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 work-trip reality

I flew JFK → Amsterdam → Berlin with a colleague, and the first half of the trip was mostly work. We were there partly to co-work with a collaborator at his co-working space, and the days were long: up at 7:30 AM and working until about 9 PM. 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.

Day one, from the bus: the Spree and the Berliner Dom. We didn’t get off.

By day four I’d learned something I’ve kept since: a work trip is a work trip. We were there to work, and the work was good. If I want to actually see a place, I add a few days of my own at the end. December in Berlin gets dark by 4 PM, so “I’ll explore in the evenings” doesn’t really work.

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 New York, where it’s easy to stay switched on all the time, watching a whole city treat evenings as properly off was something I hadn’t seen before.

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. I went all the way up to the viewing deck at the top on my last morning, and it’s the best way to get a sense of how big the city is.

The East Side Gallery after dark. It was already night by the time I got there.

The Holocaust Memorial, right in the middle of the city.

Checkpoint Charlie, on the bus tour on my last full day.

From the top of the TV Tower on my last morning, before the flight to Barcelona.

Up at the top.

The World Clock at Alexanderplatz, right under the TV Tower.

We moved around a lot and stayed in three different places over the week. The first two nights were 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. Then a night near Breitscheidplatz and the Kurfürstendamm, and for the last three nights an Airbnb in Westend, in Charlottenburg, on the west side of the city and closer to where we were working.

The Oberbaum Bridge at night, on the edge of Friedrichshain.

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. The one by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and the one at Alexanderplatz were my favourites — 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.

The old church tower, left as a ruin from the war on purpose.

A Glühwein stall at the same market.

KaDeWe, the giant department store nearby, was fully dressed up for Christmas too.

KaDeWe at Christmas.

Currywurst, near the Brandenburg Gate.

One of the best evenings had nothing to do with sights. On my last night I stayed with an old friend who now lives near Berlin, at his girlfriend’s cozy apartment in Potsdam, 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.

Notes to myself

• December daylight is short, about 7.5 hours. Outdoor things go in the middle of the day.
• A work trip is a work trip. Next time I’ll add personal days at the end instead of hoping the evenings will be enough.
• Friedrichshain is the young, scruffy, street-art side of Berlin. Mitte is the polished one.