Berlin Again

During the fall, it seemed like I was not doing as good a job doing weekend trips as I would have liked. So, I decided to take a day off and have a 3 day weekend in Berlin. Berlin has tons of good museums and I was nowhere close to having seen them all. When I got to the airport, I went to my gate and waited for the flight to board. Just before boarding was supposed to start, I noticed that the screen by the gate no longer said Berlin. Thinking they had changed gates, I ran around trying to find the new gate and spotting on the departures board that my flight had been canceled. It was ontime when I came through security, and I went straight to the gate. It appears that KLM canceled the flight without even bothering to make an announcement that the flight had been canceled. That's pretty much the last straw for me, and so one of my plans for the new year is to minimize my travel with them even more. I went to the service desk and got rebooked on a later flight, a meal voucher, and a discout, so I suppose that they did everything they needed to do, but I was still disappointed to have lost effectively an entire day of my weekend.

After I arrived and checked into the hotel, I went for a walk in the cold night air. The city was quite nicely decorated for the season.

From Berlin by Night

By random chance, I walked straight into a Christmas market, that turned out to be pretty good. So I had some food and gluhwein for my dinner. I went to another market that night that was supposed to be good, but found that they were charging admission to get in. That's absolutely unheard of to me, so I turned around and left. The next night, I came across another one around Potsdamerplatz.

From Berlin by Night

It looked really cool, taking advantage of the semi-open Sony Center, and having a snow tubing slope. However, on closer inspection it was quite commerical, there were only a few different stands that were repeated over and over again, and the whole thing seemed to be put on by a company as a staged event. So, it turned out not to be very good. The best part, though, was the big stage where people were playing Singstar karaoke on a huge screen. Unfortunately, it seemed only Abba songs were on the list (probably some kind of sponsorship tie in with Mamma Mia, which serves to further detract from the whole thing).

During the days, I went to as many museums as I could. I managed to see all the museums on Museuminsel, plus the museums down by Potsdamerplatz. It was a long day of museums, but it was nice to do, and I got my money's worth out of the musuem card I bought. The best, though, is still the Pergamon, which everyone who goes to Berlin should see.

The final day I went to the zoo. The zoo is excellent, with tons of animals. I spent half the day there and easily could have spent longer. Even better, since it was winter, hardly anyone else was at the zoo, so it felt like I had the whole place to myself.

From Berlin Zoo

From Berlin Zoo

From there, it was to the Luftwaffenmuseum. Unfortunately, it closed it 4pm and by the time I go to it, I only had 45min to see the place. Worse still, the museum was huge and spread out. I rushed as fast as I could, but there was no way I could cover all the ground or even do justice to the stuff I could see. There were many interesting airplanes there, and I hope I can get back and do it properly another time.

From Luftwaffenmuseum

From Luftwaffenmuseum