The next day, we made the long drive to Berlin, where we’d spend the second week of our vacation. This was the drive I had been looking forward to: roughly 600 km, nearly all of it on the autobahn.

Part of what makes Germany’s highway traffic laws seem so progressive compared to those in North America is the use of dynamic speed limits. Electronic speed signs above the road can be changed to reflect weather or traffic conditions, and other stretches of unrestricted road have permanent limits in rainy weather.

As easy as the speed signs are to decipher, others are less obvious, like those indicating zones where heavy trucks are limited to the right lane, or passing is not permitted. Halfway to Berlin, we realized it would’ve been helpful to study up on German road signage, after being perplexed by signs that we later learned meant no overtaking, and no overtaking for heavy trucks.

Here’s where the 328i GT really shone as a driver. If it felt big and unwieldy on urban streets and secondary highways, it seemed right at home on the Autobahn, where it took on the planted, solid feel you expect in a German car. I didn’t push the speedo past 170 km/h, but this car would’ve been just fine to keep going, a nice discovery considering these are speeds we don’t get to explore in Ontario (without risking your driver’s license and car).

The little turbo four-cylinder acquitted itself nicely, too. I knew it was a good performer in a city setting, but its torque (258 lb-ft, just like in North American models) proved useful here too, for getting up to speed on some of the shortest on-ramp lanes I’ve ever seen, and for gaining speed for getting around slow trucks on uphill stretches. At the speeds we were doing, the eight-speed transmission had the engine spinning a bit north of 2,500 rpm.

We were pleased to learn that German highway rest stops were as civilized as those we found in our drive through France a decade ago, with sit-down buffet restaurants, and sparkling-clean bathrooms, for which we were more than willing to pay the roughly $1 admission.

When we were planning this trip, I’d considered trying to secure a car that’s not sold in North America, for a more immersive European experience. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t: because this German GT was more or less exactly the same car BMW sells here, everything felt familiar, from the radio and climate controls, to the gauges, to the seats that made it easy to get comfortable and settle in for the long haul. It occurred to us that as we neared Berlin, we weren’t as worn out as we thought we’d be after seven hours on the road, but it’s possible we spoke too soon: we weren’t actually in the city yet.

Indeed, the journey was uneventful until we got to Berlin. We let the car’s navigation system (thoughtfully set to English by the folks at BMW Germany) guide us in from the highway, but a series of road closures due to construction and a protest march going right past our apartment added a stressful 20 minutes to the trip, which ended with an even more stressful interaction with a police officer manning a roadblock at the end of our street. We didn’t speak enough German to explain why we wanted to turn onto the street, and he insisted he didn’t speak English (yeah, right; nearly everyone speaks decent English in Berlin), and so we went back and forth until he finally told us, probably in exactly so many German words, to get lost and just go where we needed to go.

Our apartment was in a neighbourhood called Prenzlauer Berg, a former working-class area that survived Allied bombing remarkably unscathed and became popular with artistic types after the war ended. Since then, renovations to many of its pre-war apartment blocks have driven up property values and turned it into a sought-after residential area with loads of shops and restaurants.

Following our fraught arrival, we employed the magic of Google maps to see what was nearby, mainly with the goal of finding a place to get lunch the next day. As often happens, I got distracted by beer when I saw the word “kulturbrauerei” (which clearly meant something like ‘culture brewery’) on the map, thinking I’d found a local brewery. I was right, sort of: this former brewery, a short walk from our apartment, is now a community centre that houses, among other things, restaurants, a grocery store, a dance studio, a nightclub, and a museum. Most importantly, however, it hosts a fantastic weekly food truck rally every Sunday, where I got my first taste of currywurst. This is a local specialty that dates to around 1949, when street food purveyor Herta Heuwer concocted a curry-based sauce, dumped it all over a bratwurst and created what is now an essential part of Berlin’s street food scene. This was a fancy version with a plum-based sauce over wild boar sausage, but I wasn’t complaining about the lack of “authenticity”.

Later, we headed downtown for a look at one of Berlin’s best-known landmarks, Brandenburg Gate. Though a beautiful piece of architecture in its own right, it might be best known for its prominence in the media’s coverage of German reunification in 1989, when the gate seemed to appear in every image broadcast from the city. Walking under its arches, it was hard to imagine it hung with black curtains during U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s visit in 1963, to prevent East and West Berliners (“Ossis” and “Wessis”) from being able to so much as see each other.

Berlin is a city steeped in history, and not all of it is happy. There are echoes of the Berlin Wall everywhere, plus memorials and museums dedicated to the former physical and political divide between East and West Germany. We spent hours at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, located at the site of the checkpoint itself, which has been preserved as it looked before the wall came down. The museum opened the year after the wall was erected, suggesting that its founder, a human rights activist named Rainer Hildebrandt, understood very clearly the significance of what his country was going through.

Among other things, the museum’s four levels include stories of people who escaped (and more who tried and failed) from East Germany, and a section dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swede who helped thousands of Jews escape Nazi-occupied Hungary during WWII.

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