BERLIN: Sweat and Cinemas

We arrived in Berlin on a rather hot summers day, mid 30's, which our taxi driver told us happens a few weeks in the year in Berlin.

We checked into our hotel room at the Hotel California, which was supposed to be a four star hotel.  We were quite unimpressed to say the least to discover that our tiny hotel room wasn't air conditioned and was extremely hot.  When we rang reception to ask if they had another room that was air conditioned we were informed that none of the rooms were air-conditioned.

Frankly this surprised us.  I mean this is supposed to be a four star hotel. One more star and this should be the equivalent of the best Intercontinental or Hyatt hotels, and no air conditioning.  What's with the star rating system in Germany?

Even a 5 star hotel does not have to provide cooling in the room.  On the other hand, a three star hotel must provide a shoe polishing machine on every floor and a shoe polishing kit in every room, and it's mandatory. That means that the highest rating possible if you don't supply a tissue in the wardrobe for wiping dust off your shoes is two stars, though even a five star hotel can let you melt and wither with stifling heat and horrendous humidity.  Where's the priorities.

For my rating system it goes like this.

To get one star you must provide a bed (yes we had one hotel room without a bed).  It should be mandatory.  If it's a double room it must have a double bed, or larger.

To get 3 stars or higher, you must provide heating and cooling to the room.

To get 4 stars you must provide 24 hour room service. 3 stars you must provide a mini bar.

All rooms must be clean and hygienic.

3 stars must provide a TV with at least 1 channel in English.

4 stars must provide at least one English channel that isn't news (this should go for other common languages in the country as well)

3 stars must have Internet available in the hotel

4 stars must have Internet available in each room.

Suffice to say we were not impressed with the Hotel California in Berlin on a hot summers day. Fortunately we found a solution to sweating away our nights in our hotel room.  After a long slow late lunch at a great little local cafe, we found an English speaking cinema into which we retreated in the afternoon and evening.

That night we arrived we got back to our hotel room at about 1am by which time the air outside was quite cool, and we could open up the windows to finally get a little sleep. Unfortunately other inmates of the hotel, didn't have the same inclination to sleep and preferred to share German documentaries complete with full volume bomb blasts and machine gun fire with the rest of the hotel complex.

We escaped the hotel room early the next morning and got on the hop-on hop-off bus for a tour around Berlin.

Here's a few of the sights that we enjoyed in this otherwise interesting city.

This church was bombed during WW2 and the government has preserved it in it's damaged state (made safe) as a reminder to the destruction of the war.  This was just down the road from the Hotel Cali-sauna.

 

Here is what is left of the Berlin Wall. This part was no where near as impressive as the pictures we saw on the TV when the wall came down.  It has been pretty extensively damaged by tourists insisting on lugging a little concrete nugget back home for their rock gardens. Berliners call such tourists wood-peckers for good reason. The remainder of the Berlin Wall is now protected.

 

Here is Checkpoint Charlie. The other side of the sign is a lot more interesting, talking about guns and weapons and stuff.  Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to snap the other side as we went past.

 

Some of the more beautiful historic buildings of Berlin.  Some are original, some are rebuilt and some are renovated.

 

Here I am enjoying the breeze through my hair in my brief flight of freedom from the Hotel Cali-sauna.

 

This building is the German Parliament. The public can walk up through the front entrance and up the large dome in the centre.  It looked like much too much hard work for a warm summers day, so we just enjoyed the view form outside.

 

This is the very impressive Berlin Haupt bahnhoff (central train station). It's an enormous train station that connects the many different train services of Berlin together.  This is where we arrived in Berlin.

 

This was the US entry to an architecture competition.  Apparently a section of the roof on the left fell on and killed a journalist a few years back, but it has since been fixed.

 

Here's one of the Royal Palaces in Berlin

 

and another...

 

After our trip around Berlin we went back to the cafe where we enjoyed a lovely lunch the day before, and had an even better lunch on our second day.  A few beers and wines later, we retreated to the cinema to wile away another six hours before returning to the sauna to pack our bags and catch a cab to the airport.

For those travelling to Berlin, be warned that the Shoenfeld Airport is a 40+ Euro taxi trip from central Berlin.  It's about 50km out of the city, a quarter of the distance to Dresden.  Currently all of the budget airlines fly out of there, though apparently it's going to be the major airport for Berlin in the coming years.

While we were booked on a Turkish Airlines flight (not a budget airline), they had a codeshare with Sunexpress, so we ended up on this other airline.  Jodie, not being a good flier at the best of times, was pretty distraught at having to travel with an airline that she'd never heard of before, especially when it shares a booth with Aeroflot and a couple of other Russian airlines.

If it hadn't been for the fact she'd passed through security and passport control, and that her suitcase was already on the plane she would still be in Berlin.  To say she was not a happy puppy is a serious understatement. She has taken it upon herself to personally book all of our overseas flights in the future, to avoid any unnecessary surprises.

The flight itself was OK, with a simple meal provided, though Jode's remained on the edge of her seat the entire way and wasn't happy until we were in Izmir Airport.

For those travelling to Turkey, you need to buy a Visa upon arrival.  We had to wake up the young lady at the counter to get ours at 6am and she must have still been bleary eyed, because she stuck them into our passports upside down.  It didn't cause a problem with the passport control however, and we were admitted to Turkey.

The trip was nearly shortlived with me nearly being run down by a psycho taxi driver who wanted to push into the queue while our taxi driver and I were loading the suitcases into the boot of the taxi.  Lot's of "manyacing" (maniac) and Turkish swearing by our taxi driver to the taxi-psycho and we were out of there...