Day Four - Berlin

Jonny's curtains are broken, so I wake early as the day's first light streams through the large, mucky windows.

Today were are to explore Berlin the way Berliners do: by bike. The cycle lanes are much wider, cleaner and flatter than any of London's and peddling alongside busy is a genuine pleasure instead of a death-dodging gauntlet.

We headed eventually to the Reichstag and Brandenburger Tor, but deliberately zigzagged through the old East Germany in between redbrick, abandoned factories, their morbid towers casting greasy shadows over the concrete high-rises.

Through the old Mitte quarter, we floated down Under van Linden to the imposing Brandenburger Tor, adorned on top by the golden and well traveled goddess 'Victory'. (She was claimed by Napoleon and moved to Paris before being reunited with the gate (albeit replicas) in 1815.)

We looked at the Reichstag, the German government administration since 1999 when Berlin was returned to being Germany's political capital, from Bonn since you asked. Although it retains its Baroque shell, British architect Sir Norman Foster was commissioned to transform the decrepit interior into a state of the art administrative centre. This is where the dome comes from. The Germans call it something that loosely translates as "English Eggcup".

We saw the Holocaust memorial, an unsettling and moving series of equally spaced concrete obelisks, some 2700 in total. They are all slightly different while retaining their uniformity, a testament to the individuals who perished during the homogenized persecution of a people.

Through the Tiergarten to the victory column where less than 24 hours earlier 250,000 people had gathered to euphorically hear an American presidential candidate delivering 30 minutes of nondescript platitudes to the world.

After seeing enough of Berlin's sights to start up a small postcard shop, I decided we needed some retail therapy. We headed straight to the KaDeWe, Germany's "department store of the West". It is huge.

After being gutted and suffering near total destruction during the War, it was rebuilt and stood as a sign of the West's prosperity to the East. It showed communist East Germans the benefits of capitalism, such as a foodhall that makes Fortnum and Mason's look like a Fox's biscuit tin.

It has 1800 varieties of sausage. Not meat, just sausage. It has nearly 2000 varieties of cheese. It has everything zou could ever want or need and far more beside - from canned sweetcorn to caviar.

We smugly enjozed two enormous slices of cake in its top-floor café with views out over all Berlin. We then cycled back to Kruetzberg, less smugly and certainly less effortlessly.

In Kreutzberg, after sipping pilsner with some achingly cool teenagers in a corner café, we stopped in at a shop which was essentially the remnants of someone's garage. There were no prices on its entirely second-hand and reclaimed stock. To buy something on needed to ask the chain-smoking owner before he plucked a derisorz figure out of thin air. I brought a waistcoat John Virgo would envy for one euro. Just as well really, as after just four dazs on the road, I've ran out of clean t-shirts.

We dine on fried chicken and potatoes washed down with sticky glasses of Portugese wine. A day cycling in 30 degree heat has taken its toll on all of us, and we flake off to bed, bidding Jonny good luck in his upcoming end of year exams for which he assures me he is prepared as he drains his third glass of rosé.