Friday & Saturday 9 & 10 September: Berlin

We had an early flight from London to Berlin with a change of planes at Cologne. Lufthansa were their usual efficient selves. A passenger was taken sick at Cologne, which resulted in a short delay while she was taken off, but otherwise the flights were totally uneventful.

All roads lead to Rome, but in Berlin all trains lead to the zoo. The Zoologischer Garten station is the transport hub of Berlin, where inter-city and urban trains come together with the underground (U-bahn), buses and taxis. Berlin is a huge, sprawling place without a recognisable city centre, so the area around the zoo became our default base. It includes lots of shops, cafes, a nice big park (the Tiergarten), and an open square with a ruined church, food stalls and lots of really good buskers.

As usual, we got a guided tour by bus - this time it was not the hop-on/hop-off type, but it was in an open topped double-decker. The commentary was in both German and English - the guide described everything in one language, then quickly changed to the other. This was not an optimum solution, but at least we weren't bothered with the fiddly earphones used on some other tour buses.

We also bought a public transport day pass, which was great for getting around by U-bahn and bus. Of course our impressions were only very superficial, but we were impressed by the speed and efficiency of the service. On the other hand, the stations were dirty with a lot of graffiti and litter. In fact just about everything we saw needed a good clean up.

Are you being served? We decided to buy some clothes and went into a department store. Picked out some very nice shirts and things at a really good price, then the fun started. A nice lady took the items, opened the packages, tore off half the bar-code label, and affixed a sticker to it. This was handed to the customer, who was accompanied to a cash desk. The shirts were placed in a pigeon-hole while a young lady with a computer processed the payment. "I'm sorry sir, we don't take Visa" (!?) "We only take American Express.....I'm sorry Sir, the machine can't read your American Express card. There is a cash machine on the first floor that might take Visa." Well the cash machine didn't look like anything we'd ever seen, and wasn't willing to hand over any cash, no matter what we tried. Ah, well - we didn't really need those clothes.

Berlin is a city of many famous museums and monuments. We saw the Brandenburg Gate (rather disappointing), the Reischstag (but didn't get on the end of the hundred metre queue to go up in the dome), the Victory Column (large and vulgar) etc. Sadly, our timing was such that we didn't actually go into any of the museums. This was not such a loss, as we had already had our fill in London, and wanted to save ourselves for St Petersburg.

Tomorrow morning we leave Berlin after a very short stay. Two nights and a day is obviously not enough time to get to know a place, it's all we could crowd into our schedule. And frankly, it was probably enough. We will go by train to Rostock, from where we'll get a Baltic ferry to Tallin in Estonia. We're looking forward to slowing the pace, and the sea crossing plus three nights in Tallin should enable us to relax and recharge our batteries a bit.