A Weekend in Berlin

Hello friends!

I hope you're enjoying your summer. Things are fairly uneventful over on this side, except for a short trip we took to Berlin last weekend. How this journey came about was a bit of an accident, and it's a perfect example of my lack of organisational skills. It started out like this: Last year, in 2023, my partner and I embarked on a journey to Norway. We had booked an early morning flight from Berlin airport, around two hours from where we live. So to make sure we wouldn't miss it, I got us a nice hotel room for the night in Berlin, so that we could get up early, and head straight to the airport. I was actually surprised that the room was in a fancy-ish hotel, but still the cheapest on the site; I believed I had made a great deal. So far so good. But when we arrived at the hotel, the clerk told us that they had no reservation under my name. After a few minutes of digging, and me getting increasingly nervous, he said: "It appears that you have made your reservation for 2024". He also informed me that it was non-refundable. Ugh, typical! Either way, we still needed a room, so I asked if they still had some available, and I booked a new one, for three times the original price. And you guessed it, that left us stuck with that random overnight stay in July of 2024, which we now took advantage of. I later thought of an easier option: Simply logging into the site where I had booked the room, and request a date change (which I did when the same damn thing happened to me again in April this year, before leaving for Japan. I should not be left alone with responsibility and a credit card.) I don't know what it is about numbers and me, but we just don't get along. I also contantly mix up things like 6 PM and 16:00 (4 PM).

Anyway, what started as a bit of a bummer turned into a really nice trip. We met up with friends, ate huge piles of hand-pulled noodles, strolled around in the summer heat, and had drinks in a beer garden that looked absolutely stunning. It had, what I consider, the quintessential Berlin aestehtic of crumbling old walls, tagged with grafitti, overgrown with plants, and decorated with string lights. Add these components together, and you can make any place look casually beautiful. I also met a squirrel while walking to the bathroom, so that's another win for me.

The main event however, was a visit to the Samurai museum. It had a great collection of samurai armour from different periods, as well as helmets and smaller items and trinkets on display. I was thoroughly impressed by the intricate designs and patterns, and the overall level of craftsmanship. The whole exhibit is pretty interactive and fun, with a little fox mascot guiding you through, and like children, we spent most of our time answering the "fox quiz" questions on the touch screens that accompanied each exhibit. They ranged from Japanese history to literature, to art, language, and even a bit of pop culture thrown in there. In the end, we sat down to watch a projection of a tea ceremony that had a lor more more bowing than tea in it.

Here are a few photos from the trip:

 Berlin in a nutshell: old buildings, grafitti, greenery

The beer garden was just around the corner from the samurai museum

Climbing plants make everything better.

 I took too many photos here, but I loved the aesthetic so much

Last one, I promise

At the museum, they had a few theatre masks on display, and I loved how expressive they were.

The detail and colour in this samurai armour was absolutely gorgeous

 Some of the helmets had these massive horns. Imposing, but not very practical.