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Germans have a reputation for being efficient and serious but the zig zag cycle path that appeared on a street in Berlin Zehlendorf suggests that the stereotype doesn’t apply to everyone. A photo of the cycle path captioned ‘Tetris Radweg’ was the first thing I saw when I opened Facebook on Wednesday last week and […]
One of the things that most surprised me about Berlin when I moved here is that shops, as a general rule, remain closed on Sundays and public holidays. In addition to exceptions for a few supermarkets at the city’s busiest train stations there are though up to 10 days when Sunday opening is allowed each […]
With its grand villas, alpine chalet-style houses, waterside views, and cobbled streets, Klein Glienicke is a charming village, popular with day-trippers. But for 28 years this idyllic settlement on the Potsdam border was an East German enclave separated from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall and only accessible with special permission. The quirks of Klein […]
A mixture of documentary and loosely scripted drama, the black and white film, People on Sunday was a surprise hit when it was released in February 1930 in Berlin. Described in the titles as Film Studio 1929’s ‘first experiment…a film without actors’, the main action in People on Sunday revolves around a day trip to […]
Berlin summers can be as stiflingly hot as its winters are brutally cold so a map of the Berlin drinking fountains, where water is available for free, could come in very handy. I’m a big fan of a Wegbier to quench my thirst while exploring Berlin and beer in Berlin is generally cheaper than water […]
Germany is famous for its beer gardens but did you know that every summer there is a wine garden in Berlin – the Rheingauer Weinbrunnen on Rüdesheimer Platz? Well, you do now. There are officially 350 seats at the Rheingauer Weinbrunnen but on warm summer evenings the crowd swells to maybe 600 or 700 people. […]
If you have lived in or even visited Berlin, the chances are that you’re very familiar with the S- and U-Bahn but did you know that the German capital also once had an M-Bahn? The Berlin M-Bahn (short for Magnet-Bahn) was a Maglev, or magnetic levitation) train system, which is described in detail in this […]
There are several people and events that get cited as contributing to the fall of the Berlin wall and the Bruce Springsteen East Berlin Concert in 1988 comes up often. The Boss was at the height of his fame, a rock ’n’ roll demigod, who embodied an all-American spirit due to the associations with his […]
Rüyam Gemüse Kebab (or Rüya as it was called until 2017) has been serving up the kind of chicken Döner Kebabs that dreams are made of at Hauptstraße 133 in Berlin Schöneberg since 2012. Rüyam is literally my dream, and I mean literally – it is the Turkish translation, hence their tagline ‘traumhaft lecker’. All […]
One of my biggest frustrations when I moved to Berlin (and I’m not the only one) was finding out that under German law, shops are (generally) not allowed to open on Sundays. I still find it hard to believe that a modern, cosmopolitan city closes down so much on a Sunday but for the most […]
