Germany (Berlin)
Trip Summary
Over the summer, my husband and I (and his family) took our first cruise vacation together. We opted to take the 11-day Scandinavia and Russia cruise on the Regal Princess departing out of Warnemunde, Germany. Berlin is the closest airport city to the port, so we all flew in a few days beforehand (always, always do this–it will give you a chance to get adjusted to the time change and will help account for any delays).
Having lived in Germany when I was young, I knew the transportation system in Germany was top-notch and easy to navigate, so I booked a hotel that I knew would be close to a train station–the NH Collection Berlin Mitte Friedrichstrasse. It had good reviews, was close to some of the sights we wanted to see in Berlin, and its close proximity to the train station couldn’t be beat.
We booked a standard room, and check-in was short and painless, the hotel very clean, and the staff helpful and courteous. The room was also nicely decorated and had the standard European bed set-up that I love–complete with fluffy blankets for each person!
The only drawback was that the air conditioning was not functioning during our entire stay, and while air conditioning isn’t a big thing in Europe, some hotels (including this one) have it. However, it was not working at the time, so we kept our windows open in hopes of a breeze. The windows only open so that the top slants in, so we never got much wind to cool the rooms down, so just be mindful of that if you book this hotel. Looking at more recent reviews, it seems as if the air conditioner has been fixed, but during our stay, the lack of it made the rooms quite hot.
For its location, cleanliness, and proximity to the train station, this hotel gets high marks! The only drawbacks were the hot and stuffy rooms.
NH Collection Berlin Mitte Friedrichstrasse Hotel: A-
However, we didn’t spend much time in the hotel. Our flight got in early in the afternoon, so we booked a free walking tour through Brewer’s Berlin Tours. They were highly reviewed, and their meeting point was right next to our hotel, so after dropping off our luggage, we set off to explore Berlin!
And explore we did! The tour is several hours long, and I think we walked around just every part of Berlin, seeing the Brandenburg Gate, the Adlon Hotel, the Berlin Cathedral, Checkpoint Charlie, the sections of the Berlin Wall that are still standing, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The guide was outstanding and was a wealth of knowledge as he pointed to maps and pictures in a book that he carried. He patiently answered questions, made sure the entire group could fully see the sights, and took his time in telling the history of each place before giving everyone time to take photographs.
The guide also seemed very passionate about the city, and this made for a moving trip as he somberly pointed out the history that played out on the very streets we walked on throughout the tour.
The most moving part of the tour was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe–the Holocaust memorial made out of plain grey blocks near the city center. The design is very intriguing, and you can easily lose yourself just wandering between the columns, walking among blocks of various sizes, many just off-tilt enough that the experience is jarring and unsettling.
We probably spent the most time here, and I am glad for that, because walking through its maze as the ground got lower and the columns got higher gave you a sense of unease, almost like you were drowning in the blocks.
Then as you continued to walk, the ground leveled out again and the columns got shorter until you walked out of the memorial. I felt it was expertly designed this way–I have been to several World War II memorials, and this definitely achieved its goal in reaching its visitors and conveying the deepening despair of that time period.
This walking tour was fantastic, and I highly recommend it. It gets very high marks for its excellent itinerary, knowledgeable guide, and time spent at all the sights. It’s also a free tour (though, be sure to tip generously as it is one of the best city tours you could take in Berlin!)
Brewer’s Berlin Free Tour: A
That night, my husband and I had a second tour booked with that same company–the Craft Beer and Breweries Tour. It also had good reviews and started soon after our walking tour ended. While my husband’s parents went back to the hotel, my husband and I got ready to explore a whole new side of the city!
The meeting point was also very close to our hotel, so after meeting up with the rest of our group, we promptly started exploring the various breweries in the city. The tour guide was a lot of fun and explained the history of each brewery, what kind of beers they made, and then we all sampled a small glass of it before moving to the next place.
The samples were nice and varied (and we discovered how delicious oatmeal porter is!). There were also some beers that we didn’t like at all (some of the sours), but some of the later places we tried even gave you a choice of what kind of beer you wanted to try from their menu.
We ended up exploring quite a bit of the city as we hopped on and off the train and switched to several different train routes. We even got on a trolley at one point near the end of the night, and I marveled at how well the tour guide seemed to navigate the city–we always seemed to arrive at the stations just as a train was arriving!
At the end of the tour, we stayed the longest at the last brewery. Everyone got a bigger glass of the beer they enjoyed most, and the tour guide enthusiastically explained how this specific brewery offered unfiltered beer that was good and authentic.
Then he raised his glass and bid us all goodbye! I looked at my husband then and thought, “Wait, that’s the end? They don’t take us back?” I immediately thought to all the different trains we took and how I wasn’t paying attention to which lines we used and at which stations we switched trains. It was also after midnight, and I didn’t know how long the trains ran. And sure enough, the guide was serious, so we had to put our heads together in order to find our way back!
Luckily, a seasoned traveler was in our group, and she was very helpful in showing us the trains to use in getting back. She showed us how to know that we were taking the trains in the right directions, and after taking careful mental notes, we set off to find our way back by ourselves! Luckily, we made it (and by that point had been up for 36 hours, so hats off to us!).
So the tour gets high marks for its jovial tour guide, the small group size, and the varied breweries on the itinerary, but loses points for stranding the group at the end! At the very least, I would recommend that they let group members know up front that they are responsible for making their way back so they can make travel arrangements, because that was a very unexpected surprise (after midnight in a city we didn’t know).
Brewer’s Craft Beer and Breweries Tour: B+
Even after a late night, we still had to get up early as we had an excursion planned to see Sachsenhausen. My father-in-law wanted to see one of the concentration camps while we were in Germany, and this was the closest one to Berlin. So we booked the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Walking Tour.
After meeting up with our tour group, we all boarded a train to get there. It isn’t a long trek to the city, but it does require a few train transfers, so we got to see some of the countryside as the train whisked us out of Berlin.
From the train station, we walked to the camp itself, and this is what surprised me most as the camp was right in the middle of a residential area.
I had only been to one concentration camp before–Auschwitz–and that one is very isolated and in the middle of nowhere. This one was right off the street–its imposing walls and the somber words on the camp’s gates, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” still there for all to see.
Walking through a concentration camp is always a difficult thing when you know its history. The pathway that we walked on was the same one prisoners used, the gravel pits we passed were where barracks used to stand, and the path that we would take underground was where the gas chambers and crematoriums were.
It was a quiet day, one full of sadness and reflection, and would have been appropriately so if the tour guide had been more like the one we had for our Berlin walking tour–patient, understanding, and communicative with the group members. But our tour guide seemed to be in a sour mood the whole trip–snapping at the people who struggled to keep up with the rest of the group’s walking pace, sighing irritatedly at people who would ask questions, and constantly bending down and flipping over his hair in the middle of the concentration camp so that he could fix his hairstyle. It just set a strange tone for the tour, and I found myself wishing that we had just done the trip by ourselves–it would have been easy enough to do.
So the tour gets good marks for its affordability, the ease in getting to and from the camp, but loses points for its irritable tour guide.
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Walking Tour: B
We had that afternoon free, so after getting back to Berlin, we headed toward Alexanderplatz for dinner and people-watching. Alexanderplatz is a great place for it, because it is basically an open square with lots of restaurants and outside seating, so we sampled bratwurst, beer, and bread while talking and enjoying the evening.
After dinner, we strolled along the river a bit for some last-minute sightseeing. It would be our last night before we would have to head out in the morning to Warnemunde to meet our ship!
Favorite Experiences
I did admire the walking tour of Berlin and seeing the architecture of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It was a memorial that seemed well put together and purposeful in how it was created, so I liked seeing and appreciating that. The guide was also excellent in this tour and did so much in helping the tour group understand the magnitude of the Holocaust’s devastation.
Also, a moment that initially was going to be unnerving and stressful actually ended up being one of the best adventures of exploring Berlin. After our brewery tour ended and my husband and I had to unexpectedly find our way back to our hotel, we had a fun time navigating the trains (and seeing just how lively the trains can get at night). One of the train stations had a doner stall open, and that was a lovely midnight snack as we continued our train adventure. It is also always a fun thing to accomplish something that you had initially doubted yourself on–in this case, it was figuring out the train system in the middle of the night!
What I Wish I Knew
Thank goodness one of our brewery tour group members had an app on her phone that showed us the train route back to our hotel. I wish I had thought to download some of those apps beforehand as there are quite a few of them from My Train Companion, Citymapper, Eurail, to Rail Europe, and all of them give easy-to-follow directions when traveling around Europe. One thing you do have to take note of on each rail line is which end city is north and which end city is south, and this way, you can catch the train going in the right direction.
I also wish we had done the Sachsenhausen tour ourselves. Usually, it’s a group member that ruins a tour, not the tour guide, so that was an unexpected disappointment. The place is a somber historical site and deserves to be treated with respect, so if a place ever needed a calm and sensitive guide, it was that one. It would have been better not to have a guide at all, so I wish we chose that route. The place was easy to find and the trains not too difficult to navigate, so we could have done it ourselves.
If you decide to go, there is a lot to do in Berlin that I didn’t get a chance to do, so be sure to check out the travel forum here. I love Germany and enjoyed seeing Berlin, so if you have a chance to visit, by all means, do so!
I also post reels and TikToks regularly of all the places I’ve reviewed on here, so if you want to see some videos of what to expect, check out my social media here:
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Happy travels!
