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If walking is your thing, Berlin is great for having absolutely no idea of where you’re going. No where in the centre is any more than 20 or 30 minutes away by foot, and along the way, you tend to encounter lots of smart, abstract architecture. If you’re of the environmental persuasion, you’ll certainly be pleased too.
It’s a short 10-15 minute walk from our hostel in East Berlin along the River Spree to the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate. This is where our tour to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp begins. While we wait, I eat Dunkin Donuts, write a postcard, buy a few souvenirs for people and take some typically touristy photos.
Isn’t it great? 2 hours and £20 later you can be 800 miles away. My 6 week trek of 3 continents continues. Arriving somewhere i’m always struck by idiosyncrasies. In Berlin it’s the ubiquitous graffiti. Anything concrete that can be sprayed with an ineligible disarray of scribbles is – but occasionally in an artistic manner.
We make our way to Sheremetyevo Airport on a damp smoggy morning and relax in an Irish pub while old Ilyustrian Aeroflot planes chugger along outside and jet people off to remote parts of Siberia and the Caucuses. Our slightly more modern Lufthansa A320 takes us firstly to Germany, and then back to where we started – Dublin.
My journey to Scandinavia takes an abstract form. Due to Lufthansa’s odd route network, we must connect through both Frankfurt and Munich, before jetting onwards to Stockholm. It’s a full day travelling, and I could have flown to Asia in the equivalent time, but I’ve never been one to complain about the gift of flight.
