Rabbits from the future

After that last cliffhanger (hehe) I know all of my reader was on tenterhooks to see whether or not we would survive. There was a clue hidden in the last post, you may have missed it because it was outside of the body of the blog post, but it was there.


Ok, I'll help, here it was, yes this blog was posted in 2014, more than 3 years after the event,  also the tense of the post was something you could have used for a clue, I was not in fact writing this while wandering around a cliff edge in Portugal. 

Sorry to be so anticlimactic but yes, we did survive Albufeira, we survived long into 2011, long enough to go on our next holiday. This time it was winter and we decided that for this time of year, the best kind of holiday was a city break.

When deciding on a city break destination, what is the single most important thing you would look for? Is it some sort of culture and history? Do you perhaps travel to them only during some sort of street festival?

The main deciding factor when choosing a city for a city break above all else is of course an excellent public transport system.

We wanted underground trains, overground trains, trams and buses that you can travel on with a single ticket. We wanted to go somewhere with an alluring mystery surrounding line S6. We wanted somewhere named after a rabbit (who was named after what or vice versa may be up for debate) yes for 2011s winter city break, we wanted to go to Berlin.

I had of course been there before so the challenge now is not to repeat anything in the last blog post, either that or I'll copy it word for word replacing 'Titch' with 'Rachael' I'm sure no-one would notice, lets see which one I choose (comparisons will need to be manual, I won't be telling you).

Naturally I was delighted to sample the might of the public transport system straight away, journey 1 - train from the airport into the city, beautiful and magnificent. Berlin was the first holiday with our brand new camera in tow, so you can expect either slightly higher definition photos or slightly blurry photos from using it on perhaps the wrong setting. This is an example of the 2nd one I think.

I think the appreciation of a good public transport system comes from living somewhere with a terrible one, I live in Warrington, they have a large number of bus routes and they do come pretty regularly so it seems like it should be a good system, it almost is, but only if you want to get to the town centre, that’s the only place they go, want to go from West to East? that'll be a change in the town centre, that's fair enough, want to go from East to North East? You'll have to go via the town centre. I could forgive the lack of variety in the routes if it wasn't or the payment model, you don't pay to get from A-B, you pay for the journey so thats a single to town, then another one to wherever else you are going, to make things worse, the prices just keep on rising and they pretty much demand the right change. No-one carries change any more, everyone magics money directly into companies bank accounts by telekinesis to pay for stuff, where are your telekinesis receptors Network Warrington?

To be honest I don't use it that often, I have a car and I can walk to work, but just knowing its there, a useless wasteful service clunking around near my house is bad enough. But Berlin, what a joy, you buy one ticket and you have an hour (I think) to get to where your going using whatever forms of travel you need to use, this was very useful for us as our hotel was quite far out.

5 paragraphs on the public transport system is probably enough, now maybe I can muster 1 on what we actually did, so... Some sort of modern art? Presumably, I sure didn't bother to look it up or anything, but there were a lot of these concrete pillars of varying sizes, you could go through them or over them and we spent quite a lot of time playing in and around them like all good 24 year old children would. (You are never too old to play in a large piece of art, it isn't like the wooden horses at the play area where you will get a lot of funny looks)

The trip was rounded off with a nice... broken camera, it turned everything green, this particular  shot is of a Panda in Berlin zoo (ha), look at how green it all is!

It seemed we showed up the day after a famous polar bear born in captivity named Knut had died, so we didn't actually get to see him, but we were there (almost).

Now we have a new mystery you need to wait to solve, will the new broken camera be fixed by the time we go away again? And will Rachael get her hat back from the Vietnamese restaurant?