This was my second time in Berlin, and while I certainly enjoyed it the first time around in 2024, it wasn’t completely on my list for this trip, but with my friend, Jerrad, one of the Eurovision group, having recently moved to Berlin, it was a no brainer to go there to see his new place, hang out in the city, and take advantage of some free housing (hey, just being honest).
Unlike the other cities I visited, this visit was really not about sightseeing. Of course, it’s not like I have seen everything there is to do in Berlin, but this is was much more about being more of a townie in Berlin and trying to help Jerrad acclimate to his new home.
The train ride from Prague was fairly uneventful. It was around four hours, and I spent most of the time on the mostly empty train working on catching up on the blog and photo uploads.
Arriving in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof is disconcerting compared to the other city stations I have encountered thus far. It is an immense, multilevel train station that is more than a little confusing, and it took me a while to get myself moving in the right direction.
Once I found the U-Bahn (subway) I needed, I was on my way to Alexanderplatz to catch a different line towards Jerrad’s. This part was relatively old hat to me because I had stayed in the Alexanderplatz area in 2024.
If I anyone has watched the Idris Elba series “Hijack” on AppleTV, then this station and stretch of the U-Bahn is pretty familiar, because it is where the hijacking in season 2 began. Just an odd coincidence worth mentioning.
Once I arrived in the Neukölln neighborhood, I was immediately struck by how different it felt from the tourist areas I have bounced around in Berlin. It is an ethnically diverse area with a large middle eastern population, and honestly, it almost felt like New York with who vibrant and, frankly, loud it was. All of this is to say, I loved it!
Jerrad lives in a flat in a relatively new building in a major intersection where five streets meet. When I say it is loud, I mean it, because there is a lot of noise and emergency vehicles going by. It has been a while since I have had to deal with such noise, and while I am sure I would get use to it if I were there, with the need to keep the windows open in the summer, I think it’s going to be a lot.
I got settled in while Jerrad had some work things to do, and I did some laundry to get me through the last part of my trip. One doesn’t want to run out of underwear, does one?
After Jerrad wrapped up his main calls, we walked to the local grocery store to pick up some things, and once again, I am amazed at the affordability of groceries in Europe. I picked up some essentials to get me through the next few days (pretzels!), and we went back to his place to nosh a little and wait until his next work call.
After all that, we decided to go to one of his favorite bars called Savo Bar & Cafe. It was a cute bar kind of designed like if grandma were a riot girl – think antiques, plants, political art, and rock band stickers. This is where the first surprise of this Berlin trip happened.
On my short visit the last time, I went out on a Sunday night in the Schöneberg neighborhood bars, which were very much like any bar I had yet encountered. Well, as I soon discovered, at most townie type bars in Berlin, smoking is allowed and welcomed in the entire bar. This was definitely a surprise, because I haven’t experienced that since Istanbul in 2018.
Because of this, I was most definitely going to plan my clothing choices and probably do laundry again before going to London. The smoke wasn’t terrible or oppressive, as it was sometimes in Istanbul, but remembering the days when you could smoke in bars in Indianapolis, it still just makes everything you own stink.
We had a couple cocktails and called it a night, because I was pretty tired from travel, and Jerrad had a call in the morning. There was a cute pup on the train ride back.
