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Steve, Ian and Hamish fly to Berlin, January 2007

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Thursday 18th January 2007
Storms. Worse than 1987? Possibly. Whatever the statistics, we knew that the journey to Cambridge was going to be difficult. As it turned out, our decision to put off the drive until 8pm was fortuitous, because Jane phoned - stuck in London with no hope of a train out. She came to Croydon, and we lifted her as well as all our bags, in the Mini (tight squeeze), the wrong way round the M25 (the Dartford river crossing was effectively closed), up the A1, through some lanes (bad idea - deep floods and fallen branches), back onto the A1, then the A505 and finally the A10, above the traffic chaos further south.

We dropped Jane off at 10.30, and headed to Parsonage Street, and the welcoming smell of slow-cooked sausage casserole. Found a parking space as good as right outside. Bonus!

Friday 19th January 2007
Three hours of sleep is good for no man. It really isn't. Any wonder Steve, Ian and I got ourselves up, showered and dressed with stress and tetchiness all round. We made the coach with five minutes to spare, and managed somehow to scrape together the change for three tickets.

There was no let-up to the angst once we got to Stansted and checked in: the security control queue was an hour-and-a-half long. Steve joined it while Ian and I got coffees, and then we all inched forward. It was fortunate our flight was delayed first by thirty-five minutes, then by the time we'd boarded, push-back was at 0830, a full hour late.

Never mind, we're now cruising at 39,000 feet in an Air Berlin Boeing 737-700 somewhere over Germany heading for the - apparently rainy and windy - capital.

Isn't it wonderful to travel only ninety minutes, and then experience at once a different culture, and at the same time a place so familiar? You will I'm sure be aware that I spent school holidays from 1978 to 1980 in East Berlin, and that my brother Ian and I returned just as the Wall had come down and reunification was imminent, in 1990. Well, here we are again, landing at Tegel (oh, how many times was I picked up and dropped off here by my parents?) and then travelling through the city, first West and then, almost without a sign now (so unlike the kerfuffle of the checkpoints) into the once-East, noticeable by the different traffic lights, and by the odd mixture of the still very drab and alongside, the very modern. Glimpses from the bus of the new British Embassy, to be visited, the Catholic Church of St Hedwig's, The Dom, the Stadtsoper, the partly-demolished Palast der Republik (GDR Parliament), and so on. We fetched up in Alexanderplatz, wandered, then took a short taxi ride to the hotel, in Gleimstrasse, just off Schönhauser Allee.

Dropped cases, wandered, found a bar and a welcome spot of lunch, wandered a little more, in freezing rain (I bought a hat), then stopped for calorific hot chocolate until check-in time arrived, and we went to the hotel.

A longish wait in the hotel bar, while others were attended to and we were seemingly ignored, didn't bode well.

But after the formalities, we were shown upstairs. Wow! Have we landed on our feet?! This is actually an apartment, spacious, comfortable, and simply but beautifully decorated. We have a perfectly adequate bedroom, enormous lounge with gigantic plasma TV and sofas galore, a good-sized dining table, a kitchen complete with the coffee-making basics, complimentary juice and wine(!), and a delightful bathroom. All for €75 a night, all in. That's not each, that's the total.

I was bushed, and fell asleep on a sofa, but having woken I've discovered Steve's gone for a walk, and Ian's about to meet him downstairs in the bar, so I'm going to have a wash and brush-up, and join them. Wilkommen in Berlin, as they say!

The 'Apartment Guesthouse Pension Berlin' - which we now know to be gay-run, and in the heart of the rejuvenated gay/student/alternative/revolutionary district of Prenzlauer Berg in the former East Berlin - does some very fine food. We have just eaten and drunk very well downstairs in a friendly and busy restaurant, and have decided that our first day in Berlin has gone very well, and we are indeed happy tourists.

The others discovered some DVDs in the apartment, and so on the giant screen in the lounge we watched "Berlin - Ruine 1945 - Metropole 2000". Sadly the DVD "Das war die DDR" was faulty, but we did watch - in German - "die Honeckers", about the second - and effectively last - East German leader and his family. Much of it was talking heads, and hard to follow, but we got the gist.

Saturday 20th January 2007
We all slept extremely well, which wasn't surprising after the stupidly early start yesterday. I made an initial hash of making some coffee using the facilities in the flat, but finally produced a passable trio of cups. Breakfast downstairs was well worth the €4.50 we had pre-paid, consisting of a formidable buffet. The others had trad. cooked - scrambled egg very good, reportedly - but I went for cold meats and cheese, and brötchen with jam.

For some reason to do with our group dynamic and individual inertia, we didn't leave the flat until 11am. We fought the ticket machine (and each other!) at Schönhauser Allee U-Bahn station, finally understanding 'the system' and ending up with a 'day pass' each for the public transport network.

We travelled the four stops to Alexanderplatz, and while Steve and I queued for the Fernsehturm, Ian, who didn't fancy another queue, headed off for a coffee. We spent half an hour up the tower, in my case renewing my understanding of the geography of the city.

After meeting up again we took a short pilgrimage to St Hedwig's, the Catholic cathedral I used to go to back in 1978-80, then we walked across the rejuvenated Gendamenmarkt, past the Französisch Dom and Deutsch Dom (still dome-less and bomb-ruined when we lived nearby) and the rebuilt Schauspielhaus between them, to Leipzigerstrasse. We found number 61, the block which housed the embassy flat my parents called home for two years, and which I visited - it must have been - five times for school holidays during the course of Dad's posting to the GDR. The building had been re-faced, and the balconies filled in, but essentially it, its neighbouring blocks, and the taller ones across the road, were still much as we remembered them.

After a good lunch in a Bavarian restaurant in Leipzigerstrasse, we decided to head to Checkpoint Charlie.

Now I didn't know how much or how little would remain. When we lived here, it had been an extensive construction, taking up perhaps 150m of Freidrichstrasse, the road snaking from first barrier, through concrete chicanes, past customs huts and guardrooms, to a second barrier, armed GrePos (border guards) and the watchtower. By contrast, when walking through with my orange BMG (British Military Government) card, I would encounter first a guard at a metal gate, then I walked along first one, then into the open and through another, covered wooden walkway, to a final guard at a final gate. The guards would glance at my card and generally smile, because they recognised me. Once buzzed through the final gate, there was a short walk still in East Berlin to the white painted line across the road, and into the West officially.

Well we got it wrong first off by walking down the wrong street off Leipzigerstrasse - not in fact Freidrichstrasse but one parallel.

When we did get it right, it was a weird experience, for me at least, to try and visualise what had once been there. The "You are now leaving the American Sector ..." (and "... Soviet Sector ..." on the reverse) sign was still there, and the US Army checkpoint in the middle of the road, but the surrounding buildings were modern, and architecturally so at odds with the old, pre-war buildings, and hideous GDR-era ones, as to render the whole area unrecognisable if you looked in certain directions.

An unfortunate encounter between Steve and an official in the 'Haus Am Charlie" (what I knew as the Checkpoint Charlie Escape Museum, now vastly expanded) over a deposit for an audio tour handset left Ian deciding not to give them his custom, but Steve and I each paid out €9.50 and went round. I was disappointed by the layout, and many of the captions assuming the Wall was still there, but I know Steve in particular was keen to learn more about the whole subject.

We met up with Ian again afterwards in a Mexican-themed bar across the road, and after a while I went on a supermarket errand. I was in a bit of a strop actually, because we didn't seem capable of making any decision about the rest of the evening. After visits to three supermarkets, I eventually returned with all the items I had been charged with finding, and eventually we returned to the apartment, then out to a local Thai restaurant.

Ian and I fell asleep in the living room watching a DVD about the TV tower, bought on our visit earlier. Steve stayed awake throughout, but I'd had enough after a long day in the fresh air.

Sunday 21st January 2007
Again, late down for breakfast, and late out of the apartment. Stop for cash then cigs on the way to the U-Bahn, where we each bought again a €5.80, two-zone day travelcard, then re-tracing the route from last night, back to Stadt-mitte station. We found the old British embassy, now something else, then wandered past the old Soviet - now Russian, of course - embassy, still with hammer ansd sickle in Stalinist stone relief, via a welcome cup of coffee to shelter from the icy rain which had started just after we left the apartment. We chose a nearby restaurant, a few doors down from the old embassy, with an inner courtyard with high glass roof, and containing some sort of informal television studio. The American embassy was more heavily fortified than the new, and striking, British embassy on Wilhelmstrasse. In worsening weather we walked right around the Reichstag, then through a maze of government offices back to Friederichstrasse, and lunch in the café of an Opel showroom.

We abandoned our plan to visit the open-air Holocaust Memorial due to the weather, and instead took the S-Bahn towards Alexanderplatz. Having realised that we would only have two hours in the Pergamon Museum we thought it best to head homewards, so after a bit of faffing with the BVG (public transport) map, we selected a nearby tram whose scenic route took us to Schönhauser Allee.

We noticed today, walking around and from the tram, a great many buildings still with battle scars from the fierce street fighting between Soviet and Wehrmacht/SS troops in the final weeks of World War II.

Steve slept upstairs for a couple of hours while Ian and I drank beer in the bar below the apartment, and read.

Later, after he had joined us for a drink, Steve and I went up to prepare dinner from the provisions I had bought last night. Ian came back in just after ten o'clock to a meal of pasta and sausages in tomato and herb sauce. Wine was drunk, and a good time was had by all - as they say.

Monday 22nd January 2007
Wow! Down to breakfast at a reasonable time this morning, due to efforts all round. Breakfast at the 'City Guesthouse Pension Berlin' consists of bacon, German sausage, scrambled eggs, cold meats and cheeses, yogurts, various other savoury products (including, I noticed this morning, an enormous bowl of olives), cereal, fruit, and bread and rolls with Nutella, jam, honey and so on. There's also juice, and milk. Coffee, for some reason, is always extra, but from the buffet it's all you can eat for €4.50. Being early today meant the place was much less crowded, but there was a smaller spread too, probably because today is a weekday. Left luggage.

Tram to the Pergamon Museum on 'Museum Island', and over two hours' traipsing. Steve got an audio headset, which required no fuss and no deposit to borrow. A tip if you go - leave your coat and scarf and hat, and any bags, at the (free) coat-check, rather than lugging them all with you.

The Pergamon Altar, and Ishtar Gate, are spectacular, and I'm always fascinated by Greek and Roman architecture, sculpture and pottery, because I studied them for 'A'-Level. We left the Islamic Culture exhibition for another time, and headed off to find something to eat. We lunched at a fine restaurant in Orianenburgerstrasse.

By the time we had come out the wind had turned even colder, and we walked past the restored synagogue (another place for our next visit), and headed for Alexanderplatz. U-Bahn to the guesthouse, collected luggage stored earlier after checking out, and back again onto the U-Bahn (line U2) to Alexanderplatz and the TXL bus. A cold ten-minute wait, then the journey out down Unter den Linden, past the Reichstag and then up Invalidenstrasse and Alt-Moabit towards Tegel.

Check-in was painless and we had time for a coffee before the good-humoured security check:

Guard to Steve: "Deutsch?" "No, English." "Ah, that's OK, I'll speak in English. If you were Russian I'd talk in German."

The duty-free shop had a ridiculous system where they would only sell a very limited number of brands, from a tiny stock, of cigarettes for EU travel. So the ones Steve wanted, and the tobacco Ian wanted, whilst there on the shelf, couldn't be bought.

But now it is ten past seven, and we have just taken off in this Fokker 100 heading west, to Stansted, and the end of our break.