Saturday, 15 August 2015

Cologne to Berlin. July 16

We caught another ICE train to Berlin today, which took just over 4 hours. Another lovely train picnic was had, pretzels, coffee and salads, along with watching Awkward for most of the journey. Arriving in Berlin we were firstly overwhelmed and amazed by the main train station. It was huge. And also had basically every shop imaginable. Well not quite, but so many. Airport like really. Which made us question why we have no train stations like this, it's crazy! The hardest part came next, figuring out how to get from the train station to our area, Neukölln, southeast of the central area, Mitte. The train system is actually really good we came to find out, but mega confusing when you don't know how it works. The ticket buying system likewise. You always have to put in your end station when buying a ticket and we just wanted like a weekly or something. Luckily a man who was on our train seemed to have it figured out and showed us the way. We then had to actually figure out what train to catch, our host seemed to make out that it was really easy, but we were soooooo confused. In the end we went to the info desk who printed us out a plan of what to do. The trains are in two systems, above ground S-Bahn and below ground U-Bahn, which is the most confusing part, you often have to swap between them. After finally figuring this out, we made it to our place, met our host and got a tour of our new place for the next 10 days.

The apartment is on the ground floor, a delight for us, and was pretty big, even having a separate bedroom, AND double sinks. AMAZING. The kitchen was a proper kitchen too, fully equipped with everything we needed. We went in search of a supermarket next, which was easy because there was both an Aldi and another one right near us. Also on our corner is an Asian supermarket, a dream for us. For dinner Ash made Tom yum soup, finally able to properly cook! We spent the night finishing OITNB, and drinking delicious prosecco, before leaving our apartment to hunt down Mcflurries to no avail and settling on icecream on a stick instead.


Love,
A&E

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