Today is Sunday and we had nothing planned for the day. – our last day in Berlin. We woke up to nice cool but rainy weather and we decided to partake of a one-hour river tour of Berlin which was right across the street from our hotel – Meliã Berlin located in what was once East Germany. We started with breakfast at our hotel where we met a young man from Michigan who was staying at the hotel for a conference – it was nice to enjoy some conversation with a fellow English-speaker.
Due to the rain, we were seated below. Sitting on the upper deck would have been nicer as I would have been able to take nicer photos, so I took what photos I could. I noticed along the river there was a lot of graffiti and some of it was quite beautiful, but we were moving fast enough in the boat to miss taking photos of a lot of them.
On the boat they had little hand-held speakers that you could hold where you could choose the language you wanted for the tour. We started off listening to these, but with the tour being spoken in Deutsch over the speakers, it was hard to listen to it in English, so we turned them off and just enjoyed the view instead. It was nice sitting in the lower deck as they had tables and you could buy refreshments and food on the boat as well. Of course we had, as you might have guessed, more cappuccinos.
Just a sample of all the graffiti along the river … some of it looked sloppy, but some were really impressive.
building with very cool optical illusion
beside Berlin Hauptbahnhof
A view of our hotel from the river boat … after our first night on the second floor, we were moved to the sixth floor. Our room was located between the ‘E’ and ‘L’ on the building. The windows were huge and the one side of the windows is actually a door you can open to let the air in – we loved that feature. No screens on anything and you were protected by metal railing, so it felt like a balcony even though you are standing in your room.
Something to note: because of little to no private passenger traffic, the air smells cleaner here – you don’t smell vehicle exhaust all the time you’re here.
As you can probably tell, staying at Meliã Berlin was an awesome choice of place to stay as it is close to so many attractions and there are multiple museums within walking distance – it’s just too bad our stay was short and weren’t able to take in most of them.
The area is full of so much older architecture that is absolutely breathtaking. It is a much more beautiful city than I imagined it would be. The people were friendly and even more-so when they learned we were Canadian. To our surprise, a good many also speak English which was helpful.
Risé Brette
The Weary Traveller 