Berlin day 5

16 juli 2020 - Berlin, Duitsland

Good afternoon everybody!

First of all, I want to say that today was our last full day here in Berlin. Tomorrow we will travel back home at around 14:00 in the afternoon. Which is why we made today a very busy day.

Our day started off at 9:30 in the morning. Famke and I had a pretty rough night again with not much sleep, so we were very tired and didn’t want to get out of bed. But the thought of going to the zoo today, made us get up anyways. Today was going to be a nice day with a weather of 20 degrees and no rain, so we putted on a t-shirt and went to get breakfast. During our walk to the Lidl, it started to get really cold (okay it was just a bit chilly, but I always get cold very very fast). I wanted to go back to the hotel and grab my jacket. Unfortunately, it was not just a jacket. All of a sudden it started raining! And not just a little rain, no, a heavy downpour. Famke also decided that it would be better to get a jacket and an umbrella.

Even though it was raining, we went to the zoo anyways. There were a lot of people over there, but the zoo is very big, so we weren’t bothered by it. We started our route through the zoo and thankfully it had stopped raining. I took out my camera to make pictures of the animals and their very weird body parts. Weird body parts you ask? Well, let’s say that it is mating season and the male monkeys didn’t mind giving us a little show. They were chasing the female monkeys with their ducks out and somehow we found it very funny and laughed at it for a solid 10 minutes. We continued our tour through the zoo, and I have to say, it is indeed very beautiful. There are so much animals to see and the residences are very creative and visitor friendly. We were really enjoying our time there until the weather changed again. It started raining so bad that our shoes, are jeans and our socks were completely soaked! Everyone was looking for shelter, but the rain didn’t seem to stop. We decided to start walking again under our umbrella’s because, we were already wet anyways. And very very cold.

Eventually the rain had stopped and luckily this was the last shower of the day. We managed to finish our route pretty fast and we had spent a total of three and a half hours there. But we had some more thing to do today, so we didn’t stay there to look at some animals a second time. Instead, we rented some bikes and cycled to Checkpoint Charlie. We truly risked our own lives, because cycling here is NOTHING like cycling in the Netherlands! We almost got hit by a car two times and I almost fell off my bike once when the road became very bumpy. But, we survived! There were not a lot of tourists at Checkpoint Charlie, so we managed to make some nice pictures of it. After that we cycled to the Konzerthaus, which was basically just another pretty building. So were left with the same thing we had been almost every day: the things we had planned to do the whole day had only costs us half a day and now we had half a  day left to do other things but we didn’t really know what to do. SO, we opened Google maps and looked for some more interesting places in Berlin. We found a monument in the south of Berlin and after a 20-minute cycle workout, we were there. I think the most fascinating thing about this monument (the Airlift Memorial) was that there were literally no other tourists beside us. Somehow it was very quiet in this part of Berlin.

Anyways, we went to see a graveyard that was nearby the airlift memorial, but somehow we couldn’t find the entrance of it. We cycled literally all around the wall but there was not one single entrance, so that was kind of disappointing. And then it happened again: it was only 15:30 and we had done everything we wanted to do. We had only two things left to see in Berlin, which we were kind of saving for tomorrow morning, but we decided to do them today to make today a fun last day. And boy did we have fun.

It started with our journey. We wanted to go to the Kaufhaus des Westens and we looked up the train station that was closed by it. We dumped our bikes and took the metro to go there, we thought. But this metro had two routes combined, the U1 and the U2 (I truly don’t even know how that would work). We took the metro anyways and all of a sudden it changed routes, which was bad, because we had truly no idea where we were going now. We decided to get out at the next possible stop to see where we were and how we would get to the right station. However, because it was a metro, we had to walk out of the station for our internet to work. We walked up the stairs and we were back on the ground and you never believe what happened next. The Kaufhaus was LITTERALLY RIGHT IN FRONT OF US! I don’t even know how, but in a blink of an eye we went from ‘we are lost’ to ‘we are exactly at the right place’, and I’m still so confused about it.

But anyways, we were at the Kaufhaus des Westens and it is basically a big warehouse full of fancy and expensive brands like Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton. It had 7 flours full of expensive clothes, shoes, beauty products and home accessories. (Side note: Famke and I had a discussion about how to write ‘accessories’ and I am sad to admit that Famke was right) We walked through the warehouse but sadly they had nothing to our taste, so we went out empty handed.

The last thing on our what-to-do-in-Berlin-list was to visit the Kranzler Eck. On our way over there, we came past a Hard Rock Café and we stopped there to get ourselves some sweaters. We went to have diner after that at the Five Guys and saved the Kranzler Eck for last. When we were done eating, it was only a five-minute walk to the Eck, but when we were there, we couldn’t find it. As it turned out, it was basically just another square surrounded by shops and restaurants. Oh, and this one stone that said “Kranzler Eck”. We took a picture of it for the idea of it and we took the train back to our hotel.

Like I already said, this was our last full day here in Berlin and we have done everything we wanted to do here and more. The only question now is: what are we going to do tomorrow? I hope the answer will be to sleep in, because damn I am tired!