Berlin - Day Twenty Nine

I woke up a few minutes too late to take the free walking tour of the city that left from my hostel, but I wasn't too bothered about that. Headed out to town on my own for a bit of an explore.

Berlin is clearly the sort of city that needs a bit of time, but I think I'll probably have to push on tomorrow to get the most out of my last few days of interRailing. With that in mind, I took the advice of a German friend who knows and loves Berlin, and went to the one place she told me I couldn't miss; a Vietnamese restaurant on Alte Shönhauser Straße called Monsieur Vuongs. I got in there a little before the lunchtime rush, but it was still packed with people. There are only about three dishes on menu, and I went for a kind of green curried chicken with stir-fried vegetables which was probably the best meal of my trip so far, and only cost me nine euros with a drink as well. That girl knows her stuff; if you're ever in Berlin ignore all the sights and head straight to this place...

Satisfied after my meal, I created my own walking tour of the city; past Alexanderpatz's enormous tv tower, past the impressive buildings that line Karl Liebnecht Straße (unfortunately I didn't really know what I was looking at, but they look nice all the same), and through the Brandenburg Gate. I walked around the Reichstag - the German parliament building - which has an impressive glass dome designed by Norman Foster, through the moving new holocaust memorial, which took me by surprise when I finally realised it's deceiving scale, and then ended up in Potsdamer Platz - Berlin's Time Square; a futuristic and expensive expanse.

By the time I'd got through that lot I was feeling a little pooped. Chilled out at the hostel for a couple of hours, and then met up with Grace for a drink. She's just arrived here to start a three month placement as part of her music degree, and it was really nice to spend a couple of hours with her and her friends. They all seem a little wide-eyed, having just arrived and still needing to sort out apartments and so on, so we didn't have a late one. I did something I've never done before and ate a 'fake' cheeseburger in a vegetarian restaurant that seemed to offer nothing but poor imitations of popular meaty fast food. Never again...