New Year break - Berlin style

For the last two years, I travelled to Berlin to celebrate the arrival of the New Year with my cousins and nephews there. Like many capitol cities around the world, they know how to put on a show of fireworks, however, I preferred to stay close to my cousin’s residential area and watch the street parties. Traffic apart from main roads is virtually stopped and a great many fireworks are set off from every street corner come the midnight chimes. Berlin of course has a lot of attractions, two I visited on this trip were the Spy Museum on Potsdamer Platz and the New National Art gallery nearby, which certainly contains has some weird and amazing artworks. Berlin has several winter street markets with hundreds of stalls, the Christmas Gendarmenmarkt, open until New Year’s eve, was visited one evening. It was of course quite cold, but the market has many glühwein stalls near the entrances to help warm one up, plus several of Berlin’s famous curry sausage stalls for a delicious taste of the city. Potsdamer Platz is an excellent location to base oneself on a city break to Berlin, some top hotels like the Grand Hyatt, Mandala and Ritz-Carlton are located around there, plus it’s so well connected by public transport to other central areas and beyond. Berlin makes for a great winter short break, just wrap up warm for exploring it !