Tim & Jo

We arrived in Berlin last night, Andreas meet us at the airport and that meant we got back to our hostel without any problems Managed to get a hostel for tonight as well. (only discovered we'd booked our Berlin hostel for June instead of May yesterday morning...). Went and had a beer on the Oranienburger Strasse when we arrived which was really good, the beer tastes so good here

Bought our gear over to our new hostel this morning and then hired a couple of bikes to whip round town quickly. Theres cycle lanes everywhere and on the busy streets the cycle lane is a lane of different coloured cobbles on the footpath, feels really safe riding round.

Went for a ride over to the Hauptbahnhof (Main train station) and validated our Eurail tickets and reserved tickets for all our night train connections. First station we went too the Frau behind the counter didn't speak a word of English and wasn't too interested in helping us, so we left At the main station they had a designated English counter which was a whole lot easier... and the guy actually wanted to help us

Had lunch in the Tiergarten which was beautiful and so peaceful compared to the streets, then we came back to the hostel and had a snooze for a couple of hours, was much easier making the beds in the light as well (had quite a battle putting a duvet into a duvet cover in the pitch black last night, whilst trying not to wake up the others in the room)

Just got back from visiting the Reichstag, and climbing up the glass dome. From there you can look down into the area where the German parliament sits, also get a really great view over the city up there. We were lucky 'cause the sun was just setting as we were arriving at the top.

Off to Dresden tomorrow, the train leaves every two hours so we shouldn't have to spend too long wandering around with full packs and nowhere to leave them.

P.S. Did you know that Berlin has over 50 McDonalds outlets? No we didn't either until a massive sign let us in on the secret

Tschuss