Our plane was set to leave from Stavenger at 10am. Everything went great and we saw yet another perfectly clean airport in Norway - I swear this entire country was pristine!! We had another layover in Amsterdam - we would be in that airport twice on this trip - and finally arrived around 2:30 ish in Berlin. Our first stop was to pick up our car (this would probably be the first logistical mistake in Germany....stay tuned).
Now....renting a car - seems like a fairly straight forward part of the planning process right? Well...this was a VERY important step for the boys that included lots of research and decision making. One word....Autobahn. Next words....no speed limit. Apparently this means that you need to get the MOST badass car possible for 4 people, 4 roller suitcases and 4 book bags. So after much research the boys landed on a Mercedes S Class...230. Now. I know NOTHING about Mercedes but DAMN....S Class? This was the nicest 4 door car I've been in. The car basically drove itself but it also spoke German when we were introduced so that was the first order of business. 30 min later and a quick tutorial from the technician and she was speaking English :) Anne and I had some sweet captains chairs in the back that were pure luxury. The boys got to work on getting us to our hotel - in the middle of Berlin. The trip was actually pretty straightforward and we were there before we knew it. Right next to the same kind of rental car company - bahahaha! So after we drove it into the city and paid to park for 2 nights we could have picked a car up right by our hotel - O well....you live you learn.
Moving on, we were staying at the Hotel Adlon which is a historic hotel right next to the Brandenburg Gate! Check that off the list! Very cool area with lots of tourists and people watching :) As we checked into the hotel it was clear this would be the most luxurious of all our hotels. With the closet, WC, Bathroom, it was like a 4 room suite! We would do our best to fit in drinking fancy bourbon at the bar.
We headed out to check out some sights after getting to the hotel around 4pm. We walked past the Holocaust Memorial which were a bunch of rectangle cement structures that represented all that died during that horrible time.
From there we caught a cab to the Monkey Bar! This was a bar on the top floor of a hotel right next to the Berlin Zoo - a very hip place to have a drink! 360 degrees view of the city and you can look down on the monkey cages! Even at 5pm it was crazy busy. We had a few great drinks and a snack just to ease everyone's anxiety of being in a new place we had to get the hang of. From there we ate outside along the street at a restaurant called Brauhaus and had our first German dinner. We had a great waiter who spoke 4 languages and entertained us while we were there. On the way back we saw the Wilhelm - a bombed out church that the city left as was after war to show the devastation that the city saw. You can still see places where buildings were hit with shrapnel all over the city but for the most part everything is built up like you would never know. This church though represented what it was like just after the war - pretty cool to see.
On our way home we bought Berlin Welcome Cards at the Subway station that would get us into museums and give us our transportation tickets. The boys were not bought in but Anne and I were CERTAIN these were the best way to go. We were bound and determined to make it worth our money....stay tuned for more on that tomorrow.
Back to the hotel and a few before bed drinks would close out our first night in Berlin!
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