GERMANY – Of the eighteen months I lived in Berlin, I spent eleven in the southern part of the city. Though some of Berlin’s most interesting neighbourhoods (Neukölln, Kreuzberg and Schöneberg) lie south of the center, I have to say that I found places of interest fewer and further apart to the south of the…
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GERMANY – Just like royal families other countries built their residences just outside their capitals, the kings and queens of Prussia chose to build their permanent residence in a town just west of Berlin called Potsdam. Bombed in WW2 and separated from West Berlin by the Iron Curtain afterwards, many things have happened there since…
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GERMANY – While my solo explorations of Berlin usually took me to far-flung suburbs, weekend outings with a friend of mine who was born and raised in Berlin took me to the kind of place Berliners like. As they are rather fond of their parks, one such place was Volkspark Schöneberg-Wilmersdorf in the south of…
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GERMANY – The northern edge of Berlin is a very nice place to go for a bike ride when spring is coming into full bloom. So in this post, I will take you on through the fields and forests from the former east to the former west, through an area Berliners definitely consider part of…
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GERMANY – In this post, I will take you on a bike ride from near Pankow station to the neighbourhood of Weissenssee (which is now part of the borough of Pankow). Like much of Pankow, Kissingenstrasse, which goes east from Pankow station, is spacious, green, and lined with stately looking buildings: A building in a…
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GERMANY – To fully understand Berlin, one has to understand how spacious it is. This means that some districts are so far from each other that they could almost be in different countries, both visually and culturally. To many Berliners, this also means that many other parts of the city are full of the wrong…
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GERMANY – The wall used to stand just a few hundred meters from my first address in Berlin, on the other side of the tracks at Schönholz S-Bahn station. The people whose apartment I lived in told me that the whole neighbourhood (including a good friend of mine, who was too young to remember it)…
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GERMANY – In this post, I will show you some winter shots of Reinickendorf, the northern borough of Berlin where I spent my first 7 months in the city. Reinickendorf has about 250,000 inhabitants and covers 89.5 square kilometres, making it roughly the same size as my previous home towns Utrecht and Liège. This makes…
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