europe on Aldrin Jenson

Europe, part 1: Berlin in December

aldrinjenson@gmail.com (Aldrin Jenson) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:00:00 -0400

Trip: Berlin, Germany · December 12–20, 2025 · first stop of a three-country European trip

Last December I finally made it to Europe. The trip ended up spanning three countries — Germany, Spain, and Italy — and I’m writing it up in three parts. This is part one: Berlin, which was the strangest leg of the three, because it wasn’t really a vacation at all.

The Brandenburg Gate on a clear December afternoon. (The East Side Gallery didn’t make it into my camera roll.)

The work-trip reality

I flew JFK → Amsterdam → Berlin with a colleague, and the honest truth about the first half of the trip is that it was dominated by work. We were there partly to co-work with a collaborator at his co-working space, and the days looked like this: up at 7:30 AM, work until 9 PM, collapse. Day one we booked a hop-on-hop-off bus tour and were both too sleepy to actually get off the bus. On the Sunday I worked until noon, took a nap, and woke at 5 PM to find it already dark — December in Berlin gives you about seven and a half hours of usable daylight, and I’d slept through most of them.

By day four I had a realisation I’ve kept coming back to since: company-sponsored travel is not travel. The company is paying, which means the company (reasonably!) wants you working. If you tell yourself you’ll “explore in the evenings,” December-in-Berlin will laugh at you. If you want to actually see a place, budget your own days for it.

What German work culture taught me anyway

Ironically, the thing Berlin taught me most clearly was how to stop working. People there disconnect completely — nobody replies to Slack after hours; they’re at the pub. Sitting in a pub one evening with my colleagues, this came up explicitly, and it stuck with me. Coming from a New York startup, where the default is always-on, watching an entire society treat evenings as genuinely off was quietly radical.

The fashion was its own culture lesson: deliberately chosen secondhand clothes, a punky thrift-store style where a great jacket costs five euros. Nothing about it reads as “cheap” — it reads as chosen. Very different from New York.

A city that refuses to forget

Once the work thinned out, I got to the part of Berlin that actually moved me. Berlin is not a “top 10 attractions” city — it’s a city organised around remembering things most cities would rather bury:

The Berlin Wall and the East Side Gallery — including the famous mural of the two presidents kissing. Walking a former death strip that’s now an open-air art gallery is a strange, hopeful feeling.
The DDR Museum — daily life in East Germany, down to the furniture and the surveillance. I hadn’t understood viscerally what living under that system meant until this.
The Holocaust Memorial and the Topography of Terror — sobering, deliberately so. What struck me is that Germany built these on purpose, in the middle of its capital. The country institutionalised confronting its own worst history.
The TV Tower — the tallest structure in Berlin, and a good way to get the city’s scale.

We stayed in Friedrichshain, which felt like “the Lower East Side of East Berlin” — the RAW-Gelände complex nearby is a reused industrial site full of clubs and street art, very much post-wall youth-rebellion energy.

The Wall at the Topography of Terror — the Gestapo and SS headquarters site, kept as an open exhibition. Berlin confronts its history on purpose.

December also means Christmas markets. Gendarmenmarkt and the one by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church were the highlights — Glühwein stands, wooden stalls, that whole atmosphere. And I made it to Mass at Sankt Hedwig’s Cathedral, which ran in German and English — there’s something grounding about finding the same liturgy in a foreign language.

The Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz, beside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church — December in Berlin is dark by 4 PM, but the markets make up for it.

One of the best evenings had nothing to do with sights: I stayed a night with an old friend who now lives in Berlin, at his girlfriend’s cozy apartment, and we talked for hours. Old friends in new cities are one of travel’s best features.

Verdict

Berlin is “nice for starters” — genuinely good for a short visit, and I’m glad I went. But it’s not somewhere I’d want to live. What I took from it wasn’t a list of attractions; it was a question the whole city seems built around: how do people live under constraint, and what do they build after liberation? Every museum, mural, and reused factory is a different answer to that.

Next stop: Barcelona, where I finally got to travel like a tourist. That’s part two.

Practical notes

December daylight is short (~7.5 hours). Plan outdoor things for midday.
If it’s a work trip, accept that it’s a work trip. Add personal days at the end rather than pretending evenings will be enough.
The Berlin WelcomeCard covers public transport plus discounts — worth it if you’re moving around a lot.
Stay in Friedrichshain if you want the young, scruffy, street-art Berlin rather than the polished Mitte version.

Europe, part 2: Barcelona

aldrinjenson@gmail.com (Aldrin Jenson) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:10:00 -0400

Trip: Barcelona, Spain · December 20–23, 2025 · part two of a three-country European trip

After the work-heavy Berlin leg, I flew to Barcelona — my first time in Spain, and the first stretch of the trip that felt like an actual vacation. Younger me would never have believed I’d casually be in Spain one December. That thought alone was worth the flight.

Gaudí days

I had a couple of days on my own and spent them doing the full architecture circuit, and Barcelona’s architecture really is the show:

Inside the Sagrada Família — Gaudí designed the light itself. The one thing in Barcelona that exceeded the hype.

Sagrada Família — the one thing that fully lived up to the hype. It’s less a church than a piece of architectural theology: Gaudí designed the light itself, so the nave glows green and gold in the morning and burns red and orange in the evening. Every geometric choice means something. It’s been under construction for over 140 years and somehow that adds to it. Book the skip-the-line entry; do not attempt the walk-up queue.
Park Güell, Casa Batlló, Casa Milà — the rest of the Gaudí trail. I’ll be honest: after the Sagrada Família these felt a bit overhyped to me. Worth seeing, but the church is the masterpiece and the houses are the B-sides.
The Gothic Quarter and El Born — medieval lanes that suddenly open into cathedral squares. This is the best aimless-walking territory in the city.
The Picasso Museum and Montjuïc — the museum for the early work (you watch him learn to paint like an old master before he unlearns it), and Montjuïc for the views. I saved the cable car for later and it was a good call — it’s the best cheap thrill in Barcelona.

The roof of Casa Milà — Gaudí’s chimneys above the Eixample.

I also took the hop-on-hop-off bus tour about three times, which I maintain is an underrated way to learn a city’s geography fast.

Toward the end, Dan flew in from New York — landing at 5 AM, and I went to the airport to meet her at arrivals holding a sign, which I recommend as a practice regardless of who you’re picking up. With one shared day in the city, we did the greatest-hits loop: the Montjuïc cable car, the bus tour, the beach, and a proper paella.

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The view from the Montjuïc cable car — the best cheap thrill in Barcelona.

What surprised me

Catalonia was news to me. I hadn’t known before this trip that Barcelona sees itself as Catalan first — its own language, flags on balconies, a whole distinct identity within Spain. Street signs are in Catalan, not Spanish. I’d arrived thinking “Spain” was one thing, and left understanding it’s a federation of identities that don’t fully agree with each other. This is exactly the kind of thing you can’t learn properly except by standing in it.

The scam. At 1:30 AM, hungry and alone at a late-night place, I tapped my card for a croissant and got charged €17 — the receipt showed three items I never ordered. I didn’t confront the vendor: middle of the night, alone, didn’t speak the language. I just took the loss and the lesson. In tourist-heavy areas, look at the amount on the terminal before you tap, always.

Verdict

Here’s my honest take, which I know is not the consensus one: Barcelona was interesting but underwhelming relative to its reputation. Parts of the city felt less developed than I expected, and outside the Gaudí works and the old town I didn’t find the thing that makes me want to return. Of the cities on this trip, I’d rank it below both Berlin and the Italian stops. I’m glad I saw it; I don’t think I’ll be back.

The trip’s final act was the best one: a week in Italy over Christmas — Rome, Florence, and Venice. That’s part three.

Practical notes

Book the Sagrada Família in advance (timed entry, skip-the-line). It sells out and it’s the one unmissable thing.
Check card terminals before tapping, especially late at night in tourist zones.
Pickpocketing paranoia is justified on La Rambla and the metro — I held my phone tight the whole time and lost nothing, but stay alert.
The Montjuïc cable car at golden hour is the best view-per-euro in the city.
December weather is mild and the crowds are thinner — a genuinely good month for this city.

Europe, part 3: Christmas in Italy — Rome, Florence, Venice

aldrinjenson@gmail.com (Aldrin Jenson) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:20:00 -0400

Trip: Rome → Florence → Venice · December 24–30, 2025 · final leg of a three-country European trip

After Berlin and Barcelona, Italy was the leg I’d been saving up for — a week over Christmas with Dan, moving Rome → Florence → Venice by train. It ended up being the best part of the entire trip, and the part I’d most readily repeat.

Rome (Dec 24–27)

Christmas morning at St. Peter’s Square — the Pope celebrated the Mass.

Christmas morning at St. Peter’s

We were in St. Peter’s Square for Christmas morning Mass, with the Pope himself celebrating — and we’d ended up in a good spot, close to where the papal carriage passed. I’m Catholic, and I don’t really have language for what it’s like to spend Christmas at the centre of the church you grew up in, an ocean away from where you grew up. It’s the single most memorable Christmas I’ve had.

We also did St. Peter’s Basilica properly — including climbing the dome, which I’d rank as one of the best things in Rome: you come out overlooking the whole of Vatican City. Highly recommended, worth every one of the several hundred stairs. The Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel came with fast-track entry (worth paying for — the regular line is measured in hours). Room after room of Michelangelo and Botticelli, ending under that ceiling. No photos allowed in the chapel, which honestly makes people actually look up.

Two thousand years, still standing

What impressed me most about Rome wasn’t any single sight — it was the age of things that are still just… there. The Colosseum has stood since around 80 AD. The Pantheon is over 2,000 years old, with marble brought from Egypt, and you can walk in for free and see Raphael’s tomb (which delighted the Dan Brown reader in me — Angels and Demons fans will understand). Every carving is done to a level of detail that made me reflect on focus itself: the people who made these had an intensity of attention that we, with our phones, mostly don’t.

The Pantheon — over 2,000 years old and still in use. (The Colosseum only made it into selfies.)

One evening at the Colosseum I did something that became my favourite travel hack of the trip: I stood in front of it and used ChatGPT as a live tour guide, going back and forth for a couple of hours — Roman history, gladiator psychology, why civilisations collapse, why the marble skin was stripped off the stone skeleton. A knowledgeable guide in your pocket, for free, at night, at your own pace. I can’t recommend this enough at historical sites.

The rest of Rome: the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain (we made our wishes — but beware the currency exchanges nearby, where $100 bought a scandalous 57 euros), and a walking tour with a guide named Virgilio, who was our favourite person of the whole week. A guide named Virgil, guiding people through Rome — the jokes write themselves.

Florence (Dec 27–28)

Florence got barely a day and a half and deserved a week. It felt more alive than Rome somehow — more families, more children, more of a lived-in city wrapped around Renaissance bones.

David. The real one, at the Accademia. Photos do not prepare you — it’s the smoothness that gets you, marble that reads as skin. The same gallery has Michelangelo’s Prisoners: unfinished figures half-emerged from their marble blocks, which show you exactly how a statue is “freed” from the stone. Seeing the unfinished ones next to the finished David is the best art lesson I’ve ever gotten in ten minutes.

David at the Accademia. It’s the smoothness that gets you — marble that reads as skin.

The Vasari Corridor. I’d read about this secret elevated passage of the Medici — running from Palazzo Vecchio over the Ponte Vecchio — in Dan Brown’s novels, and walking up to it in real life was a proper full-circle moment.
The Duomo — really beautiful, though we couldn’t get inside on the Sunday. A night walk to Piazzale Michelangelo for the panorama over the city was the right call instead; Florence at night from that terrace is the postcard.
The T-bone steak. Bistecca alla fiorentina is sold by the kilogram, and we ordered a full kilo (85 euros) on confident advice. We could not finish it. Order less than you think.

Left for next time: the interactive Leonardo da Vinci museum. Florence is firmly on the return list.

Venice (Dec 28–30)

The arrival alone is worth it: the train crosses the lagoon and you step out of the station directly onto a canal. No cars, no roads — your bus is a boat. We took the Vaporetto (the public water bus) four stops to the hotel and I never stopped finding it charming, even after we missed our stop once because the thing moves faster than you expect.

Venice — no cars, no roads. Your bus is a boat.

Doge’s Palace was the intellectual highlight. Venice was once a merchant-republic superpower — the palace is basically the machinery of that power preserved in marble. And then the sobering coda: the city’s population has fallen something like 95%, with fewer than 5,000 actual residents left in the historic centre. You’re walking through a working museum whose city has mostly moved out. Look for the Squero di San Trovaso — one of the last working gondola repair yards — for a glimpse of the Venice that still functions.

One evening we went to a Vivaldi concert in a Venetian church — Vivaldi, in Venice, in a candlelit church, is exactly as good as it sounds. We also climbed the campanile on a foggy day, from which you can see, precisely, nothing. Timing is everything.

Verdict

Italy was the clear winner of the three countries — I’d rank Florence and Venice above everywhere else on the trip, and I’ll definitely be back (Milan, Bologna, and a Pompeii day trip are already on the list, on good advice from a friend who’s been to Rome six times). Winter turned out to be a great time for it: thinner crowds, mild days, and Christmas in Rome as the anchor.

The trip home had one last gift: a flight in a two-seat row — the best economy configuration that exists — and landing in New York on the 31st, just in time to close out the year.

Practical notes

Book Vatican fast-track entry. The standard line is hours long even in December.
Climb St. Peter’s dome — best view-to-effort ratio in Rome.
Use trains between cities. Italo/Trenitalia between Rome, Florence, and Venice is fast, cheap, and scenic. In Venice, buy Vaporetto passes.
Try ChatGPT as a tour guide standing in front of the monuments. Genuinely transformative for history-heavy sites.
Avoid the currency exchanges near tourist sites — the Trevi-area rates are a scam. Just use a card or an ATM.
Fiorentina steak is priced per kg. A kilo is a lot. Trust me.
Winter is a good season for Italy — fewer tourists, and Christmas in Rome is special if that means something to you.