A very good reason to travel West: the C/O, next to the formerly infamous Berliner Zoo tube station, is an awesome museum dedicated to photography and visual media. Previous exhibitions include Larry Clark, Martin Parr, Anton Corbijn, Annie Leibovitz and Stephen Shore.

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.).

I often go exploring into random and dilapidated areas of Berlin. I like the thrill of finding new nooks and crannies with strange visual sites. A few months ago, an old housing colony was abandoned, and many objects (such as couches and front doors) were left at the edge of the city to rot or to be scavenged. This is a view from a non-descript area of the S-bahn train tracks (between Sonnennallee station and Treptower Park station) into the most Southern part of Neukölln district.

The central ‘Mitte’ area of Berlin is packed tight with galleries and museums, which means you can cram a lot into a short amount of time, if that’s what you want. The best of the lot is the Me Collectors Room, which shows off large chunks of the Thomas Olbricht collection alongside other contemporary private artworks. The permanent ‘Wunderkammer’ display offers over 200 pieces from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, with a solid focus on the strange and macabre. There’s even a Mark Ryden original that fits in nicely.

You can grab a coffee or a juice right next door to the KINDL Center in the old brewing Hall at König Otto, complete with all the fascinating brewing equipment from its completion in 1930 it is a hall reminiscent of German Expressionism style… or as stated on their website. :)