This is part of a series from our recent travel to Europe in June/July 2026.
There’s something nice about a morning with no agenda. Chris was up early, early enough to slip out and come back with coffee and pastries before I’d properly surfaced, and for a while we just existed in the hotel room, not rushing anywhere. After the heat and the hustle of the day before, it was exactly the right way to start.
We had one more stop in Berlin before we left the city behind.
The East Side Gallery runs along the River Spree in Friedrichshain, and it’s unlike anything else in the city. It stretches about 1.3 kilometres, the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall still standing, and instead of turning it into a solemn monument, the city let it become something else entirely. In 1990, not long after the Wall fell, over a hundred artists from around the world were invited to paint directly onto the concrete. What they made is now one of the most visited open-air galleries on earth.
Some of the paintings are instantly recognizable. Dmitri Vrubel’s image of Brezhnev and Honecker locked in a fraternal kiss carries a real charge when you’re standing in front of the actual thing, not a photo of it. Others are quieter. Information panels run the length of the wall, laying out how it went up almost overnight in August 1961, the decades that followed, and that night in November 1989 when East Germans started crossing freely again after nearly thirty years apart. The following image I took resonated a great deal with me.
What gets you, walking the length of it, is the texture. This isn’t a replica. These are the actual slabs, cracked and weathered, now covered in art that insists on life continuing on the other side of them. Worth every minute.
After the Gallery we headed back to the hotel, grabbed our bags, and made for the Berlin Hauptbahnhof to start the next leg.
Deutsche Bahn had other plans.
Our train was cancelled. Berlin’s central station is an impressive place to get stranded in, but stranded is stranded, and what followed was me trying to work the rebooking process through the DB app with a mix of determination and moderate success. We landed seats on a replacement, the ICE844, leaving at 17:47. Three hours later than planned.
There are worse places to wait. We found a spot, regrouped, and reminded ourselves this is just part of travel.
The ICE844 pulled in on time and we were moving. Deutsche Bahn’s high-speed intercity trains are a genuinely good way to get around, and the run southwest to Hanover takes under two hours through flat north German countryside. We rolled into Hanover Hauptbahnhof at 19:32, caught the regional connection, and by 20:40 we were pulling into Hameln.
And there was Michele.
For anyone who doesn’t know the story: Michele was our exchange student. Seeing him on the platform in Hameln, a grown man now, in his own city, waiting for us, was one of those moments that quietly takes your breath away. This is what travel does when you let it. These are the connections that time doesn’t break, not if you tend to them.
He drove us to the family home, where his parents Anna and Thomas welcomed us like we’d never left. We changed out of our travel clothes and ended up on the patio as the evening cooled, a meal in front of us and a lot of catching up to do.
Hameln has a story of its own, the Pied Piper, the cobblestone rats, a genuinely beautiful Weser Renaissance old town, and we’ll get to all of that in a future post. That first evening wasn’t about the town, though. It was about the table, the people around it, and the particular warmth of being welcomed into someone’s home after a very long day.
We fell into bed late, tired in the best way, the delayed trains already sliding into the category of things that make a better story than they made an afternoon.
