The typical Berlin winter is biting cold and grey. In combination with the hardness of the city and the angry natives, it feels like a hostile area. Why it's worth experiencing it? Because that's the way this city is.

This museum of photography is really great, and the highlight for me after the inspiring exhibitions is the good coffee and great cakes at their coffee place. I find myself there almost every second week for a drink and a slice of cake. The food is perfect, the ambiance is nice and it's really alive as a lot of people are coming directly from the running exhibition. At the entrance you can find an interesting bookstore and the best photoautomat of the city right outside. Last but not least, it's only some meters from the Helmut Newton Fondation ( which doesn't have a nice coffee place itself yet ).

The is an old geisterbahnhof, or railway station, in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, Germany. It is served by the Berlin S-Bahn and the M13 line of the Berlin Straßenbahn. The station opened on October 1, 1935, at the junction of the Nordbahn line from Berlin to Stralsund with the railway line to Szczecin where the eponymous street named after Bornholm Island crossed the tracks. As Bornholmer Straße station lay right at the Berlin Wall it was closed on August 13, 1961, turning it into one of Berlin's ghost stations, passed by eastern and western S-Bahn trains without stopping. After German reunification Bornholmer Straße was reopened on December 22, 1990. Today, you can still go there to see remnants of the wall, and where people flooded in when the wall came down in 1989. (In the evening of November 9, 1989, thousands of East Berliners and GDR citizens assembled at the bridge demanding entry to West Berlin. At 9.20 p.m. local guards were the first to open the checkpoint and allow people passing through freely to West Berlin, where they were greeted enthusiastically. The event marked the commencement of the fall of the Berlin Wall.).

A small but never-the-less great museum for photography-lovers. It’s there that I fell in love with dear Helmut. Mr. Newton was this man who loved women bodies, dramatic stagings, and his wife. An original who was down-to-earth and respectful despite living a glamorous life. After every visit I feel inspired, more confident and proud to be a woman and own my body. You will find at the Helmut Newton Fondation a collection of his photography work, personal belongings, and condolence letters wrote to his wife after he passed away. In addition of that, a space dedicated to June Newton’s work, a little cinema room as well as two temporary exhibitions for contemporary artists ( check website for more infos ). Helmut Newton will remain one of my human and artistic crush, I can only recommend to pay yourself a visit there to learn about his work, his life, his love. p.s.: and it’s some hundred meters only from the C/O Gallery.

I never knew this neighbourhood existed and went to visit a friend and was instantly transported out of Berlin into some sort of 50's utopia. "The Hansaviertel is a prime example of modern architecture and urban planning in the fifties in Berlin. 36 individual buildings or ensembles still form the model of modern architecture and urban planning of the 1950s. The southern part of the war-damaged Hansaviertel, which lies between the S-Bahn line and Tiergarten, was chosen as the central demonstration area of ​​the International Building Exhibition in order to present the "city of tomorrow" - in deliberate contrast to the East Berlin Stalinallee and the restored tenement barracks." - berlin.de Also visit The Akademie der Künste, if not for the art then the architecture alone.