Holiday in Berlin with baby
I’m happy to place up our first guest post! Tracey went to Germany with her partner and baby boy. They hired a house for part of their stay, and they had a fantastic time. Thanks a million for sharing your trip with us, Tracey!
Berlin like a Berliner
Last year my husband and I took a trip to Germany with our 8-month-old child. We had extended family there and we believed it was a great time to travel - before the tiny guy could walk or voice his displeasure with the choice of activities.
We knew traveling with a baby was going to be different and we’d have to make some compromises. The little guy had a regular routine at home and we made a decision the smartest thing for our trip would be to maintain 2 key facets of that schedule. So every day we got to have a chilled breakfast while he had a quick morning nap. In the day we saw the sites while he happily cat napped in his carrier. And each night we enjoyed a nice home cooked dinner and adult conversation after he went to bed. This worked particularly well when visiting with buddies and family.
Our trip included stops in Grunstadt, Chemnitz, Nurenberg, Munich, Berlin and Neuschwanstein in the Bavarian Alps. For the majority of our trip we were staying with family. Except for Berlin we were on our own.
So we booked a goedkoop appartement berlijn instead of a hotel. This gave us a kitchen so we could have a nice breakfast every day, and make dinner each night ( though we sometimes had a late lunch out and didn’t need dinner ). An appartement huren berlijn also gave us a bedroom in which the tiny guy could retire each night while we ate, played cards, folk watched, etc.
It was straightforward to find and book an apartment at OH Holidays. There had been a wide selection of residences throughout Berlin available for all sorts of budgets. We wanted something in central Berlin and near to the metro with a bedroom, washing, kitchen, crib, high chair, for example.
Our little one bedroom flat was on the fourth floor of an old studio block in the former East Berlin neighbourhood of Friedrichshain. The building was one of the few in the area that had survived through WWII and communism and it was full of personality. The neighbourhood was a genuine fun eclectic mix of folk and right outside our door were grocery stores, street side cafeterias, restaurants , clubs, shops, coffee, net, etc . In the day it was just a short metro ride to all of the key sites. And we in the evening we enjoyed people watching from our balcony.
It was naturally a long walk up those stairs with a baby in a carrier after a dull day of sightseeing and there wasn’t any hotel staff or room service at our beck and call. But we had the freedom to make our own meals, do washing and make ourselves really at home - all at a lower price than most hotels. We felt like we were seeing Berlin from a Berliners standpoint.