{"id":14278,"date":"2025-07-23T03:57:30","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T10:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/?p=14278"},"modified":"2025-07-23T03:57:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T10:57:30","slug":"berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/2025\/07\/23\/berlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Berlin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Took an Uber to the rented apartment.\u00a0 Finally figured out where the apartment door was located and went inside only to find it smelled like an ashtray and the second bedroom was downstairs in the basement with some very rickety stairs from the kitchen down to it.\u00a0 \u00a0It smelled even worse when we got down there.\u00a0 \u00a0We immediately called it The Dungeon!\u00a0 \u00a0There were two small basement windows that had bars on them.\u00a0 \u00a0 And the two bathrooms it was supposed to have was really 1.5 bathrooms.\u00a0 Nothing in the basement bedroom.\u00a0 \u00a0We all decided to find someplace else, we couldn’t stay here.\u00a0 \u00a0We will never use Booking.com again.\u00a0 They would not help us get our money back ($1440).\u00a0 Seems the owners know if they don’t respond to Booking.com emails about the issue they won’t refund the money.\u00a0 Seems to me to be well oiled SCAM.\u00a0 Some pictures of the Lux Central Apartment showing the dungeon bedroom and sketchy stairs leading down to it.\u00a0 Notice the miniature windows as the egress… with bars.\u00a0 Not that anyone but an infant could have gotten out thru them if the bars weren’t there.<\/p>\n

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Basement Bedroom Windows.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Plywood Staircase… without railings or balustrades.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Cabbed over to a New Hotel in East Berlin.\u00a0 It was extremely Nice!\u00a0 And at a very reasonable price.\u00a0 Almost dirt cheap!\u00a0 What was really interesting was they included 4 beers, Soda or water each day.\u00a0 \u00a0 Dinner at Italian place on other side of Spree river.\u00a0 Weird burger meat, I wouldn’t go back there.\u00a0 In house breakfast that first morning for \u20ac48..\u00a0 Good,\u00a0 but the place around the corner was \u20ac32 and just a little bit better.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Next morning we did the Breakfast place around the corner, and for the next few mornings too.\u00a0 Museum Island, big church then walk to Korean BBQ and the downpour!\u00a0 \u00a0Bus back toward hotel and hit a grocery store to pick up some supplies and upon going outside the heavens let loose again and we waited till it slowed a bit then made a dash but only got about 100 feet and ducked into a car-park till the next slowing.\u00a0 \u00a0Then off to the hotel with a slightly soggy bag of food in my hand.<\/p>\n

Scott and I took a ride to a Firehouse near that other apartment and talked to one of the fireman in the house and explained what we had encountered.\u00a0 Showed him the picture and explained the kitchen was at the top of the stairs \"\"<\/a>that seemed cobbled together and had no handrails going down.\u00a0 Just a couple foot section at the very top.\u00a0 \u00a0Those stairs also had large openings without any sort of mechanism to keep children from falling thru them down to the floor below.\u00a0 \u00a0The openings were big enough for almost anyone to fall thru, so the missing hand rails seemed critical in my opinion.\u00a0 \u00a0The windows in that basement were barred so there was no other escape route out if a fire started in the kitchen.\u00a0 \u00a0 The fireman told Scott and I that if a fire broke out in that kitchen and someone was down there it would be their last day on earth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Metro’d over to Checkpoint Charlie, then bused over to \"\"<\/a>Brandenburg\u00a0 gate.\u00a0 Along the way the Bus stops, Terminates, driver won’t tell me where to get back on and continue the journey to the BB gate.\u00a0 Walk over to train station to catch exact same bus and driver again to get back home.\u00a0 \u00a0Took the metro to the Alexander Platz where we walked around in the crowd and then hopped on a bus to the hotel.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Found a great Taco place a couple miles from us called El Taco Loco.\u00a0 Really good Mexican food.\u00a0 \u00a0So good we went back a few nights later with Tami and Scott.<\/p>\n

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Pad Thai dinner \u20ac10.50 that night was pretty good, especially considering it was a reasonable cost and just a few steps from the hotel.<\/p>\n

I decided to take a short trip to find the Schwerbelastungskorper.\u00a0 \u00a0aka The heavy load bearing body.\u00a0 \u00a0You can google that to find out what it was used for.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>We bused down to a bridge over the Spree river to walk over to what was left of the Berlin wall.\u00a0 \u00a0Its quite interesting with all the murals that are now painted on it.\u00a0 Its probably a mile long stretch and not all of it is painted on both sides.\u00a0 Enjoy the pictures..<\/p>\n

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After our stay we headed back to the Berlin Hofbahnhof for a ride to Rostock Germany for the ferry to Denmark.\u00a0 It was going to be a pretty long day.<\/p>\n

Enjoy the pics..<\/p>\n

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Took an Uber to the rented apartment.\u00a0 Finally figured out where the apartment door was located and went inside only to find it smelled like an ashtray and the second bedroom was downstairs in the basement with some very rickety stairs from the kitchen down to it.\u00a0 \u00a0It smelled even worse when we got down … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Berlin”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-traveling-the-hiways-and-byways"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14278"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15464,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14278\/revisions\/15464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}