It's the Mrs' birthday later this month (and our first anniversary today). I want to take her to Berlin for a long weekend to mark both. I'm hoping to have a room in a hotel overlooking the Brandenburg Gate but otherwise know nothing of Berlin past the obvious names. What should we do during the day? Where should we go in the evening?
Go to the currywurst museum, but be forewarned: they do not actually serve currywurst. However, every goddamn food stall does, and you should have some regardless. I wish we'd been able to go into the Bundestag building; there's a beautiful dome/rooftop terrace/garden you can climb up to in addition to normal guided tours. We spent awhile just marveling at the building from the courtyard. While you can spend a beautiful, delightful, but utterly exhausting and dehydrating three hours wandering around the Tiergarten in search of this fantastic biergarten like I did, it's probably best to get directions, head straight there and then go for a walk in the beautiful park. Even if you don't drink, the food's good, the scenery is beautiful, and it's an interesting and novel place (to this American, at least). Also, not packed with tourists but pretty accommodating to exhausted and confused tourists who don't really know German. Honestly, if it interests you at all, everything on this list is absolutely worth seeing with the exception of Checkpoint Charlie. We went to take a token picture & tell our families we'd been, but it was so packed, crowded and crassly commercialized I wish we hadn't gone at all. Berlin is fantastic and you should go for all the weekends.
If you have any interest in museums and antiquity you should take a trip to the Museumsinsel. Warning: can take many hours!
Go to the former Eastern part of the city which is now the young and hib part and walk around, find a bar that serves in the street, listen to some live music or just sit outside in a comfy chair and enjoy great beer (so go in the spring early summer). I second Tiergarten and you should definitely se the Bundestag building - queues can be rather long so a good trick is to take a sightseeing trip on the river (like starting from the impressive new railway station) which ends with a visit to the Bundestag and bypasses the queues. The trip is also worthwhile in itself. Two of my colleagues own apartments in Berlin, I'll ask them for more specific advice.
Things I did last weekend in Berlin with girlfriend and friends: Friday evenig: Went out for drinks on the Oranienburger Straße . Weird but fun atmosphere with bored-looking whores on the street, lots of nice cocktail bars and the police patrolling in front of the jewish synagogue. Saturday: Went to the Pergamon Museum. They had a huge 3D panorama view, which was visually stunning (no joke!). The regular exhibition was very nice as well. Recommended if you are interested in the time period. Sunday: Visited Berliner Unterwelten. It's a guided tour through old WW2 or Cold War bunkers. We did the WW2 one and it was great. The tour guide was excellent and very knowledgeable. Highly recommended.
Thanks for the suggestions guys, there's some interesting things there, I'm a sucker for a museum and the pergamon looks amazing.
Now we're doing, I'll recommend the Stasi museum and reserving at least an hour to see the Memorial to the murdered Jews of europe. the Stasi Museum is a bit of a mixed bag if you don't speak/read German, only about 50% of the displays are translated, but is worth seeing if nothing else for actually being in the old Stasi office complex and for being part of East Berlin that actually still looks/feels like the East Berlin of the movies. I do have to keep reminding myself that it's over 20 years since the wall came down. The Memorial we'd seen photos of before we came and were less than impressed. Having gone through our photos just now, it just doesn't work in pictures but as a physical monument it's actually both impressive and moving. I was eavesdropping an American tour/student group discussing it and the teacher/guide had a completely different impression of what it meant to what I was taking from it. The visitor centre is also very well done though sadly the only place I've been that had x-ray machines. I like the approach they've taken, while there's an element of 6million Jews (and Roma! they get a mention here), Auschwitz and so on, there's far more emphasis on personalising it, accounts of families from all over Europe and mini biographies of people killed in the holocaust. On a more general basis, I really like Berlin, easily one of my favourite European cities already. It doesn't feel as frantic as Paris or London and is far more friendly. when I first got here I thought it was a bit of an ugly city, but having had a day to wander around between the AlexanderPlatz and the Brandeburg gate I'm starting to change my mind. It also has "beer on a Bike". Where 10 people or so pedal frantically while sat around a "bar" being served up beer on a contraption that would cause riots in Londo. And you can see the sights on a Segway tour. On sunday I will only answer to the name Gob, we had to try it out. Afterwards we've got our trip to the dome in the Bundestag.
Really recommend the Segway tour, especially if you do it towards the beginning of the trip. 4 hours zooming round the major landmarks in the east of the city is great fun. You have to book in advance to visit the Bundestag, easy enough to do in advance online though. Agree with fourfs about checkpoint charlie. Worth passing through to say you've seen it and the information panels are interesting, but everything there, including the famous "leaving the American Zone" signs are replicas. You can get your passport stamped if you really want to but this is apparently a really bad idea, particularly if you have a US passport. Far more interesting is the Topography of Terror on the site of the Gestapo HQ which is about 2 minutes walk away and also has some of the only remaining sections of the wall still in place.
