Allons-y!

Day 1: Berlin

Before I go on sharing about how amazing Berlin is, I feel obligated to share with everyone my much less than pleasant experience of traveling on Turkish Airline. It would simply be unethical for me not to share.

Well, I may have exaggerated abit; it's not the kind of life threatening/poor flight safely kind of horror. But it's the kind of "what kind of service is this"/"why am I subjecting myself to this kind of torture" (#1stworldproblems)

I have to admit that I'm a pampered traveler. The bulk of my travel budget goes to airfare and hotels. I don't mind scrimping on other things, but the quality of the hotel and airline is something I can't compromise. But because of our departure date and tour package, it was a no choice lah, Turkish airlines jiu Turkish airlines lo.

But after this I have decided that there's no such thing called no choice. We all have a choice. And my choice is to never fly via Turkish Airlines again!

In short:

My knees were touching the front seat. Ok to be fair, it's not their fault that their seats are small. In general, airline seats are shrinking anyway. But still, it was super uncomfortable. I couldn't even squeeze in a bottle of water in the front magazine pouch because there was simply no space for my legs to allow that!
The facade of having a meal choice when there's actually no choice.
DAMAGED LUGGAGE. It's my first time having our luggage damaged! 3 out 6 of our luggage were damaged. Wheels were broken, luggage surface was cracked/chipped off etc. And while queuing at the damaged luggage counter, I found out that many of the travelers onboard the same flight had their luggage damaged as well! And a further google search, out of curiosity, showed that many Turkish Airlines travelers have experienced this shit before.Well this is probably not the airline's fault; I'm pointing my fingers at the Istanbul airport.

Which in short:

Pretty airport, has interesting shops, but is simply disorganized and obviously ill equipped to handle so many passengers.
Not exactly clean. But cleanliness was the least of my worries when I was just so tired and only wanted to find a space to sit and rest.
Back to the point about being obviously ill equipped: the departure gate was only announced about an hour before our scheduled departure time, because they have a limited number of departure gates. (I don't mind having to board the flight outdoors and climb up the airstairs though, it's so fun hahah)

So I have also decided to avoid doing any transits at Istanbul airport again. This is just my two cents' worth of honest opinion. The airfare is really a lot cheaper; I remember the ticket to Barcelona was close to a grand cheaper than SQ! So it really depends on your priorities.

Enough of my rants, here's the set of photos from my 1st day! All taken in Berlin.

Lunch!

Some sort of potato vegetable soup, followed by creamy chicken with rice?

And brownie!

Potsdamer Platz

I'm not sure if they actually transported this pavilion from Korea and planted it there as an exhibition or it's a specially built one?! Anyhow, it's very interesting.