Holiday: Day 9 - Berlin
Every holiday has at least one of those days that just doesn’t go to plan and for us that was today.
It started off well enough with us getting up nice and early and making our way to Amsterdam Centraal where we were catching an express train to Berlin with Deutsche Bahn (DB).
Our ICE train leaving Amsterdam
Our planned train was due to leave Amsterdam just after 8 o’clock which would arrive in Dusseldorf just over 2 hours later. We’d then swap trains and go from Dusseldorf the Berlin about 40 minutes later, it all seemed pretty organised, that is until midway through the first train leg I got a push notification to say that the second train we were catching was no longer going to continue all the way to Berlin, we would either need to get off and get a different train or arrange for a different train all the way through.
We went with the option of a getting a different train all the way through so at Dusseldorf we went to the ticket office to change our tickets, unfortunately the next train that we could reserve seats on was a two hour wait, but to be fair we wanted to do that because we probably needed to reserve seats having the kids with us. So we did, and we got coffee and pastries to make the wait that little more bearable.
The Berlin TV Tower in Alexanderplatz
The second train arrived on time, everyone got on and there was no real drama, that is until about 30 minutes in when things just seemed to be getting a little hot. Turns out our carriage didn’t have air conditioning and with no windows to open it was turning into an over. Eventually enough people got uncomfortable with it and we started fanning ourselves and complaining to the train guy, who eventually did something about it (probably an hour later) and started moving us into different carriages that were air conditioned. To be fair there isn’t much he can do, it’s not his fault. The other problem this caused was that as they were trying to restart carriage electronics and so on we were delayed in stations to do this, which meant that progressively our train got later and later. All in all I think we ended up about 90 minutes late to Berlin, on top of the 2 hours we had already delayed it ourselves.
Next was to get to our hotel, which was easy enough given that the Berlin metro is pretty similar to all the others and ticketing makes sense so we found our way to the underground lines and took the few stops we needed till we got off.
Traditional Berlin currywurst
A quick check in and bags dropped off and we were back out in the streets to find some food for dinner. We heading to Alexanderplatz in the centre of town figuring it would have the most options, which it probably did but we wanted something a little more “Berlin” so we walked the streets till eventually we found this bloke selling curry wurst, traditional Berlin style. To say it was a hit would be an understatement, Sebastian describing it as the best meal he had so far on the holiday. I tend to agree with him as it was as good as what I had remembered from almost 15 years ago. To be honest its really just bratwurst with some curry sauce on it and served with chips/fries, but amazing.
And that was it for the day, a relatively lengthy day of travel to get a long way across Germany, but we’d sorted ourselves out and were ready for a full day the next day.
Michael