Roger and Stephen in Singapore: Berlin

A conference took us to Berlin last week and we were greeted with an unusual late in the season cold snap. Arriving early on Saturday morning the weather was overcast. We decided to orientate ourselves with the city by jumping on the hop on - hop off bus and doing a tour of the city and then because the ticket was valid the next day, stop off at some of the stops that appealed to us. We passed many large parks and they looked bleak as the winter weather had taken its toll with the grass being brown from earlier snow falls. Later in the afternoon it started to snow and preceded to snow for the next 3 days. Although the temperatures plunged to around -9º C, Berlin looked fantastic in the snow.

Berlin's history has left the city with an eclectic array of architecture and buildings from beautiful old buildings built in the late 1800's to the cold concrete housing blocks built in East Germany after the war. The city is filled with memorials to its past and provides the visitor to the city an extensive insight into cities divided by a wall.
Berlin is a very flat city making walking easy and also having a extensive public transport system that made it a breeze was to visit the many areas. It was frustrating to find that most of Berlin closes on a Sunday so dining options are limited and certain areas seemed like ghost towns apart from a few tourists walking about. I managed to walk into one Supermarket that was open on a Sunday to find queues at least 20 deep at all the registers with people purchasing groceries.
After living in Singapore where graffiti is virtually non existent we certainly noticed endless graffiti on buildings and monuments that certainly spoiled them.
Later in the week as the sun shone and the snow began to melt it certainly was harder to walk around as the snow has turned to ice and became very slippery as well as ice falling from buildings onto the footpaths sometimes hitting pedestrians.