OH Berlin

When visiting Berlin on your next city break, you may be curious as to what it takes to live like a local in the city – with many now vying for this style of travel. But, is it even possible to ‘live like a local’ on city-breaks to Berlin and to what extent can this be achieved?

Join Go with Oh and Oh-Berlin through March as we test this notion, and answer the questions you need to know once and for all.

To do this, we have teamed up with professional travel bloggers Sherry Ott and Lisa Lubin, and as our Living la Vida Local Guinea Pigs the duo will undergo strict testing to gather results. They shall be exposed to nothing but absolute authenticity as they try to come to grips with the different culture, the language barrier, and the uniqueness of Berlin.

Visit our campaign central hub-page to see the duo’s successes and failures, and to see humorous anecdotes chronicling their experiences here in the German capital.

That’s not all, though. We want YOU to test the concept yourself. Therefore, we are offering the chance for you to win a weekend in Berlin for two, simply by answering a few questions about your travel style over on our Facebook page.

Join in the fun, and get involved in the conversation: have your say on the concept, and on the experiment in general over at our Living la Vida Local quotes page. Alternatively, if you have a Twitter account, let us know what you think by using the hashtag #GWOlocal.

Read the full article over on our Oh-Berlin blog, and make sure you stay informed over at campaign central.

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Here at Oh-Berlin we always try to recommend places we like personally and have experienced for ourselves. As a result we have come up with suggestions of places to see and things to do in Berlin that we have enjoyed.

The Topography of Terror is a free permanent exhibition and one of the best documentations of the Nazi reign. The Hohenschönhausen Stasi Prison tour was one of the best tours we have taken in Berlin. It really captures the chilling and dark realities of how the Stasi operated.

Good coffee and sublime cheesecake is why we love Five Elephant on Reichenberger Straße. Excellent coffee, service and ambience also at Lerchen & Eulen. For an indulgent breakfast head to  Café Einstein for a little slice of elegant and sumptuous old Vienna.

Where do we like to party? Kater Holzig is always good fun and Berghain typically intense on our occassional Sunday afternoon visits. We also like Dunker on a Sunday night, make sure you get in before midnight for free entry.

We love C/O Berlin which always has great photographic exhibitions throughout the year. If you enjoy ballet then the Deutsche Oper Berlin should guarantee you an enjoyable evening.

Read more about culture, things to do, planning your visit or life in Berlin at the Oh-Berlin blog.

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As we head towards December, Christmas and the ushering in of a new year our mind drifts back to reflecting on the last year in Berlin. We thought it would be a good moment to share some of our best memories and pictures of experiencing the fascinating and charming city of Berlin.

An artist that caught our eye was Berlin based Kirstine Roepstorff. She would exhibit as part of the Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany exhibition that showed at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

It was also a year that we welcomed guest blogger Sherry Otts to Berlin and to one of our wonderful apartments.  It was great fun having Sherry over and we had a ball taking a fab bike tour with our friends at Fat Tire Bike Tours and visiting fantastic sights such as the Stasi Prison and Spree Park.

We had one of our best days out when we visited the Reinickendorf district and was also impressed with Steglitz-Zehlendorf.

We enjoyed compiling a list of great international cuisine in the city and maybe put on a few extra pounds in the process.

Alas we reached autumn which brought all those magical new colours into our lives.

We hope you enjoyed checking out some of our best pics from the last year. Want to see more? Check out our Oh-Berlin blog and you can also catch us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Sometimes it´s hard to really imagine that something could be true when your personal experience of it is contrary to what you have been told.

Take cycling in the city. Everyone says that Berlin is a relatively safe city to bike around. But say for instance you come from a city like London where you sometimes feel that you are just road-kill waiting to happen it´s hard to believe, surely all roads are full of maniac lunatics just seeing cyclists as inconvenient pesky obstacles. But along with having a great number of cycle lanes, less traffic congestion than a lot of other cities and dare we say it normal sane and not crazed drivers Berlin is actually a fun and enjoyable city to bike around. If you really are a novice you should check out our 10 tips for becoming an expert cyclist in Berlin.

This leads us to bike tours which are a fantastic way to see the city. We have taken a few tours with our friends at Fat Tire Bike Tours and we can thoroughly recommend them. You can check out recent reviews of Fat Tire Bike tours we took at following links:

The All-In-One Berlin Bike City Tour

The Berlin Wall Circuit

You can read lots more about Berlin at our Oh-Berlin blog.

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While Berghain may get many accolades from the international media and a following from far and wide anxious to try and get into this mecca of techno, arguably it´s Kater Holzig that still keeps the old skool Berlin playful party vibe alive.

Whereas Berghain is all shiny, industrial, minimalist – signs of a new dawn in Berlin, Kater with its large outside area, creatively decked out of course,  aspires to Berliners love of “open air”, preferably with a view of water, open fires,  chatting, partying, not being restricted to stuffy indoor confines if at all possible.

So Kater is run by the old Bar 25 crew who were meant to have thrown the wildest and best parties back in the day until it finally closed in 2010. Kater may not be as wild as some of the Bar 25 shenanigans but it still has some of that Berlin spirit: The mini tree houses in the middle of the club, the turning of, at first glance, the slightly ramshackle into something visually appealing, through art, sculpture, design or construction, the chance to create the space you party in – an adult´s cultural playground.

Read our Party Hard – Ten Berlin Clubs Worth Checking out at the Oh-Berlin blog.

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One of the things that made Bernauer Strasse stand out in its time was that the street became famous for escape attempts. Stories would spread through the western media that people were escaping to the West from Bernauer Strasse.

One of the most famous daring escape attempts was through an underground tunnel which began in a cellar at 97 Bernaeur Strasse. There is a very moving audio translation from Eva Klein speaking about her escape with her husband and child using Tunnel 57 as it has become to be known due to the amount of people who escaped. In the recording Eva explains how she was initially very frightened as she thought she was actually being tricked by the Stasi to attempt to escape and that they were setting her up. Not really knowing where she was going, but taking comfort that she was with her husband and child among a large group, until she said ´I saw some light as I stepped out and then realized I was in the West and it was a beautiful moment.´

Read about Oh-Berlin´s visit to the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse.

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In a city with such an international and transient populous there are so many quirks, details and characteristics that make it stand out from the crowd. You can expect many things from Berlin, but which ones seem more all-encompassing? Cue our compilation of the top ten ‘typical’ things to do in Berlin (well, according to us anyway) where we explore the signature components that bind this city of diversity and change together – including places to visit, food to eat, and even the famous ‘Berliner Schnauze’ temperament of local residents (it’s a frankness we admire so much). Have we missed anything? There was so much to choose from it was a very difficult decision, please let us know if you put something else in the top-ten instead.

To read the full article on the Oh-Berlin blog simply follow this link.

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