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For those in Berlin at any point, it's worth dropping in to the Muhle store. It's beautifully set up, and if you have 35 euros free (I didn't), you can have a barber's shave while you are there.
To be honest, it's not like you will find anything there that you can't get online, but it is nice to wile away some time looking at various bits of kit that you have otherwise only seen pictures of. It actually won over my other half, who likes things stylish and well designed etc, and she commented that she had a better understanding of why I was interested in DE equipment having seen it from a quality and aesthetic POV. I got to handle an R41, which I have read so much about - it looks like an innocuous razor, looks sometimes being deceiving etc, etc.
Back in the drugstores and supermarkets of Berlin, I had an experience similar to that I had in Italy earlier in the year. We presume that a country will have easily accessed stocks of the soaps/creams/AS that originate there, but it is not the case (always).
Despite my best efforts, I couldn't find any tabac soap (stick or bowl), although Tabac AS and balms were easy to find. No Irisch Moos at all. Lots of tubes of palmolive classic and some Nivia creams in stores, but in the end, all I picked up was a 3 euro stick of Wilkinson Sword.
Other than that, I can highly recommend Berlin. Visually, it doesn't top the list of European cities one might visit (during WW2, British bombers dropped 45,517 tons of bombs; the Americans dropped 23,000 tons), but it has fantastic food and bar options, a lively design culture, plenty of fantastic coffee options, and an obviously international perspective (it seemed like we heard as much English being spoken as German). And more graffiti than you could possibly imagine. Plentiful beer, of course, but absolutely excellent German wines that I would not normally have tried outside of their country of origin.
To be honest, it's not like you will find anything there that you can't get online, but it is nice to wile away some time looking at various bits of kit that you have otherwise only seen pictures of. It actually won over my other half, who likes things stylish and well designed etc, and she commented that she had a better understanding of why I was interested in DE equipment having seen it from a quality and aesthetic POV. I got to handle an R41, which I have read so much about - it looks like an innocuous razor, looks sometimes being deceiving etc, etc.
Back in the drugstores and supermarkets of Berlin, I had an experience similar to that I had in Italy earlier in the year. We presume that a country will have easily accessed stocks of the soaps/creams/AS that originate there, but it is not the case (always).
Despite my best efforts, I couldn't find any tabac soap (stick or bowl), although Tabac AS and balms were easy to find. No Irisch Moos at all. Lots of tubes of palmolive classic and some Nivia creams in stores, but in the end, all I picked up was a 3 euro stick of Wilkinson Sword.
Other than that, I can highly recommend Berlin. Visually, it doesn't top the list of European cities one might visit (during WW2, British bombers dropped 45,517 tons of bombs; the Americans dropped 23,000 tons), but it has fantastic food and bar options, a lively design culture, plenty of fantastic coffee options, and an obviously international perspective (it seemed like we heard as much English being spoken as German). And more graffiti than you could possibly imagine. Plentiful beer, of course, but absolutely excellent German wines that I would not normally have tried outside of their country of origin.
