Today there was the official opening of the Bodemuseum, the most recent restored of the Museumsinsel museums.

(picture courtesy of ZDF/heute)

The upcoming weekend you can visit the museum. There aren’t any exhibits as of yet, they will be added in the coming weeks and months. So all there is to see is the restored building itself, which should be interesting enough, as founder Wilhelm von Bode had the concept of creating different “theme rooms” giving the visitor the impression of past architerctural eras.

Dubai and Miami joined the Metroblogging family. Please give them a warm welcome and spread the word!

Having the biggest network of subways in Germany – and one of the most modern in Europe, there is always a lot to see, when you take the subway in Berlin: many things to spot, or in this case, to sit on. ;-)

Please check this out. A collection of benches from Berlin’s subway stations.

On a side note: Berlin’s public transportation pages were relaunched the other day – I just noticed now. Looking good to me, a definite improvement.

Alright guys, I was on the phone today with the Besucherservice concerning this and found out some more stuff about the guided tour:

First of all there is a good description of the tour on the airports website.

Secondly, unless we are 20 or more people, it is cheaper to join an existing group. A group tour is

When I left Berlin for a 3 month job in summer the price for a regular ticket for a bus or metroride was 2 Euro, which is in my perspective pretty expensive, but other things are expensive too, for example coffee in berlin mitte is at least 2,50 so I can live with 2 Euros per trainride. Now in September when I got back from D-Dorf it had risen to 2,10 which brings back that damned old “search for coins” game, that defenitely slowed down the process of buying a ticket, plus got busdrivers back into the “I dont take coppercoins” mode, as if that was no money. Now in November, I hear BVG plans to rise price again, this time to 2,30 which will turn the process of buying a ticket into a fight over coins and will make busdrivers even unfriendlier and I ask myself if that is possible and necessary. Whatever, I hereby publicly announce that I will turn into a fare dodger from now on, and if anyone knows of a program that prints out BVG-Tickets and if this application runs under Macos X/Linux…let me know.

If you ever have been to Berlin you will know that one of our big advantages is that you are allowed to get drunk 24h a day, there is no closing hour for pubs, discotheques etc. If you are hungry, you might run into a problem, as most restaurants close at latest 1 am if you want to buy milk in the middle of the night, you might have to go to a gas station and buy something they say is milk and that might have been relabeld so if you come home your milk turns out to be sour. But, If you want to get drunk, no problem, just head into the next 24h pub and get drunk, no brown bags needed, no secrecy at all. You are old enough…get drunk. Now from today on, still asking myself if this has anything to do with Chancleress Merkel visiting Great Britain today, the UK allows their fellow citizenship and everyone old enough to do exactly that. The curfew is dead, long live nightlong drinking. So Angie if you are hearing me: turn down the German shop closing hours act in return and we, the people, will happily applaude that Brits are allowed to drink all night long from this day on. May they drown in what they have the balls to call beer (just kidding my fellow Uk friends, I know you can take it).

So if you are cheating on us already (by reading other Berlin-blogs), then you must visit this one. Ladies and gents, please checkout the Ostkreuz guide. The guide (, or blog,) features pictures and stories about Ostkreuz, which is one of Berlin’s more or less wellknown S-Train stations.

To be more detailed, Ostkreuz is an intersection where (I think) basically every S-Train to the East (or from the East) of the city passes by there, for example, the infamous “Ringbahn”. And even though I don’t take the S-Train very often, I actually changed trains (and waited) a few times there already.

And even if you don’t like the read (But hey! What are you doing here? ;-)), you have to check out the pictures.

Via: ZEIT.DE’s Berlin-Journal

Today our new Bundeskanzleress is making her first two visits to Paris and London with a short stopover in Brussels (why stopover, why there, don’t we have planes that can go from Paris to London nonstop, why doesn’t she use the train, that is an accurate way to save money). Actually she is saying hello at Nato HQ. Seems like Ms Merkel will work all day and doesn’t need any breaks so far. tbc.

This is a cheap (and short) plug to introduce Metroblogging’s latest family member, Vancouver! If you didn’t know anything about Vancouver before, this is your chance to improve, so make sure, you pay these guys a visit.

Angela Merkel is now the official first German woman chancellor. So let’s get back to business.