What to do in Berlin!

Last weekend I was away in Berlin for 3 days and had an amazing time!

My flight went from East Midlands Airport at 6.30am meaning a very early start. As I was travelling with my boyfriend we paid for airport parking. Splitting this between us made it cheaper than public transport to the airport.

We arrived in Berlin at 9.30 and made our way to out hotel via the Tier Garten, We stayed at the Fjord hotel Berlin and paid £243 for 2 people making it £40.50 a night. The hotel was lovely to say it was on the cheaper side. We dropped our bags off as we where too early to check in and then when we went back they had been taken to our room which was a nice bonus. There was free fruit and infused water daily. Also extremely friendly staff which really helps. I'd 100% recommend this hotel.

After going to the hotel we headed out to join a free walking tour from this company: https://originalberlintours.com/tours/free-original-berlin-walking-tour/

Our guide was great and showed us all the main sights such as the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin Wall, Cathedral and The Palace as well as a few places that we wouldn't have known about such as the site of Hitlers war bunker. I love walking tours as you can really get to understand the history where as by myself I may see the building but I wouldn't know the story behind it. Such as the 2 domes in the Gendermarkt, one French and one German. The Germans where angry that the French finished their dome first so the Germans decided to make theirs 1 meter higher to get back at them! He also showed us where the burning of the books happened at the university library which foreshadowed the start of the war.

We left our tour at the Brandenburg gate and went for a much needed sit down in a cafe at this point we'd been up 14 hours and where pretty tired. So we decided to head back to our hotel via the supermarket where we picked up breakfast and snacks for our trip to keep our food costs a bit lower. After checking in we went to our room to unpack and shower before heading back out for dinner.

Our hotel was close to Potsdamer Platz where there was lots of restaurants so we headed there and ate at Que Pasa. As you can probably guess from the name it was a Mexican. We shared nachos for a starter then I had a burrito and my boyfriend had tacos as well as 2 cocktails for me and 2 beers for him. The bill came to €56 which we thought wasn't bad!

On our second day we headed out early to the Topography of Terror (Berlin Wall), we spent hours reading all about the history of the wall and the wars. I was really interesting and definitely a must do for anyone heading to Berlin. 

After that we made our way towards Check Point Charlie stopping at an italian where I had the best spaghetti Bolognese i've ever had! Unfortunately I don't know the name of this restaurant but this was the best meal I had while in Berlin.

We then headed to the Check Point Charlie museum. We where actually pretty disappointed in this one, it was all very cluttered and didn't seem to follow any real plan. There was lots and lots of information shoved in random places and covered everything from World War 1 to Korean Torture camps. I think they had tried to cram too much into a small space and it just left us confused and a bit bored.

After leaving we headed to Fassbender & Rausch a famous chocolate shop in Berlin. They have models of Berlin landmarks such as the Reichstag made of of chocolate and weighting 300kg! There was also the Titanic, a plane, the Brandenburg gate and a volcano erupting chocolate! We bought a small things to sample back at our hotel.

We headed out again that night for a nice meal, this included us getting dressed up a bit! We went to a restaurant called Meredo. The service here was pretty poor it took a long long time for our drinks to arrive and then our food. Luckily when the food actually arrived it was really good! I had a chicken caesar burger which came with an amazing salad and was in fresh ciabatta bread with rotisserie chicken. My boyfriend had a traditional beef burger. The food did redeem the restaurant a bit but after waiting so long I don't think we'd go back there.

For our final day the heavens opened and it rained a lot! So instead of heading to the zoo as we had planned we went to the spy museum via a watch tower left from the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately because of the rain we where not able to go into the tower. The rain also meant the queue for the spy museum was huge! However, it was well worth the wait once we finally got in. It was the best museum we visited by far. There was so many interesting things to read about and lots of spy artifacts to look at such as cameras, modified umbrellas and suitcases. We also received money off vouchers for their cafe when we paid for our tickets so after spending a few hours walking around the museum we had hot chocolate and lemon cake. The hot chocolate was incredible to say it was a small museum cafe. I'd recommend going here just for that.

After the Spy Museum we headed back to Fassbender & Rausch to buy some more chocolate! We bought hot chocolate and a mix of their different types of chocolate. We then made one last stop before heading back to our hotel and that was Dunkin Donuts. We don't have these in England so we wanted to try it! We got a box of 6 doughnuts for €7 which we thought was pretty good value and meant we had breakfast for the next day.

As we where running low on money we headed to Pizza Hut for dinner haha. It was close to our hotel and cheap so after eating pizza and chicken sticks we headed back to the hotel for an early night as our flight was at 9.30 am the next day meaning leaving our hotel at 6am.

We got up at 5.30am and left our hotel at 6am to walk to the Berlin Central station for the train to the airport. We attempted to make our way back through the Tier Garten as we had done the first day only to find it all fenced off meaning we had to go all the way around. This may have taken us a long time but meant we got another look at the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag which turned out to be a nice little send off for our weekend in Berlin.

Have you been to Berlin? Would you like to? Let me know in the comments!