3 Nights in Berlin

If you do one thing, go up the Reichstag. The queues can be awful, but I found that early evening was the quietest and most spectacular, when the sun was setting.

Other places of note are the German history museum, Stasi Headquarters, Potsdam, the house of the Wansee conference, a bike ride around Lake Potsdam, the East Side Gallery, Checkpoint Charlie and its museum, Potsdamer Platz, the memorial to the murdered Jews, and, of course, Brandenburg Gate.

Quick Tips:

If staying in the west of the city, leave the train at Berlin Zoo, and if staying in the east, get off at Ostbahnhof or Lichtenburg. They are building the biggest station in Europe, the Lehrterbahnhof, near the Reichstag, though, which will open for the World Cup in 2006.

Best Way To Get Around:

Buy a Berlin transport ticket and use the U-Bahn, S-Bahn, regional trains, trams, and buses. It is an excellent value, and you are always very near a train, tram, or bus.

This IS the best youth hostel in the world. It is cheap, clean, and secure in a great location.

Located in the former East, two stops on the U-Bahn from Alexanderplatz or a short walk, it is situated in a nice up-and-coming area. It has plenty of low-priced shops and restaurants nearby.

The rooms are excellent, decked out in the standard IKEA furniture, but very comfortable and homely. They consist of five bedded dorms, but have apartments on the top floor I think. There is a bedside table with drawers and a reading lamp by each bed. The rooms are very clean, and the beds are well spaced.

The bathrooms, again, are clean and very modern. There are about eight showers for four rooms, which is a good ratio in my opinion. Each room, floor, and corridor has swipe-card locks so security is excellent. Lockers are free of charge, but do require a deposit of around 10€.

There is no lockout or curfew, and if you have come on an overnight train and your room is not ready, you can still use all the facilities, including the shower. The staff is very friendly and regularly organise tours and excursions out. They can also book hostels and trains for you, and have a goldmine of information on them, too.

Downstairs there is a bar that can be lively and sociable, depending on the night and the people in. I think a better place to meet people is the seating area in reception, with its comfortable leather sofas.

Breakfast is not included, but there is a nice café adjacent to the hostel that is quite nice and averagely priced. Internet access in the hostel is good with four terminals, but it is quite expensive, so it is best to head to the easy Internet café in Alexanderplatz, where it is cheaper and more comfortable, with more computers.

The Circus is of a higher standard than some four-star hotels I have stayed in and is cheap. It is, in my opinion, one of the best places to stay in the world.

Catch the S-Bahn to Wansee and hire a bike from outside the station. They supply you with a map to make your way around the lake to Potsdam.

It is a beautiful ride through woodland and along beautiful lakeside scenery. Stop off at the House of the Wansee Conference on the way. This is where the Nazis decided on the "Final Solution" for the "Jewish Problem." It is truly horrific how such a beautiful building in a beautiful location could be the setting for such an abhorrent moment in history.

On the way to Potsdam, there are plenty of peaceful places to stop, including a couple of lovely cafés with large lawns. Potsdam is beautiful, and the main park there is the big attraction with its many palaces and other architectural wonders and landscaped gardens.

Cycle back to Wansee, or, if like me (lazy), put the bike on the S-Bahn in one of the special cycle carriages!

This is the vast, imposing former headquarters of the Stasi (Russian Secret Police). The anti-Stasi graffiti from when the wall came down is still on parts of the building. The building itself is enough to strike fear into people.

Only a small part of this very Soviet building is a museum about how the secret police worked. It is quite cheap to enter and has some fascinating exhibits, such as cameras and other spying equipment, the Stasi used.

There isn't much in English, but if you ask, you can get a booklet explaining every exhibit and item in English. The lovely lady in the tearoom (the unchanged staff canteen was in the Soviet days) even put a video on for us in English.

It was quite scary in many ways, showing the lengths a government went to just to spy on its own people who they were so paranoid of.