Saturday 17 August – Berlin
Our thoughts this morning were to have some breakfast, find a hop-on, hop-off bus for a few hours and then come back to the room and have a rest. Well, that didn’t turn out so well. We had read the brochure for the bus which said it was a 2 hour trip. There was a red line and a green line, with the swap over near the main train station. So after a breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausages etc. we headed off.
We got on the bus near Checkpoint Charlie, which was 10 times busier than the prior afternoon. We would take the red line through to the train station, swap and do the green line, hop back on red and come back. Easy peasy. Well, things went downhill. At one of the stops around the corner we waited for about 15 minutes. We eventually made it to the train station and swapped over, after waiting for another 15 minutes for the green line bus to turn up.
The green line bus was the ‘traditional tour’ – it went through the areas around the biggest sections of the wall that still exist (that have artwork all over them). We got to that point, and just about everybody got off the bus. Weird. The announcement was only in German so we didn’t know what it meant. The seats at the front of the bus were now empty so we moved up there. It wasn’t until the bus driver got off and was chatting up a girl in the coffee shop that we realised it was a 30 minute break we were on. Hot, hot, hot in the sun. Oh well.
We continued on our way through the rest of the green line tour back to where we would meet up with the red line. We saw the Brandenburg Gates but did not get off the bus as planned as there was a big noisy demonstration near the stop and continued on to see other sights along the way. There we a number of stops where we waited 15 minutes like the one prior to the gates. The next big area was a shopping district. Stopped again – this time 20 minutes. Ros had time to look through a few shops. By this time it was nearing 3pm with the last bus leaving this stop around 4:30pm, so we didn’t want to be stuck about 4kms from the hotel, so we got back on the next bus.
We continued non-stop this time back to our original departure point of Checkpoint Charlie. On the tour we did go past the ‘first’ Weber store. That was excitement plus for me haha. We had also heard about all these ‘currywurst’ places. Well, at Checkpoint Charlie we went to a place there. But we had schnitzels rather than sausages with curry sauce. It was quite nice.
It was a short stroll back to the hotel. I did suggest a few times to Ros that things would be much much quicker on a Lime Scooter. But no agreement on getting on one of those! So, we left at 10:30am, expecting to be back around 1pm. By the time we got back to the hotel it was 5pm. Our 2.5 hour bus trip turned into 6.5 hours.
Ros was shattered and had a snooze. She had mentioned about seeing the car park that is now where Hitler’s bunker was. While she was asleep I checked out the location – about 1km from our hotel. About 8pm we headed out – in search of a lime scooter! The scooter would get us there much quicker. We found a couple of scooters near to the hotel and jumped on, with a quick run up the road and around the corner. Where the bunker was is a very non-descript place with a sign. The sign was only put up recently for the FIFA World Cup, or something like that.
On the way back to the hotel we came across a concert area. On the way on the scooter we did hear part of it. German Tom Jones crooning. On the way back we stopped and had a spot of dancing and listening to the music. All the performances were in English, with all announcements in German. The main attraction was the ‘story of Tina Turner’. They would do one song, speak for a few minutes then do another song. We grabbed some chicken from the street food vans and had a listen, then headed back to the hotel to pack and get ready for our trip to Prague.
