the only hotel for the whole trip. It’s a proper four star hotel, so I can’t afford to drink in the bar but the staff are very helpful and speak beautiful English. It charges €24 for breakfast so my ‘half the normal four star price’ rate that included ‘free’ breakfast turned out to be a very decent deal. Whether I eat any or not is more of a question, but at least I can go and drink all their coffee.