My 21-Day Round The World Trip: Starting with Paris and Berlin

Intro

All trips lead to this one. The Trifecta of Holiday trips in 2025 ends with a 21-day Round The World Trip (RTW). Yes, after a successful Thanksgiving Trip to Colombia, and a start of the month Christmas trip to the Orlando parks, my third Holiday trip was going to be the most anticipated trip of the year. And well, this time I was combining RTW25 and 26 to make it a longer, better trip, and spend Christmas and NYE where I have been dreaming of for years.

This would be my 9th Round The World Trip, having skipped 2020 for obvious reasons, and I have been able to record on this blog some of my latest experiences. Follow this link to see some of the best posts related to the RTWs:

• In 2024 I completed the Nature Wonders of the World, AND all the Disney and Universal parks in the world. PLUS, the most important part: I spent 22 Days on the Ultimate World Cruise.
• And in 2023 I spent a record 13-day only basically visiting some parts of Japan and South Africa.

This year the planning started in November of 2024, but it was not until February and March of 2025 when I started buying flights, using my miles meticulously and putting together a 21-day trip that would be so tight at some points that would made my adrenaline boil. Do not miss a single blog of this RTW25-26. Let’s get started!

Day 01: From NYC to Paris

This year, the RTW was going to count for 2: for 2025 and 2026, so I would have way more time to plan for the 2027 one, but also to spend more time in each destination, and attack some of the bucket lists items that I have had for a while. Since my goal was to visit Berlin during December to see the Christmas Markets (last year they were all removed by the time I visited), this time I was going to do my RTW Eastbound, starting in Europe and continuing to Asia.

The first problem to solve when planning these trips is how to jump the pond, in this case the Atlantic Ocean. Difficult to do during the Holidays especially, since all tickets are super expensive, even more coming from NYC. I played with all the possible combinations, using Google Flights, and all the airlines where I have miles, and the most valuable option was to flight into Paris, using my American Airlines miles, from JFK to CDG, and from there start my European leg of the trip. Just a reminder that you don’t have to start your trip where you have to be. From there, I would move to Berlin, the main event during Christmas, and well, you will see what I did after that.

But for now, I was leaving my house for 21 days, and after packing for extreme cold and extreme hot weather in just a carry-on, I was ready to Uber to JFK for my American Airlines flight to Paris.

I arrived just in time for sunset, and since this was on December 17, close to the solstice, let’s say it was very early in the day lol.

The skyline was reminding me to come back eventually to the city has given me so much, and that I for sure love a lot. AA was boarding, and I would be officially en route on my RTW.

After boarding, the sunset became definitely even more beautiful. Do not worry New York, I will be back!

After 20 minutes in the air, the dinner service started. I was definitely ignored multiple times on purpose by the steward for about 20 minutes. I do not know what was that about. I hit the call button, and he still ignored me while serving other people in the plane. Later, he came and pretended he thought he served me, and then gave me 2 dinners instead of one. LOL. I was so irritated but let it go since this was the very very beginning of a fun trip. I just wanted to sleep on this flight, and this was delaying everything. I got the chicken and couscous by the way.

I went to sleep, as always using my travel mask and headphones, and after 7 hours we were in Paris, France.

Day 02: A quick Paris exploration

It was going to be a quick stop, before going to Germany, but still got off the plane, did immigration for the Schengen space, and then went on the Metro into the city. Sunrise was just happening, even though it was already 8 AM, like wow. I got out of the Metro around Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, which I had not seen in some time.

I tried getting in, but since I had my suitcase they did not let me in. There was no line at this time of the day, and they do not have lockers, so be ready to have just a small backpack if you want to come inside.

From there, I took the Metro to Jardins du Trocadero, because obviously, and this plaza had returned to its glory after being occupied during the Olympics in 2024. The view of the Eiffel Tower is always mesmerizing. I would never get tired of it.

I only had a few hours in Paris, before returning to the CDG International Airport for my flight to Berlin, but since I had my carry-on I could not do much in this city. I took the subway to my next stop, after getting a crepe in Trocadero, and was just laughing at the name of this stop: “La Muette”, which in Spanish sounds like a Caribbean accent version of “The Death”.

Time to see some Christmas decorations before heading to the Airport, and I got off by Printemps Haussmann, a very exclusive mall not far from Galeries Lafayette (just 50 m away). The glass dome and the Christmas tree had a mix of spectacular colors that let me speechless. Definitely, a good way to start this Holiday trip in Europe. Paris is not exactly famous for anything Christmas, but I was impressed by some of the decorations.

A Christmas in New York was the theme of this decoration, which is funny because I was precisely avoiding that lol. I mean I had already seen the Rockefeller Center Tree, and all that, but I wanted to see the Christmas Markets in Germany.

From Paris to Berlin

Continuing Eastbound, I was now going to the main event of this first leg of the trip: Berlin in Germany. The Christmas Markets had been in my bucket list for more than a decade, and I had bookmarked many I wanted to visit this time.

Back in CDG, I got some things for my flight to BER.

The AirFrance flight got a little delayed, but shortly we were on the way to Germany.

And the city welcomed us with the second sunset of this Round The World Trip, 19 more to go! Berlin looked beautiful from here.

Got on the train, and went to my hotel close to Berlin Friedrichstraße. Berlin has become a city for fun for young people, so I did some off-camera exploring around the city center. I did not go to the Christmas Markets yet, I had a plan for those on other nights. But for now, I had to go to bed early for a walking tour on the next morning.

Day 03: Discover Berlin Half-Day Walking Tour

The problem with traveling Eastbound is that your days are always shorter, and that’s why suddenly I was already on my third day of the RTW. But still, here I was waking up early to do a walking tour, and get all of the tourism stuff out of the way, so I could enjoy the city more freely. I booked this tour on Get Your Guide, after I accumulated enough points to get a free one, so why not use them.

The group tour started in the Berliner Dom. It was an English tour, and the guide have us a lot of information for each spot we visited. The Berlin Cathedral the largest Protestant church in Germany and serves as one of Europe’s most significant dynastic tombs, housing the Hohenzollern royal crypt with nearly 100 sarcophagi and burial monuments of the Prussian royal family spanning five centuries. The current building was completed in 1905 under Kaiser Wilhelm II. I will be getting back to this icon of the city multiple times during this trip. For now, the group would continue walking.

The Alte Nationalgalerie is a stunning temple-like neoclassical building on Museum Island (a UNESCO World Heritage site), designed to resemble an ancient Greek temple and completed in 1876. It houses one of the world’s premier collections of 19th-century art, including major works of German Romanticism (like masterpieces by Caspar David Friedrich), Realism (especially Adolph Menzel), and early Impressionism—remarkably, it was the first museum worldwide to acquire French Impressionist paintings in 1896.

On the same stop we got to see the Kolonnadenhof: this is an elegant colonnaded courtyard on Museum Island (UNESCO site), built 1853–1878 to link major museums, with a serene garden, fountain, and bronze sculptures. The colonnades still show visible bullet marks and scars from WWII fighting, deliberately preserved as historical reminders.

Not far from there, we saw the Altes Museum, Berlin’s oldest public museum and the nucleus of Museum Island (UNESCO World Heritage Site), designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel as a masterpiece of Neoclassical architecture—featuring a grand Ionic colonnade and a stunning Pantheon-inspired rotunda—and opened in 1830 to house classical antiquities. Today it displays one of the world’s finest collections of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art and artifacts.

Not far from there, we went to Humboldt Forum. The tour guide gave us so much info about this one: it’s a major cultural center and museum (opened 2020–2022) housed in the partially reconstructed Berlin Palace (Berliner Schloss) on Museum Island (UNESCO site), featuring non-European art, global collections, and exhibitions on world cultures.

The site has undergone multiple dramatic changes over centuries: starting as a medieval Dominican monastery, it became a Renaissance then lavish Baroque royal palace (rebuilt 17th–18th centuries), was heavily damaged in WWII and demolished by East Germany in 1950 for a parade ground, replaced by the modernist Palast der Republik (1976–2006, later demolished due to asbestos and political decisions), and finally rebuilt 2013–2020 as a modern interior with three Baroque facades reconstructed from historical records.

The Wintermarkt Schlossplatz Christmas Market is held here in this location. I would go visit later in this trip.

We continuing walking through Unter Den Linden, Berlin’s iconic historic boulevard (meaning “under the linden trees”), stretching about 1.5 km from the Berlin Palace (now Humboldt Forum) to the Brandenburg Gate, lined with rows of linden trees (also called lime trees or Tilia) that create a shady, green canopy over the central pedestrian mall. The first linden trees were planted in 1647 by Elector Friedrich Wilhelm to aid post-Thirty Years’ War recovery, with the current ones largely replanted in the 1950s after wartime destruction and earlier removals.

In this street we visited the Neue Wache, a striking Neoclassical guardhouse designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and built 1816–1818 on Unter den Linden as a royal guard post and memorial to the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. Today it’s Germany’s Central Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny (since 1993), featuring an open oculus skylight and Käthe Kollwitz’s poignant sculpture “Mother with her Dead Son” as its centerpiece.

Right across, we passed by the Memorial to May 10, 1933 Nazi Book Burning, known as The Empty Library (“Bibliothek”), a poignant underground memorial by Israeli artist Micha Ullman, installed in 1995 on Bebelplatz (formerly Opernplatz) — the exact site where Nazi students and supporters burned over 20,000 “un-German” books (by Jewish, communist, liberal, and other authors) on May 10, 1933.

A glass panel in the pavement reveals empty white bookshelves capable of holding about 20,000 volumes, symbolizing the irreplaceable cultural loss; nearby, a plaque quotes Heinrich Heine (1820): “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.”

In the same plaza, we were able to see Sankt Hedwigs-Kathedrale, Berlin’s Catholic cathedral (seat of the Archdiocese of Berlin) and the first Catholic church built in Protestant Berlin after the Reformation, commissioned by the Protestant King Frederick the Great in 1747–1773, modeled after the Pantheon in Rome with its striking green copper dome and neoclassical facade—symbolizing religious tolerance for Catholic immigrants from Silesia.

We continued walking towards Gendarmenmarkt, where the tour guide mentioned two nearly identical Baroque domed towers: the French Cathedral (Französischer Dom) on the north side, originally built for French Protestant Huguenot refugees (Reformed/Calvinist), and the German Cathedral (Deutscher Dom) on the south side, for the German Lutheran community—symbolizing religious tolerance and integration in 18th-century Prussia.

There was a Christmas Market here as well, so I would definitely would be back here. I was shocked that they charged for this one to enter tho. Seemed like the fancy one.

We continued walking in this cold day in Berlin, and for my surprise, there was a Colombian Consulate around, nice! hehe.

We were now hours into the tour, and we stopped by Checkpoint Charlie. It was the most famous Cold War border crossing between East and West Berlin, the only one allowing Allied military personnel, diplomats, and foreign tourists to pass through the Berlin Wall (established 1961), and became an iconic symbol of division—famously the site of a tense 1961 U.S.-Soviet tank standoff just meters apart that nearly escalated into conflict. Today, a reconstructed guard booth, sandbags, and signs mark the spot as a major tourist attraction on Friedrichstraße.

Time for a break, and we passed by this interesting attraction.

The tour guide dropped us off for a break in this cafe, where some people got something quick to eat. I only got a coffee.

After the break, we went to Geschichtsmeile Wilhelmstraße, an open-air street exhibition (“History Mile Wilhelmstraße”) with around 30 blue information panels along Wilhelmstraße, installed by the Topography of Terror Foundation, documenting the street’s dramatic past as the heart of Prussian and Nazi government power—highlighting former sites of the Reich Chancellery, Foreign Office, ministries, and Gestapo headquarters, many destroyed in WWII and now marked for remembrance amid modern buildings.

We were now walking towards the last destination, but we had some spots to visit in between, like Denkmal zur Erinnerung an den Aufstand des 17. Juni 1953, a striking modern memorial (installed in 2000 by artist Wolfgang Rüppel) in front of the Federal Ministry of Finance building on Wilhelmstraße 97, directly facing the former “House of Ministries” where protesters gathered during the 1953 East German uprising.

The glass panel sunken into the ground displays a large, rasterized black-and-white photo of marching workers from June 17, 1953, contrasting powerfully with the intact socialist-realist mural (“Aufbau der DDR” by Max Lingner) on the building facade above—symbolizing the confrontation between propaganda and the violent reality of the suppressed workers’ revolt.

After that, we were shocked to be gathered in some random residential complex, but this was no other than the location of Hitler’s bunker, and where he ultimately died. The Führerbunker, where Adolf Hitler spent his final days and committed suicide in April 1945, was deliberately demolished and buried after WWII; today its site lies beneath an unremarkable parking lot surrounded by ordinary East German-era apartment buildings (built in the 1980s for privileged GDR residents) near Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße and In den Ministergärten—marked only by a simple information panel installed in 2006 to provide historical context without turning it into a shrine.

There is an information mark that could be easily missed.

It was going to be 4 hours since we started this walking tour, and now we were in the last leg of it. We arrived to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the central memorial to the up to six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and opened in 2005 near the Brandenburg Gate. The site features a vast “Field of Stelae” with 2,711 gray concrete slabs (stelae) arranged in a grid on uneven ground, creating a disorienting, wave-like labyrinth that evokes isolation and loss, with an underground Information Centre below providing names and historical context.

The depth (literal) and dimensions of this Memorial is quite disorienting, but very intriguing.

We had some minutes in the Memorial, and then we walked towards the Reichstag Building, without reaching it, just to be told it’s the historic seat of Germany’s parliament (now the Bundestag), a Neo-Renaissance landmark designed by Paul Wallot and completed in 1894, famous for its inscription “Dem Deutschen Volke” (“To the German People”) added in 1916.

Severely damaged by the 1933 Reichstag fire (a key event enabling Nazi dictatorship), bombed in WWII, and left derelict during the Cold War division, it was dramatically renovated by Norman Foster in the 1990s with a iconic glass dome symbolizing transparency and democracy—now a top tourist spot offering panoramic views.

We ended the tour at Brandenburg Gate, Berlin’s most iconic neoclassical landmark and the only surviving one of the city’s original 18 city gates, built 1788–1791 by Carl Gotthard Langhans for King Frederick William II, inspired by the Acropolis gateway in Athens, and topped by the famous Quadriga chariot statue of the goddess of victory (stolen by Napoleon in 1806, returned in 1814).

It symbolized division during the Cold War (trapped behind the Berlin Wall 1961–1989) and became a powerful emblem of German reunification after the Wall fell in 1989.

This time around it had Christmas and Hanukkah decorations, reminding me of my next stops, now not on a guided tour, but by myself. I was now free, and ready t go the Christmas Markets, the main reason I came all the way to Germany. But that will be happening in the blog post. See you then, and do not miss any post of this Round the World Trip 2025-2026.