Shopping At KaDeWe

After a rather full day at the zoo yesterday, we decided to take it easy today and just do some browsing at KaDeWe, the second largest department store in Europe after Harrods in London.  It’s definitely the largest department store I’ve ever been in, with a selection of items that would fulfill almost any shopper’s needs, ranging from clothing to gourmet grocery items.  If I lived here KaDeWe would definitely be my shopping haven!

After months of self restraint against buying anything while traveling, I finally caved and bought a small stuffed sheep that was too cute to resist.  As some of my friends back home know, I’m a big stuffed animal collector (I had more boxes of stuffed animals than clothing when we packed up our stuff for storage before the trip), and most stores in Europe sell a variety of cute stuffed sheep, which is an animal I haven’t collected a lot of before!  KaDeWe was having a sale on a particularily cute set of sheep, and I decided I could handle adding  just one little sheep to my backpack 

I had read that the gourmet food hall on the 6th floor was a must see, so we headed there for lunch after picking up my sheep.  We were amazed at what we saw – there was almost every kind of food imaginable, from tea to caviar, and it was super clean and modern looking.  We wandered around and debated between having some fresh seafood, some Chinese food, or some German dishes, and finally decided to go with schnitzel at the German place.  Although the food was greasy, it was really tasty and we were happy with our choice, even though it was one of our more expensive meals thus far in Germany (35 euros with tip for two entrees and one beer). 
 
After browsing a bit more, we left KaDeWe and went to catch bus #100 back to the hotel.  We had read a tip to ride this route because it goes around most of the major sights of Berlin (such as the Reichstag parliament building and Museum Island), so it’s an inexpensive way to do a sightseeing tour of Berlin, but we found it quite boring because we didn’t know what most of the buildings we were looking at were and the bus doesn’t have any signs naming the stops to help you figure it out.  I think if you’re going to ride a bus around to see the sights you’re better off just buying a ticket for one of those hop-on hop-off tour buses!