“Berlin! Berlin! Wir fahren nach Berlin!.”

I have always wanted to travel to Berlin and thanks to Norwegian airlines we found ourselves on a flight there last week for 4 days and 3 nights for just $100 round trip each. Of course, to keep the cost as low as possible we booked a decent enough hostel for $80 total for three nights and packed our bags! What I would give to always have such affordable access to different places in Europe. Could I even make it to Vegas and back for that much back home?

Attention you are entering the tourism sector!!

Well we got off the plane in Berlin at the little airport of Schönefeldt and what is the first thing I see? Naturally an American style diner decked with route 66 and classic Coca-Cola signs.

We located the main terminal with the information desk and purchased our 3 day public transportation passes and hopped on the train for a short ride into the city.

Landing in Berlin

We asked for directions from a food stand situated just outside the train stop and were kindly steered the wrong way down the street. After about 20 minutes of walking we realized that we had been misinformed so we decided to sit down and have dinner before trying our luck the other direction. We had a nice relaxing dinner for what seemed like a price too good to be true after living in Norway the past month. I apologize for the poor quality of picture but here we are.

Goldmarie – A “hostel” experience

After finishing our dinner we continued back down the road towards our hostel. We finally found it and as you can guess from the picture below we were immediately thrilled. Nonetheless, we entered and found the reception desk who informed us that our room was on the fourth floor so we picked up our bags and headed upstairs.

Before I continue I would like to clarify that we fully prepared ourselves for the hostel experience, especially for the price, but this place was just…. wow. It looked like something out of a bad dream, the floor creaked viciously as you walked, graffiti covered the walls, and the strong smell of smoke permeated the hallways and rooms. There were few lights in the hostel and those that did exist were dim.

After we hit the second floor on the stairs we had apparently passed the point of light installations in the building and had to use our cell phones to guide our way up the stairs into the dark and down the hallways to our room.

We finally found our room, (Expectedly basic: cheap ikea table, bed, and nightstand) and flicked on one of the two lamps which to our enjoyment was red…. the lampshades AND the bulbs. Awesome. I will end my description of the hostel here as there is no way to fully explain the eery feeling that we got from the place (not mentioning the suspicious bloodstains found on one side of the sheets… of which I slept on top of… fully clothed, with a scarf covering the pillows).

I would have taken pictures but we bolted our door shut and I left my camera locked in my suitcase all evening. Needless to say we checked out in the morning with a partial refund and decided to take our friends up on a highly recommended hotel just down the street.

Michelberger Hotel

Michelberger hotel was on a completely different level, not just compared with Goldmarie, but with any other hotel I have stayed at. It was not that it was super classy or high-line, it was just their attention to detail with every part of your stay. Some including: Custom atlas’s for the city, a comfortable, trendy lounge-bar (even with locals), a signature “Michelberger Fountain of Youth” drink available at reception, and custom made breakfast tokens. Read on for more

Here is the entrance, a little different than our last one.

To start off, the rooms were quite nice and made good use of the space they contained.

We were pleasantly surprised with the breakfast buffet that they offered for about 10 Euros. Definitely the best I have had at a hotel before and to top it off they gave us two breakfast tokens as our tickets for entry to the breakfast area, they were small cutting boards decorated in knives, cheese and crackers – a nice touch.

The lounge-cafe-bar was very impressive. One evening during our stay we came back to the hotel around 11pm and found the place packed with people. It is apparently a place where people who aren’t even staying at Michelberger come to hangout and have a drink.

Just as we were heading off to the airport the last evening we realized we had somehow failed to take pictures of the actual lounge adjacent to the bar in the main lobby area of the hotel that we had praised so much during our time there. It was unfortunately night when we were leaving so there is little light in the room but I snapped a couple pics with my phone anyways just to save it in our memories!

The streets of Berlin

Back to the first day…. So, after checking in at Michelberger it was time to check out Berlin. Conveniently enough as we were heading out the door the receptionist asked us if we had a map of the city, which we did not. They provided us with their own custom made atlas’s designed to help their guests avoid the typical tourist traps.

One atlas contained their favorite places including cafes, restaurants, bars and clubs and the other showed good shopping locations with anything from electronics to second hand vintage clothes and hotspots around the city where the most people hung out. There was quite a bit of work put into these with each one highlighting a hundred places so we spent our days following our Michelberger maps that didn’t let us down!

Most of the areas we traveled through were covered in graffiti, some trashy but others pretty impressive. I was also struck by how much true street art there was to be seen.  It is clearly a city with a ton of history but yet it did not feel like stepping into the past at all and as cliche as it sounds the city seemed to still have a lot of “soul” so to speak with a lot of art districts and expressions of individuality (I hate that word).

This little guy was handcuffed to a bike rack.

Here was another cool… sculpture? It is hard to tell from the picture but behind it was the outline of a “church” made out of metal bars.

Tourist stuff

We spent most of our time looking through the various shopping areas recommended by our atlas, especially the second hand shops. I wanted to see the areas of Berlin that I would most likely experience if I were actually living there rather than large museums that I could read about online or visit during a studies tour.  It would be like visiting San Diego but spending your time in seaport village or fashion valley rather than seeing Hillcrest, North Park or Mission Hills. I wanted to get a small taste of what it would actually be like to be a local for a bit and I think we really did walk away with that. Here are a few shots of us walking around throughout the day.

I hate being labeled a tourist (I still refuse to use a neck strap on my expensive camera for almost this reason alone haha). HOWEVER, we were in Berlin and there were a few tourist attractions that I still really wanted to see!

Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie was the first. I am not going to give you a history lesson but here are a few pictures of the area

Berlin wall – East Side Gallery

The second place was of course the Berlin Wall, specifically the East Side Gallery

All good things…

We were able to visit most of the areas on our atlas and definitely picked out our favorites, though like always, we felt that our time was cut short and cannot wait to go back! If you are planning a trip to Berlin we cannot recommend Michelberger enough