As you may or may not know, Emily and I took a quick trip to Berlin this weekend to belatedly celebrate my birthday. I'm going to recap the trip over the next couple of days, attempting to capture and explain as much as possible as we go along.
To put it simply, Berlin is a fascinatingly complex city. It is the largest city in Germany. The capitol. Berlin is at once a city rebuilt from the ashes of the second world war, divided in half, and then reunited and rebuilt again. It's a place brimming with history, funky people, and cheap food. In a few words, Berlin is Collin's kind of city.
Here we go.
Thanks EasyJet! Emily and I pulled this off for $160 total round trip for the both of us. We even had reserved seats! The flight out took - and I'm not exaggerating - twenty-five minutes. Huzzah.
Things took a bit of a turn for the worse when we tried to get from SXF (Berlin Schönefeld Airport) to our hotel downtown. Schönefeld was the only airport serving East Berlin during the GDR era and, as you can imagine, it was predictably neglected and still feels rather East German. Sooo many stairs.
We knew that we would need to take a regional train - either the RE14 or RE7 - to get to central Berlin. Berlin's mass transit system is split into three zones - A, B, and C. You can buy tickets or day passes for A-B, B-C, or A-B-C. Schönefeld is in zone C. Nearly every part of Berlin that the average tourist would visit sits in A-B. An A-B-C single ticket costs €3.10. An A-B or B-C ticket costs €2.40. For reference, a day pass for A-B or B-C is €6.50 and the A-B-C pass is €7.
The nice thing is that any ticket covers you for any type of public transit - bus, tram, U-bahn, S-bahn, and regional train. Just frank your ticket in one of the red or yellow boxes and hop on your choice of transit. You have 2 hours to finish your journey, on the same ticket. The system is far reaching and super convenient. It's the best transit system I've experienced thus far.
So on to the bad part. There are kiosks where you can buy tickets - with an English option! The yellow kiosks - typically in U-bahn stations - take limited non-coin cash and have limited credit / debit options. Our bills were too big and our dankort was useless.
We pressed on into the station where we thought the train might be. There were other kiosks - red ones - and these accepted our dankort. Win. The next step was finding the correct platform. Almost nothing in the the Schönefeld train station is labeled. There are platform numbers, but that's about it. Luckily, we had iFahrinfo. It's a great Berlin mass transit app with pretty much the same engine that the rejseplanen app uses. I checked things out when I was still at CPH, and thankfully the app listed the platform number. Additional fact, Danish phones only work in Denmark, unless you feel like roaming.
So there was the train at platform 1. Waiting. No labels. Nothing. We took the leap that it was the right train and hopped on. Success!
Stay tuned. Next, Collin and Emily arrive at their hotel and make their way to the Stasi Museum to meet an old friend. It's Herr Domann!
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