Travel Buddies

Berlin is enormous. The city is roughly nine times the area of Paris by city limits, and the standard hop-on-hop-off loop covers a sliver of it: Mitte, Tiergarten, Kurfürstendamm. Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, the East Side Gallery, Neukölln, Prenzlauer Berg, the post-1989 neighbourhoods that make Berlin actually Berlin, the bus skips them all. So the question isn’t really “is t...

The lift takes 40 seconds. You step out at 203 metres and the city is laid out below you like a map someone hand-painted from memory. The reason to actually go up the Fernsehturm is what the view used to be, in 1969, when East Germany finished it and pointed it at the West like a 368-metre piece of propaganda. Then there’s the cross. Hit a sunny day and the steel-clad sphere ...

The boat clears the bend just past Friedrichstrasse and the Bode-Museum’s stone dome lifts out of the water on your right. From the deck it looks like the building is wading. The sandstone wall comes down to within a metre of the river, and at this angle, sitting low on a Spree tour boat, you read the 1904 Italian Baroque facade the way the architect actually planned it: from...

You walk up the spiral ramp inside the Reichstag dome and the floor below you is the working chamber of the German parliament. Not a model. Not a recreation. The plenary hall of the Bundestag sits twenty metres beneath your feet, with the eagle on the back wall and the dark blue seats arranged in a horseshoe. The dome is free to visit. That’s the part most travellers miss. Th...

The Spido boat cuts left out of Willemskade and pushes south, and within ninety seconds the cables of the Erasmusbrug swing directly overhead. From the water it’s a different bridge entirely. You see the asymmetric pylon (the locals call it “The Swan” for a reason), the 802 metres of deck, and the way it cantilevers out to one side instead of the symmetrical arches every othe...