Travel to Berlin
 

Hi everybody,
Next October i will travel to Berlin with my wife. We are in the mid fortys.
We will stay during 4 days.

Can you please help me with some tips regarding:

- tipycal restaurants.
- Brewerys
- modern architecture
- nice cafe's
- everything that we must not loose.

Where is the area where the artist meet each other.

Best regards

Rui

for contemporary architecture, if you've the tiniest German skills, it might be worthwile checking http://www.bauwelt.de/arch/bauwelt/a...che/archiv.php , which is the online archive of Germany's leading architectural magazine. skip to 'erweiterte Suche' and in the 'Ort' row enter 'Berlin' (if you enter it in the first row of that page, it will show anything related to Berlin, e.g. buildings abroad by an architect from Berlin).

I notice you hardly return to your posts in order to acknowledge replies, which makes me somehow reluctant to answer in depth...

There is a huge concetration of lauded contemporary architect in the former No Man's Land along the old Wall from Potsdammer Platz north to the Brandenburg Gate, Bundestag, new government buildings and the new Central Station or Berlin Hauptbahnhof.

Until the fall of the Wall this area was desolate - a veritable barren No Man's Land with the tall Wall runnning thru it.

After the Wall fell lots of new buildings were planned such as

Potsdammer Platz, a striking group of high-rise buildings reviving the long desolate Potsdammer Platz, before the war one of Berlin's most major squares; and by the Brandenbrug Gate now in construction is the American Embassy and next to it the recently complete Holocaust Memorial - a field of tilted undulating slabs - and there are several other new edifices arising here to - embassies, hotels, etc.

and then by the Gate the Reichstag with its acclaimed new dome

and just a bit north a raft of new striking government buildings spaced along the river.

The new central station is extremely impressive even though the original architect's plans were made a bit less expansive - this is the first new central train station supposedly built from scratch in over a century in Europe.

Berlin's lure to me is that right now you are seeing a world-class capital city being built from scratch for all purposes - a rare rare thing to see.

I didn't like Potsdammer Platz because I thought it lacked human scale. But it is interesting, and if you like modern architecture, you should see it and make your own judgement.

See the new Reichstag also.

I suggest that you visit Potsdam, reachable by commuter rail, and see some older architecture. There are local bus tours from the Potsdam Station.

We found so many nice cafés all over the place that I don't particularly remember the name of any. They ceased to be noteworthy -- just the norm for our image of Berlin.

There are a lot of interesting, newly built buildings behind the Gendarmarkt in East Berlin. There are also some interesting buildings along the Spree in the area between Unter den Linden and Leipziger Strasse. One building I spotted looked like it was "wearing" a glass slipcover.

There are many nice cafes along Unter den Linden between the Brandenburger Tor and Friedrichstrasse. If you want an inside cafe, there is the mall passage that is off of the basement food court of Galleries Lafayette on Friedrichstrasse. The Birdcage Cafe is here, and if you walk along the mall, there is a small bar and cafe with live piano music near the escalators in Quartier 206.

If you want to see art galleries, then you should head to the Prenzlaurer Berg area near the Hackescher Mkt.

Thin

You sound like my husband and me, so I'll tell you what we really enjoyed on our trip to Berlin in March of this year:

hotel:
we stayed at the Propeller Island City Lodge and LOVED it. It's not nearly as scary in real life as it looks on the website: http://propeller-island.com/rooms_ne...l/11/index.php

Architectural highlights:
Bauhaus Museum (small but truly fascinating- give it at least 2 hours)

specific modern buildings:
do not miss going up in the Reichstag building- although there will be a line, it is worth it.

check out Frank Gehry's DZ Bank building (you must go inside of it to catch the beauty) on the platz at the Brandenberg Gate
http://www.erco.com/projects/office_..._intro_1_0.jpg

check out the Scandinavian embassies (trust me)- http://farm1.static.flickr.com/33/97...bf0e213e80.jpg

check out the CDU (political party) building (near the Scandinavian embassies and the Bauhaus Museum)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ale_Berlin.JPG

we took the "100" bus in a loop around the city and it was a great way to see a lot of modern architecture in about 30 minutes, then hop off where we wanted to explore in more detail.

Mitte is great for restaurants. We liked one called Assel, which had extremely tasty German fare at good rpices, on Oranienburger Strasse.

Finally, the coolest thing we did was go to this crazy bombed-out former Jewish department store-turned artists galleries, called Tacheles. It is also in Mitte:
http://super.tacheles.de/cms/

Have fun!

AH! one more that you should not miss: we did not go inside but the Jewish Museum is brand new and very cutting-edge architecture- Daniel Liebeskind is the architect:

http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/jewishmuseum/

also, I cannot find the name of the building, but when you go to see the Berlin Wall (East Side Gallery), as you exit the Ostbanhof train station, directly across the street is a really cool new building with a green-lit entrance- it is the corporate headquarters for something- perhaps a utility company, I believe- and it is right on the river. Very cool!