überlin

We try to get out of Berlin and experience the “real Germany”, and what happens? We both get sick. But we enjoyed an afternoon in Leipzig in Saxony before the stomach bug hit, in particular the beautiful pastel interior of St. Nicholas Church, an important centre of peaceful protest in the lead up the fall of the Berlin Wall. My parents had good things to say about the Bach Museum and Leipzig Zoo, and those in the know talk about the local creative scene as rivalling Berlin’s, so we might well pack up the Pepto-Bismol and make a return visit!

This is the best competition prize we’ve ever offered! Because the German capital is the most awesome city in the world, what more could you ask for than free flights to Berlin, and free accommodation when you arrive? Perhaps the chance to meet us in real life? Can do! All you have to do is join überlin on Pinterest for a fun challenge.

Do you enjoy traveling? Are you sociable? Do you like the idea of meeting people who share your interests and discovering new places with them? If so, you’ll probably dig Roomsurfer, a brand new travel platform that is offering you this unforgettable trip to Berlin. Using the Berlin startup’s site you can enter your favourite city, select your interests and find your ideal host, someone with whom you have a lot in common and who can show you what you really want to see. Pretty cool, huh? Check out Roomsurfer for more information, or just watch this cutesy little video:

Back to the competition! The lucky winner will get a flight to Berlin (from one of these 100 major European cities) on April 28th 2012, and one night’s accommodation with a Roomsurfer host. You’ll also get an exclusive invitation to the Roomsurfer Launch Party, and more importantly (?), the chance to hang out with me and Zoë. From the afternoon of April 29th, you’ll have time to enjoy Berlin and, whenever you like, you’ll be flown back home. All you have to do tell us what you’re most looking forward to seeing when you arrive in Berlin.

And now, the deets
When: From 28th to 29th April.
(Or whenever you want to leave. Your return flight is flexible, although you only get one night’s free accommodation.)
Where: In Berlin.
What: An unforgettable trip and our company!
How do you win? By proving how social you are, using our latest social media crush, Pinterest. We want you to go back through our blog archives, and Pin the thing you most want to see in Berlin. It could be a restaurant, a boutique, or something totally unique like Loxx Miniature Railway. Whatever you pick, the Pin with the most Likes and Repins by the close of the competition will be the winner. Make sure to leave a link to your Pin in the comments below this post, so we can keep track of it.
Pro tip! If you want an extra nudge, tweet us the link to your pin with the words “I want to win a trip to #Berlin with @uberlinblog!” and we’ll retweet you. You’re welcome.
Deadline: You have until the end of the day on April 7th, when we’ll announce the lucky winner who will join us in Berlin.

Good luck!

[EDIT: This competition is now closed. Congratulations to imaginary_lines, who suggested we travel to Dubrovnik, Croatia, and won themselves a €75 voucher to redeem against their next Wimdu booking. You can browse all of the competition entries on our Pinterest page.]

Wimdu, a website for booking private accommodation all over the world, have given us a voucher worth €75 to redeem against your next booking with them. All you have to do  is tell us where to go!

With Wimdu, you can find the perfect place to stay in one of over 50,000 properties worldwide, or you can earn money by renting out your own property. This makes it a great place to find holiday apartments in Berlin, or in other destinations, if – like us – you’re trying to get out of the city!

One of our New Year’s resolutions was to “get out of Berlin more”. We kicked off the year with a trip to Stockholm and Copenhagen, but we’re looking for ideas about where to visit next. To be in with a chance to win, just tell us where to go!

Some additional requirements to make your job a little harder:

• We love cities, but only if they offer something special. Because we live in what we think is the best city in Europe, if not the world, we are no longer impressed by expensive, boring, capital cities. Required: awesomeness!
• We like beaches, but we get bored easily. Beautiful white sands are great, but our perfect destination would offer more to do than just lying on a beach towel. And, unlike other Brits abroad, we don’t count drinking as an activity!
• We don’t want to revisit anywhere we’ve been to recently. Check out the new Travel section of our blog to find out where we’ve been, and suggest somewhere else, bitte!

Enter the competition by leaving a comment below, with your suggestion of where we should visit next, and your reasons why. The deadline for the competition is March 31st 2012, when we’ll pick our favourite entry and inform the winner.

Good luck!

Our recent trip to Stockholm was a feast for the eyes, but it wasn’t just the scenery that was stunning, but also the flagship store of my current brand crush, Acne. For me, the fashion house embodies the Stockholm aesthetic of effortlessly cool minimalism, so it would have been a crime not to visit them in their hometown. The staff were super nice, super hot (damn you Swedes!) and even allowed me to take some photos to remember them by. In between my drooling and staring (at the collection, of course), I bagged myself two pairs of jeans and the most perfect leather jacket. Even better, because their prices are so much cheaper  in Sweden than in Germany or the UK, I was saving money! … At least that’s what I tell myself. Looking at their Spring Summer 2012 collection I think another trip to Stockholm might be in order as well, hooray!

Click here to read all about our trip to Copenhagen and Stockholm.

The clear highlight of our recent trip to Copenhagen was the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which justifiably calls itself “the most beautiful museum in the world”. An hour up the Zealand coast from the Danish capital, the Louisiana combines an excellent collection of postwar art with a sculpture garden that drops down onto a beach with panoramic views of the Oresund. Not only was the museum the best thing we did on our trip to Scandinavia, but it had us eyeing all the nearby houses and vowing to one day live somewhere “just like this”.

The Louisiana’s permanent collection includes big names like Warhol and Henry Moore, but my personal favourites were the greatest cluster of Giacometti’s stick-thin man-maquettes I’ve ever seen, and the precarious Self Passage, a George Traka installation that leads brave explorers down to the ocean. A temporary exhibition by persecuted Chinese artist Ai Weiwei pricked our lazy Western consciences, and a retrospective of Andreas Gursky’s extraordinarily expansive photographic art has changed the way Zoë looks at her craft forever.

But let’s face it, it’s the stunning setting that will keep us going back to the Louisiana more. We’re seriously considering flying back to Copenhagen just to jump on the train up to the museum, and come straight back. If that sounds insane, one look at these photos and you’ll totally understand.

Click here to read all about our trip to Copenhagen and Stockholm.

Part two of our Excellent Scandinavian Adventure! (Zoë’s busy cutting-and-pasting our heads onto Bill and Ted’s bodies as I write this.) After Stockholm (read our highlights here), Copenhagen was colder and even more expensive! Case in point: brunch for two at Café Europa, recommended by the chic @Lilies_Diary, came to €70. Despite this, the Danes were warm and welcoming, and we had loads of fun: here are the best bits of our three days in the CPH.

We stumbled across a couple of early highlights on our first walk through the historical waterfront Nyhavn district into town. First, we picked up the best brews of our trip in the Coffee Factory, and then we spotted an actor from Forbydelsen! (For the nerds: Nicolas Bro, who plays Thomas Buch. If he wasn’t deep in conversation, you’d now be looking at a picture of him, me, and my two thumbs.) We celebrated by hitting the shops, killing (geddit?) time in Wood Wood and the city’s countless independent boutiques – naturally, I bought some Clarks.

Shamefully, we only followed one tip on our friend Ed’s excellent Foursquare list, but we picked well. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, rightly called “the most beautiful museum in the world”, is one of the best things we’ve ever seen. Situated an hour away on the north Zealand coast, the museum combines an excellent collection – of sculpture in particular – with panoramic views across the Øresund that had us vowing to one day live somewhere like that. Back in town, we went from the transcendent to the touristy, popping into the Ice Bar to warm up (its -5°C was a few degrees balmier than the street outside) and grabbing the best hotdog in town at the nearby Andersen Bakery. Muscular, sexy versions of those limp dogs you get in Ikea, these are like the Brigitte Nielsens of meaty treats. I’ve said too much…

Check out our Stockholm highlights, and stay tuned for more stunning photos of the Louisiana Museum.

Welcome to part one of überlin’s Scandinavian Vacation! (We’re still working on the poster.) This is no Stockholm city guide, as we’ve only seen a fraction of what the Swedish capital has to offer, and have no practical advice beyond: take LOTS of money. Instead, these are our impressions from three short days in the beautiful, too-cool “capital of Scandinavia”.

We ended our first afternoon’s walk by passing through the arches of City Hall, and watching the sun set over the archipelago which represents Stockholm’s icy heart. Over the next couple of days we enjoyed breathtaking views across the water, from the bay’s shore and its islands. Suggestion: skip the touristy Old Town of Gamla stan and head for Skeppsholmen, the pretty island that houses the Moderna art museum, among others, and was eerily quiet on the Monday we were there (when the museums are shut!). We don’t know if the sun always casts the same golden glow over the waters, but the broken mirror of floating ice is one good reason to visit in winter.

What else did we do? Well, apart from *loads* of shopping (which Zoë’s going to describe in detail in another post!), we followed a couple of top tips from our friends on Twitter. Ben Perry pointed us towards the Vasa Museum, built around a seventeenth century ship salvaged from Stockholm’s bay fifty years ago, and an object lesson in how to bring history to life. Björn Schmidt earns foodie points for recommending Grill, where we enjoyed cocktails, spicy fish ceviche, and a shared grill of mixed meats in one of its many themed rooms – let’s call it the Marie-Antoinette-according-to-Sofia-Coppola suite. Nom oo la la nom.

Stay tuned for Zo’s ode to Stockholm fashion collective Acne, and our highlights from Danish capital Copenhagen. God natt!