As you may know already, the staff of Igloo is made of people from all over the world (well, Europe really!) who love travelling and discovering new places, new people. This January, two of us, Attila and Sarah, went on a quick trip to Berlin to test if it is indeed the European capital of Veganism and now we want to share our adventure with you. Why Berlin, you ask? Well, RyanAir was doing round trip tickets for just £20 so we couldn’t pass on it, really.

Here we go, day 1 of the trip, 4:00 something in the morning, our 2 staff members wake up and get ready to hop on the Skylink bus to the airport (we could have taken the Skylink Express and would have been there in a short 27min-trip, but I (Sarah) apparently can’t read a timetable and was convinced it didn’t run until 5ish in the morning…Don’t let Attila know it actually starts at 4:30am, it was hard enough to get him to wake up on time!). Please note, this is January 17th and the snow is still steadily falling on sleepy Nottingham streets and on us, still-half-asleep-but-happy to-be-flying travelers. Ha, we’re thinking, take that Nottingham people: we are flying off to better skies and you are stuck with the snow! Or so we thought…

Onto the 1hr bus ride then! We grab the regular Skylink bus from Friar Lane, just a 1 min walk away from the Igloo Hybrid building on Wheeler Gate and are greeted by the smiley face of the driver who sells us 2 single tickets for £10.40 (we really want to get the Express when we return, and the tickets cannot be used on the different routes). Good thing is, on the Skylink lines you don’t need to have the exact amount, the driver can give you change. Which is not the case on Nottingham City Transports buses (inner and outer city lines) where if you don’t have the exact change, the driver will keep your fiver…

We sit down, and I immediately plug in my phone in one of the handy USB plugs that are on every seat to charge up my phone during the trip. I also log onto the bus Wifi to check if everything is alright with our flight and what the weather is like in Berlin. Big mistake. That should have been my first clue: grey sky, and snowflake symbol on the weather app, but that’s okay, it cannot be worse that Nottingham this morning, right? If only I knew…

After a smooth, if not a little cold bus ride (the heating turned on around halfway through) we easily make it to the East Midlands Airport where the bus drops us in front of the departure terminal. One last quick cigarette for Attila and off we go. Well, we actually stop at the Leon restaurant for some coffee and tea (with plant milk of course!). Time is close to 6:00am and the gate has been announced so we make our way to the security area where not too many people are waiting at this time of the day. We quickly grab our belongings and go look for Gate 2, where people are already lining up for boarding. The plane isn’t full at all so we each end up on an empty exit row with extra leg room since they must have people there in case of an accident. Very roomy!

After a less than 2-hour flight, we land in Berlin Schönefeld Airport where we quite easily find the train station (4min walk away from arrival terminal) and buy 2 single tickets into the city center for 3.40€ each. The train is super comfortable and fast and we get to Ostbahnhof train station, right next to the Hostel we booked in the cool and trendy Friedrichshain quarter. We don’t see any of the cool and trendy though, as we are blinded and numbed by the cold rainy snow that is storming down on us. Attila is already shooting me death glares for getting the crazy idea that Berlin might be fun to visit in the middle of winter… How was I supposed to know? Just a couple weeks ago the weather was above 12℃!

We quickly check into our cool hostel Das DDR OSTEL which looks frozen in the 1960s. We feel like two spies during the cold war. True to history, our room doesn’t have a TV but a huge radio with which Attila fiddles to get some Trans music, this is Germany after all, but only ends up with some mainstream tunes and a French channel, ha!

We are starving by then (past 11:00am) and go off with our list of Best Vegan restaurant to begin our 2-day feast. First on our list is Vöner, an unpretentious but efficient Döner style place where we get a Goulash soup (!), the Wagenburger Spezial for myself and the Vöner kebab for Attila. It was all delicious and quite cheap, we definitely recommend for some low-key good vegan food. Stuffed as could be, we made our way back to the hostel after that and went to sleep around 3-4pm, still exhausted from waking up so early. We are not proud to say that we wasted a whole afternoon/evening by sleeping in and only waking up the next morning…

TO BE CONTINUED.