A Berliner favourite is the ‘beach bar’, which, being so named, can lead unwitting Aussies to feel they’ll be at home there. Picture a narrow strip of dirty sand with a couple of bamboo huts and lazy chairs, wedged between a major highway on one side and a railroad on the other. Hmm. We lasted a full 20 minutes then headed off, thinking we’d find more joy in the Jewish museum. Not so. More fool us.

After spending five hours wandering about it, we take ourselves off to Alexanderplatz (yes, the square that Matt Damon dashes across in the Bourne Supremacy), where the communist government of the former East erected a massive TV tower as if to show the West that whatever super duper technology you capitalistic…capitalists have, we can do…almost as well. Too bad the East Berliners used to say they’d like to knock the tower down and ride its elevator into the west.

Not to say that everything about the former DDR was bad – I’ve mentioned before how quickly I became a fan of Ampelman, the East Berlin equivalent to the little green walking man on traffic lights. He just has so much more pizzazz about him than the regular stick-figure dude, with his cocked hat and jaunty little leg…