Getting to Berlin the Hard Way

We’re in that time of year again in the Netherlands, lots of holidays. Basically, every time you turn around, it’s another long weekend.

Alex had a 5-day weekend, so we decided to spend part of it in Berlin. I had been to Berlin in 2004, but neither Mike nor Alex had ever been, so we decided to make an adventure out of it.

It’s about a 6-hour drive from Amsterdam, but there is a 5.5-hour train. We hadn’t done a train ride like that before and figured it would be a good experience. Little did we know that “good experience” is sometimes code for “future family story.”

I bought the tickets for the train about 3 weeks in advance. The website let me buy tickets from Amsterdam South station to Berlin with one transfer. Amsterdam South is the closest major station to us, so that sounded like a good way to go.

We arrived at Amsterdam South 10 minutes before our train was scheduled to depart, only to find out the station was closed because of work they were doing on the highway that runs over it. This closure had apparently been scheduled for months, but the train website still happily sells tickets for stations that do not actually exist for passengers anymore. Fantastic!

We knew we had about 40 minutes to get to our connecting station to catch the express train to Berlin. The station attendant said we could take a tram to another station and then catch a train to our connecting station, but we were pretty sure we would miss our connection, so we grabbed a cab instead.

A 30-minute, very stressful cab ride later, we ran into the connecting station with 2 minutes to spare… only to find out our second train,  the express to Berlin, had been canceled. Of course it had.

There are no ticket booths in the connecting station, so it took a while to figure out that in the train app they suggested an alternative express train leaving 2 hours later. This seemed like information they could maybe have led with.

That train worked fine (though it was very crowded), and we eventually made it to Berlin a mere two hours later than we had hoped. By European train standards, I think this probably still counts as “on time-ish”, though in Germany you would think this would make their heads explode.

Berlin itself was much nicer than I had remembered from 2004. Maybe it was because I had visited in January last time and this trip was less gloomy (though it did rain for part of the day, Germany likes to stay on brand), or maybe it was my traveling companions since my previous trip was for work. Either way, the city felt more colorful and energetic than I remembered from 20+ years ago.

We did all of the requisite tourist sites. We saw Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate. We spent a couple of hours at the Topography of Terror museum, which chronicles the rise and fall of the Nazis. We walked along sections of the Wall.

At the Brandenburg Gate

Having taken our giant road trip in the summer of 2024 (see previous blog posts - yes, there's homework), I had more context for what was happening in Berlin during the Cold War. In Finland, Estonia, and especially Latvia, we had learned about how the Russians had controlled much of those areas after World War II. Seeing the Berlin Wall and thinking about how Soviet influence had stretched across the north made the divide between East and West Berlin feel much more real and immediate to me.

Checkpoint Charlie

This was quite powerful for me.

It was a good trip.

Luckily, the train on the way back was not canceled, and we knew to get off at our connection station and take a cab the rest of the way home. Once bitten, twice Ubered.

And…after next Monday we will have officially cleared the Dutch “season of days off”.  Their next holiday is…wait for it…Christmas!

An update on the work for our new house…

As referenced in a previous blog post about the Dutch approach to contractors (a topic that deserves its own Netflix series), we had one last major project remaining: a new hutch and kitchen island. The contractor requested final payment before our early April cruise - naturally - and said they would do the work while we were gone. We dutifully moved the table, cleared the island, and prepared the space.

We returned from our trip to find… nothing changed. Sigh. Here we go again.

To their credit, once we mentioned the Berlin trip, they were able to complete most of the work while we were away. So this one only took two tries. We're calling that a win.

Here is the before picture.

And here is the “after.” The hutch in the back left has American plugs installed (with American voltage) so we can run the appliances we brought from home. Because apparently we are now operating an international kitchen.