Turkish Breakfast

Brunch is big in Berlin, especially on Sundays and especially when the weather is nice. People go out and sit at a restaurant or cafe for hours! (And no one at the restaurant cares that you sit there all day even if you order nothing more.) We have definitely become big fans of this tradition. However, now that the sun goes down at 4, you don't necessarily want to be eating breakfast for all the hours the sun is out. We have discovered that really our favorite Berlin breakfast is Turkish breakfast. There are many Turkish immigrants in Berlin so there are lots of good Turkish options.

The reason to love Turkish breakfast is that it is somewhere between the more traditional Berlin breakfast and American breakfast. Berlin breakfast is as you would expect for Continental breakfast: meat and cheese, fruits and vegetables, bread, and maybe a hard boiled egg. And butter. The slab of butter they give you for the bread is sometimes bigger than a slice of cheese! Imagine a large slice of brie.  Now imagine that it is butter. I don't know how a person could eat all of it. The Turkish breakfast we get has the meat and cheese (although Sucuk, garlic sausage that looks a bit like pepperoni, and wiechkäse, a Turkish table cheese), olives, and vegetables which is similar. However instead of bread, you get a Simit, a sesame ring. And the real winner is scrambled eggs! I don't know why I feel that a scrambled egg is more breakfasty than a hard boiled one, but it is. It really feels like I get to eat breakfast and lunch.

The cheese slab that stands alone, is really butter.

Our favorite place to go is called La Femme. We usually get the sampler platter seen here. It is always good. One of the things that makes it extra wonderful is that they make their own jam. Usually it is strawberry or berry of some sort, which I like. One time they made fig jam which was amazing! I am not ashamed to say I finished it with a spoon (why put that whole chunk of fruit on my bread?)

Another place that we like to go is a cafe on Hauptstrasse between Kleistpark and Akazienstrasse which is convenient as it is near a Turkish grocery store where we can pick up the things we like to have around at home: garlic sausage, cheese, loose tea, and some cheap and wonderful fresh dates. What I find most interesting about the food at this place is their one dish that has eggs cooked over hard with the garlic sausage cooked into it. They must put some slices of sausage in the pan before they break the eggs over it. I have not really seen eggs and sausage cooked this way, but I really like it.

When we were going back to the US for two weeks we needed to have Turkish breakfast before we left and as soon as we returned. We will need to improve our Turkish cooking skills for when we leave Berlin, because we will not be able to go long without it!

The Brezel Bar

Bringing work home is never fun.  But if there is a fun place that you can go and work on it, it is not so bad.  There are lots of cafes in Berlin that make this possible.  Our favorite one in Berlin is the Brezel Bar (or Pretzel Bar).  This is a cafe that combines some of the best things:  fresh pretzels, chocolate, hot beverages, and free wifi.

The space itself is nice and comfortable.  There is always an art exhibition on the walls that changes every so often.  It is not the largest cafe, but if you have a seat, there is usually enough room to do work.

The food though is the winner here.  Sometimes we go for breakfast and stay and work some.  My favorite options include the Muh (like Moo), that is mostly dairy (lots of cheese), an egg, and some vegetables and fruits, and the Wurst Plate which is the white sausage plate.  The sausage is good, but the mustard is amazing!  The breakfasts also include bread of some sort.  Out of pretzel dough they make pretzels (of course) but also croissants, breadsticks, and rolls.  The rolls are my favorite because it is like have a large fluffly pretzel with lots of the pretzel middle.  If we go for just a snack, there are many varieties of pretzels:  regular, cheese covered, sunflower seed topped, chocolate covered (yes, chocolate drizzled soft pretzels!).  This is about the only cafe that we have had snacks at where I have yet to try their cakes.  And if you go for lunch, you can get the funniest sandwich you will see:  a large pretzel sliced in half with your sandwich makings inside.

This is an extra crazy pretzel.  (There is a half of pretzel bottom under there.)

A perfect day is to go here with a book you are reading for fun and to hang out, read, and snack!

A Berlin New Year's Eve

The fireworks began early in the day.  A Boom! here and a Bang! there.  We didn't see anything until the sun went down, which was at about 4pm.  Then every once in a while we would see a firework light up the sky.

Later we went to a party at the apartment of two friends of ours.  There we learned that it is tradition in Germany to watch "Dinner for One," a 16 minute skit.  No one knew exactly how it started, but it is played on the TV stations throughout the day.  The odd thing about this skit is that it is all in English except for the introduction.  Friends told us that even people who don't really speak English will watch this every year.  It is better to watch the skit than for me to explain it.  I found it here:

http://www.archive.org/details/DinnerForOne_559

As midnight approached the fireworks became more and more frequent.  At midnight the streets were full of fireworks being set off in every direction.  It was almost dangerous to be outside as fireworks whizzed by trees, cars, and people outside.  Some of the fireworks were huge and went pretty high.  Others were more loud than anything.  It lasted for almost an hour before dying back down to the more occasional fireworks.  Growing up in a state where it was illegal to set off fireworks made this German tradition seem more foreign perhaps than people would think from other places in the US.

There is also a fun German tradition of telling your fortune for the new year.  First you melt down a piece of metal over a candle and then to drop it in cold water to re-solidify.  Then you decide what the shape most looks like.  The kit you can buy today then tells you your fortune based on the shape that it became.  It is very hard to tell what most of the metal shapes are, so it is a nice way for you to help your fortune a bit (and for your friends to make it worse)!

A fun night for sure!  I hope you enjoyed yours as well!

Weihnachtsmärkte part 2

First I will say that if you already noticed the difference in the titles of part 1 and 2 (not the numbers) you are one who pays attention to details.  In the first one, I took the word for Christmas market and added an s to make it plural.  Of course the word is German and doesn't work that way.  So now it is correct.

After our first forays into the world of Weihnachtsmärkte, we went to the bigger more commercial ones at Gendarmenmarkt (a square), Schloss Charlottenburg (a castle), and on Kurfürstendamm (a street with lots of shopping).

The Weihnachtsmarkt at Gendarmenmarkt cost 1 euro to get in, but was beautiful and had live music.  The structures they built for the market looked like white mountains all lit up.  The buildings surrounding market also made a nice backdrop.  This is the market where we did most of our Christmas shopping.

The Weihnachtsmarkt at the Schloss was huge!  It was also beautiful with wooden structures and a giant wooden carousel like the one my family always puts out at Christmas.  After dark, they also lit up the castle in alternating colors and sometimes just made it look like snow was blowing across the walls.

We had gone to Kurfürstendamm to go shopping when we wandered upon this market.  It was a nice surprise.  It meant fun food and drinks and fun things to look at.  This market had a giant metal Christmas tree with random toys hanging from it that every so often came alive.  Music started and then flames came from the end of the tree branches in time to the music.  It was bizarre, but fun.

All of the markets had wonderful food and hot drinks like the markets I mentioned previously.  At these we did try a few new things as well.  I had my first ever roasted chestnut.  I don't know what I thought they would taste like, but they didn't taste like I would have imagined.  However, they were good!  And the stands that sell it are so clever:  they give you a bag with two pockets, one filled with full chestnuts and the other to put the shells in.  We tried Wassail, a hot mulled cider, which was one of my favorites.  The one thing that I already wish I could have another of is Viking Handbrot (handbread).  The one we had was a  sandwich roll size bread stuffed with cheese and mushrooms topped with sour cream (or maybe quark) and fried onions.  It was warm and gooey and wonderful.

Just thinkng about the food makes me wish that at least some of the markets were open all winter!


I would say that in general, Berlin is not the best place to visit in the winter.  The sun sets around 4pm right now, so you lose a lot of time to walk around in the daylight and see things.  However, the Christmas markets make it worth a trip in December.