BERLIN

I recently went to Berlin for five nights on a trip with my uni course. The trip was originally for third years but due to not many of them being interested, it was opened up to everyone and I snapped up the opportunity to go.

As the trip wasn't originally planned to be for us, there was no set 'work' to do and we could more or less do what we wanted while we were over there so we only ended up meeting with the lecturers a couple of time in between sticking to our own itinerary. We explored the city using the train service which I was really proud of us for, bearing in mind I would usually struggle to navigate myself around some cities in England, not to mention the added struggle of the language barrier, but we managed fine. We visited loads of cool districts and did a bit of sightseeing including visiting The Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag (German Parliament buildings,) the Berlin Wall memorial site, aswell as a lot of shopping, overindulging in lovely restaurants and a few very drunken nights too!

The Berlin Wall (East Side Gallery)

Berlin is a really cool city, it has a very urban vibe which is predominantly down to the huge amount of graffiti which is absolutely everywhere! It's hard not to notice it as soon as you get there; walls, buildings, windows and even some cars were covered in graffiti, which has the potential to look scruffy, but is pulled off in Berlin to look really artistic and chic.

 I thought the city was realy inspiring, especially for people intrested in fashion like myself, artists, designers etc.

We went to the Alexa shopping centre which is home to some well known shops such as H&M and Zara. These stores had pretty much the same stock as what is in the English stores but on a larger basis, we saw at least eight different H&M's while we were over there! Also, due to the exchange rate at the moment, things are slightly cheaper in these stores than in England which is a bonus! We also visited Galaries Lafayette which is a very high end department store (much too expensive for us students) but nevertheless we moped around Mulberry, Dior and Vivienne Westwood hoping that someone would take pity on us. Although it's just a standard department store in terms of what it sells, the store has been designed in a really cool sort of cone shape with glass windows so customers can see other customers on other floors. It's definitely worth a visit.

We also found some really amazing vintage shops whilst over there. One was called Made in Berlin, and was in Hackescher Markt; it sold everything from cute handmade canvas bags to leather jackets and vintage sequin dresses. It had two floors and sold both male and female clothes. We stumbled upon this while in a rush trying to find the Reichstag one evening and so had to go back the next day for a better look around!

Another great vintage shop we found was called Colours. Someone else on the trip told us about it and we spent about an hour trecking around the streets looking for it until we finally came across it! Colours is huge and has a large section at the back where you can fill a basket and pay by kilo, so you can really grab some bargains! However, after our long walk to find the shop, we were far from in the mood to rummage through the rails and gave up after about 20 minutes! It's a really good vintage shop, but at least two hours and a large amount of patience is needed to trawl through all the rails!

All in all, although Berlin and the people there weren't as 'fashion forward' as we were promised before the trip, it's still a really inspiring place to visit and I would definitely go back.

 Here are some more of my favourite snaps from the trip:

Dancing with the locals!

On top of the Reichstag!