My first stop after finally leaving Uppsala was Berlin. It took all night to get from Stockholm to Malmö, which is on the southern tip of Sweden. After a short stop in Malmö it was time to get onto another train which travelled to the port of Trelleborg and on to a ferry which sailed over the Baltic sea to Sassnitz in the former East Germany. By the late afternoon I was in Berlin.

Having no idea where I was and no place to stay booked yet, I found a telephone in the train station and started calling numbers of youth hostels which were in my Berlin travel guide. Most of them were booked out but fortunately I managed to find a student hostel in Charlottenburg with a few spare rooms. After getting my things there and booking myself in it was about eleven o'clock at night but I decided it wasn't time for bed yet so I went into the centre of town for a look around. I walked from Zoo Station, through the city to Tiergarten, a large public park in the centre of Berlin. I walked to the middle of Tiergarten where two main roads intersect at a large roundabout. The road layout was the idea of Adolf Hitler who, if he had not become possibly the most evil man this century, could have been a gifted town planner.

In the middle of the roundabout stands the Siegesäule, or "victory column" which was commissioned after the Franco-Prussian war (I think) in the late 19th century. It originally stood outside the Reichstag a few kilometres away but was moved by our friend Adolf, presumably because he didn't like it there. The Siegesäule was used as a central motif by Wim Wenders in his movie Faraway, So Close, and it also appears in a U2 video (Stay), with Bono standing precariously on the statue's arm.

I headed home on a night bus, which is handy if you're planning on getting back after midnight. A funny thing I noticed about the buses in Berlin is that you buy tickets at newsagents and the like, but no one checks for them when you're actually on the bus. In fact, if you happen to be in Berlin and want to get around but also save money, you could take a bus and just not bother to buy tickets. Not that I would recommend it of course...

Another way to get around Berlin is to use a bike, which you can hire for the day. Thanks to the forward-thinking German mindset, there are lots of bike paths all over the place in Berlin. What's more, you can see quite a bit of the city in just a few hours. From the bike shop in the centre of the former East Berlin I rode to Kreuzberg, which has the largest area of buildings which survived the bombing raids that Berlin was subjected to during the War. Then I rode to Potsdamer Platz, which went from being the centre of the Berlin high life in the inter-war years, to an empty space and no-mans-land during the Cold War, and is now the centre of a major development, due to be completed some years into the future.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Berlin is the difference between east and west. While the former West Berlin shows the signs of a long capitalist past, the east is run down and ugly, with the colours of the buildings varying along a spectrum of brown. Still it is a very interesting place to be, especially on a weekend afternoon when the streets are deserted - a sign of its recent communist past. Travelling on the S-Bahn, the train that runs on tracks suspended above the ground from one side of the city to the other is fascinating, as you get to travel from one end of the line, over what used to be no-mans-land where the wall lay, to the other while you observe the dramatic change in surroundings.