Today we did what we do best and headed off into the Berlin wilderness for some culture. But before that was breakfast, which we couldn’t find anywhere as it was a Sunday. NS vetoed a Subway so onwards we went, eventually walking to the Kurfurstendamm, or ‘the K-dam’ to its friends.

Here were the remains of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche Church. The old part of this building (please don’t make me spell it again) had been heavily damaged during WWII with only the tower remaining. It was decided to leave the ruins of the church as a reminder of the horrors of war and build a new church with the same name beside it. Both were great structures in their own right, the original in its imperial magnificence and the modern with a fantastically blue and calming glass interior.

But culture-vulturing cannot be sustained on an empty stomach so to Dunkin’ Donuts it was for a bagel and – surprise surprise – donuts for breakfast.  Onwards past the zoo and up to the western extremity of the Tiergarten (200 hectares of public forest/gardens).

We wandered through here (which took quite a while) and on the way saw the Victory Column/Monument, but due to a panoramic plethora the day before we decided against climbing it.

The time was approaching 1400 on an F1 race weekend, so we anxiously sped up through the Tiergarten and emerged at Potsdamer Platz.  Here, we thought, was the most likely place to catch the Grand Prix. As it turned out: it wasn’t. For a good 45 minutes we combed every bar, restaurant and culinary establishment but to no avail in the 7km we’d walked.

Eventually we gave up and ended up at the Gendarmenmarkt, where we had originally been amiming for – a very old and pretty square. Here we had a hot chocolate between the almost identical French and German Cathedrals. We later found out that less than 800m around the corner was a sports bar. Bugger.

After resting our weary legs, we took the U-Bahn to the East Side Gallery. However, what was meant to be 1.3 km of Berlin Wall with authentic street art became more along the lines of 1.3 km of ‘reconstructed’ graffiti – it all seemed a but fake and done for show, in a particularly grubby neighbourhood.  We did, however, stumble upon a nice-looking faux-beach bar, complete with sand and expensive drinks.

During our sojourn East, the NSphone rang and our communications with Interthink Special Guests Jo O’Malley and Sophie ‘Tolla’ Tolhurst commenced. We arranged to meet them later for dinner and a pub crawl (the acceptable social activity when you’re students). It was great to see friendly faces that you didn’t have to ask the same “So where are you from? Where have you been? Where are you going?” questions. Over pizza and pasta, anecdotes of each others’ adventures were shared and, soon we were off to the first bar for all-you-could-drink beer.

Despite NS offending the admittedly stand-offish bar crawl ticket sellers, the rest of the evening went well.  Jo was challenged to 16 Jaegermeisters and ‘triumphed’.

We went to various bars, as is customary in a ‘crawl’ and ended up in a train station on the northernmost side of the city.  This was apparently to get an S-Bahn train to the club but after half an hour the damn thing hadn’t turned up, so we arranged a meeting time for the next day with the girls and went our separate ways.

The girls managed to get one of these exceedingly rare S-Bahn trains and the Nicks queued for the night bus at the advice of the Deutsche Bahn night-lady. After more than just a while wait, attempting to translate the timetable and a Frenchman telling us the night bus wasn’t running, we got a taxi back to Jetpak, and thus our night ended.