So... yes. Berlin, once again, for the third time in 2013. After a few days with my family in the mountains, we took a plane to Berlin on December 27 - to visit Monsieur's parents and his sister. These visits are usually quite busy as we of course want to spend time with his family, but we also have friends in Berlin we don't see very often, and after all, it's still a huge, buzzing, tempting monster of a city, and you want to make the best of your time when you're there, meaning: enjoy the cafés and go shopping and visit museums and have brunch somewhere nice and walk around and discover new corners and go back to the places you love and... sigh. Of course you never have enough time to do all of this. We didn't go to any museums this time (but we saw one of the famous "revues" at Friedrichstadtpalast with Monsieur's parents). We didn't have brunch (but a nice piece of carrot cake at Spreegold). We had coffee and great sandwiches at KaffeeMitte and yes, we went shopping (new shoes, yes!) and again a lot of postcards at Das Buch. A few steps from Das Buch, there's one of my favourite shops in Berlin, morphose. Design, design, design, I never leave them without buying something nice (and they have a really nice dog).
And of course we met our friends - with some of them we visited Gestalten Space (where I could've spent an awful lot of money on fantastic books like "Around the world - an atlas for today" - if you ever happen to need a present for me...) and had lunch/cake/coffee at mittendrin, both places are in Sophienstrasse, which is actually worth walking through just because, but there's also a few places I came to like a lot during my Berlin visits, one of them being Barcomi's (for their incredibly yummy cakes, not so much for the noise in there). With the same friends we celebrated New Year's (although - we didn't really celebrate much, we stayed at their place and had a great, special, spanish-influenced raclette and nice wine and played board games for the best part of the evening before trying to see the fireworks from the street, which didn't work out very well, but we could hear it - sounded like all hell broke loose).
At the moment Monsieur and me are crazy for two games, "Brändi Dog" and "Dominion" and we are trying to convince everyone to play with us, which worked fine with said friends and also with our families so far =)
On January 1st, after having spent half of the day in bed and the rest of it with breakfast, coffee and more rounds of Dominion, we had dinner with other friends at Escados (steak etc., very nice!), another great evening. It's lovely to meet our Berlin people. I like the feeling of having friends all over Europe, but sometimes it's annoying that they're far away most of the time. Being in Berlin always means being with friends, which is just awesome.
I didn't take many pictures this time, but when we were waiting to meet the raclette friends, we accidentally ended up in the backyards of Haus Schwarzenberg and were late for our meeting because we had to spend more than half an hour just marvelling at the street art there. That's what you can see on the photos this time. Haus Schwarzenberg, by the way, has seen a lot and could probably tell us amazing stories from the past, for example how Otto Weidt saved the life of some of his jewish employees during the Nazi deportations. A fascinating place!
