For the Christmas holidays I went (for my first time) to England with another volunteer, and stayed with one of her family friends. It was quite close to London, and we went there by train several times to see some famous attractions. My favourites that we visited include Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross Station (from the Harry Potter books), the Sherlock Holmes museum on Baker Street, the London Eye, Trafalgar Square, and Westminster Abbey (although we didn’t go inside the Abbey, because the queue to get in was enormous!) It was also exciting for me to walk on the streets that are on the Monopoly board! We had a very traditional English Christmas, which was a lot of fun for me, because it was quite different to my Australian Christmases back home!

This weekend I went to Berlin with another Lattitude volunteer. Due to a mix-up with booking train tickets, we took a bus, which was a pretty long and boring experience, but it was worth it to get to Berlin for a reasonable cost! We stayed at a nice hostel recommended to us by another volunteer, and visited several attractions around the city. We took a free guided tour that left from the Brandenburg Gate on the first day, which showed us a the Jewish Memorial, the site of Hitler’s Bunker, the SS Headquarters,  the Berlin Wall, and a few other places. On the second day we visited the places we wanted to see that were not included in the tour, including the East Side Gallery, an art museum, and a few Christmas Markets. I really loved going to the Christmas Markets, where I tried currywurst for the first time, and we went on a carousel! I was also distracted by an amazing bookstore, which had a great selection of English books (and ended up buying a few!) Berlin has definitely been one of my favourite places to visit so far, it really is a beautiful city.