In our continuing Deutschland chronicles, the weekend held a number of highlights including MORE great restaurant finds, museums, shopping, and a train trip! (click HERE to catch up on parts 1 and 2)

We started the weekend with more fabulous food for breakfast at a little cafe decorated in a charming shabby chic version of art deco meets grandma’s attic. It included to-die-for German breads some delicious yogurt like substance that was not at all yogurt, in that it was delicious, and a lovely, enormous cup of darjeeling tea!

We got some culture with a stop at the Design Museum, a horridly austere and very unwelcoming building inside and out. It was hard to even find the entrance?! But it had beautifully curated and displayed collections. There was a clothing exhibit that was particularly fun, as well as a modern furniture and chair exhibit.

The modern chair exhibit included a some unusual selections like a guitar chair, and a shopping cart chair, and a corrugated cardboard chair that looks like ribbon candy, but also classic originals by Thonet and others that have become mainstream mass-produced designs.

A bit of Christmas shopping ensued with a stop at the Bikini Mall (no they don’t sell bikini’s particularly and I have no idea why it is named that!). It is a charming mall with creative Christmas decor and ever changing pop-up shops in addition to some permanent ones. Fortified with gelato, we ventured on to the KaDeWe iconic department store. This is a HUGE multi-story high-end department store with a top floor filled with food halls and restaurants. The very creative motorized window displays referencing different mod nutcrackers (which are also for sale inside in normal sized versions!) are worth the trip alone, and even their black and white shopping bags are a lesson in chic design - you see them all over town.

We snagged the last table and perched on stools under the coat rack at the tiny (there are exactly 6 hi-top tables?!) Simela Restaurant where we enjoyed a dinner of a delicious flammkuchen (which is NOT a flaming cake as the name implies…see the explanation and recipe HERE), wine and salad. Followed by the BEST dessert ever at the Alexanderplatz Christmas Market. This Czech spiral pastry is the food of the gods… sugary, cinnamon, nutty goodness wound onto an iron rod and baked over an open fire, then rolled again in vanilla sugar and served hot off the spit. And, of course, a mug of gluehwein!

The final day of the weekend was our train trip to Leipzig via the first class Deutsche Bahn train. OMGosh, THIS is the only way to travel! We had a picture window view of the German countryside, comfy seats across our own table, outlets and wifi, and a server that took our breakfast order and came back with our continental breakfast in REAL dishware!

And then we arrived in the cobblestone streets of old town Leipzig. The heart of the city is basically one enormous and charming Christmas Market Disneyland. Every street you turn down has another section of vendors with delicious foods, and crafts, and, of course, drinks for sale. All the stalls are decorated with Christmas greens and and lights - some with elaborate scenes on the roofs. There are rides, stages where performances take place or Santa will appear to chat with the children, a creche with live sheep, and speakers pumping out a constant soundtrack of Christmas background music.

The architecture in the old town is fairly-tale spectacular, and they lay claim to the great classical composer, Bach, who is buried here.

We sauntered around all day trying various foods, shopping for unique finds, and taking in the festive atmosphere. A brief bit of cold and wet weather had us scurrying into the yurt in the Scandinavian section of the market where we sat on birch log stools around an open fire warming up. I am continually amazed by the lack of regulation…there were LITTLE kids and a town FULL of jolly revelers who had already started drinking the gluehwein, glögg, etc. beverages when we arrived at 11 in the morning…. And there was an open fire in the middle of this yurt with nothing to keep anyone from tripping into it, no rules, no ropes, nada. The yurt fire wrangler (now there’s a job!) came and threw a few more logs on while we were there and poked at it a bit. Note: we were in the public double yurt - there was also a party yurt which was booked by a private party with a sign that said so.

And we were back to the train station to wait in the cafe with, of course, a cup of tea! And then caught our train back to Berlin. It was a long, full weekend , but SO fun!

Tschüss!

for the 4th and final post in the Berlin and Beyond series, click HERE