| Ben Haines |
Aug 16th, 2000 04:28 AM |
Fodors <BR> <BR>Berlin can't offer you castles, but hastwo palaces, Charlottenburg near the city centre and Potsdam half an hour by local train out westward. Potsdam includes a great park and light Baroque buildings, and might well have the right hotel for you nearby. <BR> <BR>Otherwise, water is romantic and you might settle for ahotel near the Wannsee,in the western suburbs. In any case, if boats are still plying you might like an evening trip across Berlin as the light fades. <BR> <BR>To sit at a cafe table and hold hands by candelight a good spot is the Hackescher Hof, just north of the Hackescher Markt. You can hire bicycles there, too. <BR> <BR>The history of Berlin is not romantic. Prussians, Kaiser Wilhelm, Nazis, the Berlin Blockade, the Cold War, the Wall. But there are many museums of world class where it takes only thought to fly your mind to Babylonia or ancient Greece -- in the Pergamon Museum in central Berlin, half a kilometer from the Hackescher Hof. And the Art Nouveau collection in the Brohan museum, across the road from Charlottenburg Palace, takes you straight into the Belle Epoque. The museum buildings unromantic to a degree -- just walk in. <BR> <BR>I think you can find other museums in http://gogermany.about.com/travel/gogermany/mbody.htm <BR>I'm not sure how much detail you get in <BR> http://www.euraide.de/insidetrack.html <BR>but it's worth a look. <BR>And it would be useful to open http://www.yahoo.co.uk, and enter "Berlin museums". <BR> <BR>Berkin is chocabloc with non-touristy places. The way I find them is to look up "music" in the Day's Programme page of the Berliner Zeitung daily paper, choose something I like for that evening, and ask my hotel keeper to say how to get there. Not a big concert -- something in a church or clubhouse. <BR> <BR>Please write if I can help further. <BR> <BR>Ben Haines, London <BR> [email protected] <BR> <BR>
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