I'm probably not going to manage a travel blog of Reesian proportions here, but I will write a bit about Berlin, which we visited this week for a short break. Ros and I figured it would be nice to take a trip to somewhere new for us, while she's still not too bumpy!

We flew out from Stansted after staying overnight at the Motts' place in Biggleswade, flying with Air Berlin, who were again very good, as airlines go these days.

We arrived mid Monday afternoon at Tegel airport, and it was surprisingly easy to get to the hotel. It's a small airport, and unusually, there are individual baggage reclaim belts for each gate. So, you get off the plane, walk though passport control, and your bags are already coming out. Pick them up, and it's a couple of minutes walk to the bus ramp. There's a direct bus service to the centre of the city, and it turned out that our hotel was about one minute away from the stop.

A grand hotel

We had a pretty good deal on the hotel, the Westin Grand, which is a 5* place off Unter den Linden, about 500m from the Brandenburg Gate - as it turned out, an excellent location for the old heart of Berlin. Our room was quite a way away from the posh atrium at the heart of the hotel (probably because of the price), but was comfortable enough and it did mean we didn't have to listen to the piano cheese every evening.

The breakfast was perhaps the best thing for us about the hotel. I'm just not accustomed to staying in a place where breakfast options include such diversions as soup, rollmop herring, pomegranate and champagne on ice! We skipped the traditional german cheese and sausage platters (which were groaning under the weight of so many varieties) and stuck mostly with cereal, fruit and pastries. There was also an egg chef who fried, scrambled or cooked omelettes to order. So, we could start each day well fed and watered.

Exploring Unter den Linden

As is our wont, we probably spent too much time walking and sightseeing and not enough time relaxing. But it did mean we get to see most of the things we wanted to visit. After checking-in on Monday, we strolled up Unter den Linden (literally, under the lime trees, just to remind us of home). We visited our first Christmas market, next to the Opera House. As the evening grew darker we carried on past the Berliner Dom and Marx-Engels Platz until we reached Alexanderplatz.

Here, we decided to take a trip up the TV tower - the Fernsehturm (mmm, dig the Flash intro :-). After gliding up 200m in the lift in 40 seconds(whoosh!) we were greeted by a great night-time panorama of the city, and a cocktail bar, where I could decadently sip a freshly-stirred martini at 5pm. Smmoooth.

Walking in search of dinner in the evening, we fell upon Checkpoint Charlie by accident. Seeing the areas of still barren land between the high-rise buildings and fragments of Berlin Wall really brings home how this city has had a profound, real and still recent history of division. Returning after our meal, through the Holocaust memorial in the stillness of night was also powerful. The uneven undulation of the paving between the stelae is deliberately unsettling, and at night, the sense of dislocation is palpable.

Days two & three

On day two we visited the Brandenburg gate and the Jewish museum. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, it's an incredibly powerful setting. It would be a good museum for kids to visit, with a great interactive quality. After a couple of hours there, we took the U-Bahn to pay a brief visit to the western centre of Berlin, around the Ku'Damm shopping district.

Day three was mostly a museum day, but started with a visit to the Reichstag. It was quite misty, so the view from the dome wasn't too great, but it was a cleverly designed space to visit. After descending, we walked across the Tiergarten (historically, the Kaiser's hunting park) to the Kulturforum, Berlin's equivalent of the South Bank. We toured the main art gallery and a print gallery, and had a spot of lunch, before heading across to Potsdamerplatz where we picked up a bus to the Museumsinsel (Museum Island) near the Berlin Cathedral we passed on the first day. We did another gallery there, and then walked back along Unter den Linden to Gendarmenmarkt, where there was another excellent Christmas market. We ate for a second night running at a local restaurant, Pepita, just around the corner from the hotel.

There's probably lots more I could write about Berlin - it's a friendly city, with monumental architecture of a type you really don't see much in the UK. The sense of history is never far away, and you get a real sense that you are in the midst of a vast, ongoing building project - it's easy to see why the German nation is struggling financially, given the billions of Euros which must have been spent here already! Alongside all this history and vitality, it's clear that there is still a lot to be done here. I certainly expect to visit again to see what happens.