A Christmas Market Bell Tower, First Night in Berlin

The train from Prague ran a little over four hours, long enough to watch fields turn to suburbs turn to the kind of dense city block that only shows up once you are properly inside a capital. Berlin Sudkreuz let me out into a cold I hadn't quite planned my layers for, and by the time I found a Christmas market near the hostel that evening I was mostly there for the heat coming off the mulled wine stalls. One stall had built itself an entire miniature bell tower, gold trim and working bells and a clock face lit up gold against the dark, signs on either side advertising Jagertee and Eierpunsch to a queue that did not seem to mind the cold at all.

Three cities in three days had started to blur together in the specific way travel does when you stop giving yourself time to actually land anywhere, and Berlin's cold felt like exactly the kind of shock that resets the counter. I stood at the edge of the market rather than in the middle of it for a while, a warm drink cooling faster than I could finish it, just watching the crowd work the stalls before deciding I had rested enough to join them properly.

There was nothing urgent about the evening, which after Prague's tighter schedule felt like its own small luxury. Berlin had three nights to make its case, and it had not said a single word yet beyond a market stall shaped like a bell tower and a queue of people who did not seem to mind the cold at all. That felt like enough of an introduction for one evening.