We left a cold but sunny Dusseldorf by 930am on Monday morning with a packed lunch from Ulrike. When I say ‘a packed lunch’, think deli-style baguettes, not the usual ham and cheese sangas us Aussies make for road trips. We had allowed about 6 hours to get to Berlin, including a couple of stops, however our plans were slightly interrupted by extremely slow moving traffic on the freeway to Wuppertal. So basically the 30 min head start was shattered early on. Regardless of the ‘free’ speeds we could achieve on the autobahn; we were never going to make up half an hour.

Thankfully Hamish is an excellent traveller in the car, but this morning his ipod had not been charged, so we decided to charge it in the car, which meant listening to one of his many, many play lists. This particular play list of 50 songs (I am not kidding) was a mix of Foo Fighters, Beatles, Sparks (you might need to google them), Gorillaz and the Wonky Donkey thrown in for good measure. It wasn’t too bad and is, in some ways, easier than listening to his version of the songs whilst wearing headphones.

We made pretty good time. At one stop there was a bit of snow around, which is pretty exciting for us. Hamish ran through it in his runners and had to spend the rest of the trip in his socks. I think near this stop, we came across a sign “Welcome to East Germany” which was followed up with a now defunct guard tower. It was a wow moment.

We finally arrived to our apartment at about 430; but it was dark and cold and poor Mattia had been waiting for us with the key. Apartment is beautiful, spacious, warm and in walking/tram ride of most things. Tuesday was spent doing a bit of grocery shopping, catching up on the washing and exploring the neighbourhood.

We are living in the suburb of Prenzlauer Berg in former East Berlin and the entire week thus far, has been spent in pursuit of former sites, streets and stories of the wall. Hamish has particularly embraced this. His new favourite person is Conrad Schumann, immortalised by a picture of him jumping over barbed wire; the first East German soldier to defect. Wednesday we visited Mauer Park (former ‘death strip’ between the wall and East German military) and the ‘Life in the DDR’ museum in PB.

Thursday we went to East Side Gallery, which is the site of a couple of kilometres of still standing wall, now brightly painted by artists from around the globe. Hamish again, very keen to see the artist impression of Conrad Schumann.

After spotting our first group of skin head/neo-nazi’s, we caught the tram back to our apartment. Rod is out tonight with Mattia and his friends listening to the Berlin New York Times Bureau Chief talk about ISIS and I guess, global terrorism. This is something Mattia has organised at a wine bar, so Rod should be right at home. As he left, he said he hopes the talk is in English. Hamish and I have had a quite night at home watching Toy Story 3 and drinking lemonade. Lovely.