NyQuil should film their next commercial in Berlin.  Right now the city is a living advertisement for a flu remedy: people are coughing, sneezing, sniffling, moaning.  Somehow I’ve survived, but some diseased germ bag that didn’t cover his or her mouth seems to have infected germophobic Jackie.

She felt achy and congested this morning, and standing on a train platform when it’s cold and raining while I try to figure out which train we need to take didn’t help the situation.

Luckily, a sympathetic expat sitting on a nearby bench recognized my confusion and helped us find the correct train.

As sports fans, it was worth the confusion and the longer-than-normal train ride to the suburbs of Berlin to visit Olympiastadion.

Berlin’s Olympic Stadium is no doubt one of the most famous sports stadiums in the world.  Hitler ordered its construction for the 1936 Olympic Summer Games as a venue to flaunt the “superior” Aryan race to the world.

Instead, African-American Jesse Owens won four gold medals.

There’s not much to do there when the stadium isn’t packed with 74,500 fans for a soccer game, so we took a short ride to Schloss Charlottenburg, the largest palace in Berlin.

Normally, we really enjoy visiting palaces or mansions with beautifully detailed ornamentation, opulent statuary and lavish furnishings, but I wasn’t as impressed this time.

And I think some of that has to do with the fact that much of Schloss Charlottenburg was destroyed in WWII and had to be not only reconstructed, but redesigned.

I found myself skipping through the audio tour at a rapid pace because the narrator kept mentioning how the rooms weren’t an accurate representation of the rooms that Friedrich III and his wife designed for the palace.  Paintings and furnishings were borrowed from museums, walls were painted a different color and decorations were replicas.

Some rooms were even still under construction, or at least they looked that way covered in tarp and devoid of color.

I guess I wasn’t as impressed not because it seemed fake, but because the reconstruction seemed inaccurate.  It felt like the people who redesigned the palace were guessing as to what some of the rooms must have looked like.

Even major attractions like the White Room and the Golden Gallery feature brand new frescoes painted by current artists instead of duplications of the frescoes that once adorned these extravagant banquet halls.

Maybe I’m being unfair.  The palace is, after all, a huge tourist draw.  I can handle reconstructions and replicas, but it didn’t seem genuine to me.  Like a supermodel: looks nice on the outside, underwhelming on the inside.

And just to make the bad taste linger slightly longer, the much talked about gardens were dead.  Admittedly, even dead plants look good when they’re perfectly laid out.  But when you’re sick and cold, the last thing you want to do is wander through 33 hectares of dead garden.

We wanted to go to the zoo and see Knut the polar bear, but bad weather combined with body aches and coughing took over at this point.  So we had lunch at a German restaurant (currywurst again), stopped by the mini-market and a pastry stand to pick up a few things, and went back to the hotel to have a little taste testing party.

We’ve all heard a lot about how great German beer is, so I had to try a few varieties.  Now, I’m not particularly fond of beer. In fact, I’ve only found one beer I ever enjoyed.

But for about a dollar a bottle, why not take the taste buds on an adventure to beer land?

Well, the adventure ended abruptly.  After only one gulp of the Hefeweizen and the Dunkel, I was quickly reminded why I don’t like beer in the first place.

Beer is not refreshing.  I don’t know why commercials insist on convincing us otherwise.

Beer makes my mouth feel like I walked through a desert without a canteen.  It’s like putting a vacuum in my mouth and sucking out every last drip of moisture.  It’s bitter.  It’s dry.  It’s just not rewarding.

The Berliner Kindl Radler was slightly more toothsome.  It sort of tasted like someone spilled a pitcher of lemonade into the beer during the brewing process, but that helped mask the taste of the beer.

The last beer we tried was another Berliner Kindl Weisse. A couple days ago I said I actually enjoyed the variety I had at a restaurant.  Even though it looked like glowing nuclear waste, I dug the sweetness of the woodruff.

This time I went for the raspberry.  I gotta tell ya, it was pretty good.  There’s only a faint beer taste under the sweetness of the berry.  Sure, this is basically a kid’s beer (only 3% alcohol), but if more beer was flavored with fruit syrup, I might be a convert.

I was already on a sweet kick, so it was time to eat my boredom away with a mélange of pastries.

Germans love them some apple… if its swimming in syrup beneath a sugar-coated crust.  I happen to like the same thing, so to get in touch with my (nonexistent) German heritage, I demolished an apple strudel in about five bites.

I also got this strange pasty that resembled a Petri dish growing bacterial clouds.  I think it was fried dough with sweet cheese pieces covered in liquid sugar, but I can’t be certain.  It was just okay… but I ate the entire thing anyway.

The beer, pastries and TV-viewing rounded out my quest to become a couch crusader.

Here’s the thing about travelling to foreign countries: we wind up watching a lot of music videos.

That’s because it’s about the only thing in English.  Sure, there’s CNN and BBC News, but they repeat the same four stories every 15 minutes.

I haven’t watched this many music videos since the days when I pretended to be sick in high school just to stay home and watch MTV.  That, of course, was back when MTV actually played music videos.

In Europe, they still do.  In fact, they play everything in their entire library.  We’ve seen a few blasts from the past like “Hit Me Baby One More Time” and even a few Backstreet Boys and N*Sync videos.

Don’t judge.  You know they made some catchy stuff.

Even better is late night MTV.  That’s when it goes uncensored.  They even call it “MTV What The F*ck”.

And in between videos there are dirty commercials, like the one we saw for an iPhone app that turns girls naked.  (Allegedly, it allows you to take a picture of girl anywhere and then some futuristic technology shows you what’s underneath her clothes.)

The problem is, every now and again, the TV in our room randomly turns black and white for about 15 minutes.

By the time MTV replayed Lady GaGa for the eighth time, it was time for bed.

Around midnight, we were jolted awake by the alarming sounds of EXPLOSIONS.

That’s not comforting when you’re in a country that’s seen its share of explosions in the last century.

When you’re in that half-awake state, you come up with crazy scenarios to justify the explosions.  Maybe it was a car bomb.  Maybe there’s a riot.  Maybe the hotel is on fire.

Nope.  Once I heard another explosion and saw a flash of colored light streak across the windows, I knew it was fireworks from New Year’s celebrations that were starting early.

Three days early.

A walk through Prague’s Old Town is like watching a good movie: it gets better and better the further you get into it.

First stop is the Municipal House, a paradigm of Art Nouveau architecture.  Usually artwork is inside the building; not at Municipal House.  The half-dome features a mosaic called “Homage to Prague,” accentuated by the opulent rust-green dome and flanked by sculptures on either side.  In 1918, the treaty to make Czechoslovakia an independent nation was signed here.  Today, Municipal House is famous for its Smetana Hall, home to the Prague Symphony.

The warm cream colors of Municipal House contrast with the dark, Gothic sight next door: Powder Gate.  Since 1475, back when Prague was a walled-in city, Powder Gate served as one of the only access points into the city (and it happens to look a lot like the Old Town Bridge Tower).  In the 17th century, the tower was used as a storehouse for gun powder, hence the name “Powder Tower.”

A short walk leads to the Church of St. James, which harbors two big sites: an opulent Baroque organ built in the 18th century, and… a 400-year-old severed arm.  Supposedly, the arm belonged to a thief that tried to steal jewels from the church.  Now the blackened arm dangles from a chain in a hallway as a morbid reminder not to break a commandment and steal.

An archway across from the church leads down Tyn Street into a fascinating courtyard that no guidebook told us about.  There were unique sculptures, interesting stores and buildings covered in ghostly religious imagery.

After passing through another archway, we’re suddenly in the historical center of Prague: Old Town Square.  It can feel a bit overwhelming with so much to see, especially with the Christmas Market congesting the square.  The square is home to many major sights, and it’s best to take it one by one.

The 14th century Gothic steeples of the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn create an ominous mood that’s washed away by the square’s many brightly-colored, richly-decorated buildings.  The large pink building with the Rococo stucco is the Kinsky Palace, home to part of the National Museum’s modern art collection.

The Ministry of Development building is a golden yellow structure with a fantastic half-dome mural and statues of late 19th century firefighters.  The angelic white Church of St. Nicholas (one of two famous churches of the same name in English, but in Czech it’s Kostel Sv. Mikulase) and the haunting Jan Hus monument (Hus was a religious reformer who refused to give up his beliefs and was burned at the stake in the 15th century) are two more important sights.

The real star, however, is the Old Town Hall and Astronomical Clock, which you can read about here.

Other great sites in Old Town include the neo-classical Estates Theater, where Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” premiered (there’s even a spooky statue of a cloaked figure commemorating the opera outside the theater), Clam-Gallas Palace (another of Prague’s beautifully designed theaters), the Klementinum (read about a concert we attended here) and Knights of the Cross Square, a small square just in front of the Old Town Bridge Tower.

There’s also the Smetana Museum, Naprstek Museum and Havel’s Market — a tourist trap street lined with stores selling overpriced souvenirs.

For some reason, people love looking at big houses.  Maybe it’s because we’re curious as to how the wealthy live.  Maybe it’s because we aspire to live like royalty one day.  Maybe it’s because we’re on a mission to find out who gives out the best Halloween candy.  No matter what your motivation, Buckingham Palace is one of the most legendary places to fulfill our curious desire to witness the luxurious lifestyle.

Buckingham Palace is lot like the White House: it’s large, you can’t get too close to it, and it’s home to the most important figurehead in the country — in this case, Queen Elizabeth II and the Royal Family.  For most of the year, there’s nothing to do but snap a few photos and maybe wait around for the changing of the guard.  (Check the schedule here.)

For about 60 days a year, usually from early August until the end of September when the Royal Family is away, the palace is open to the public.  You can buy tickets to see everything from the State Rooms (the rooms where the Royal Family entertain their important guests), to the Royal Mews (the Royal Family stable and garage which includes the gaudy Gold State Coach) and the Queen’s Gallery (art and artifacts from the Royal Collection) for an astronomical £29.50.

In other words, you can pay a small fortune to see someone else’s large fortune.  In our opinion, Buckingham Palace looks just fine from the outside.

But if you want to visit, you can buy tickets in advance here.  For more information about the history of Buckingham Palace and things to see on your visit, check out the official site of the British Monarchy and The Royal Collection website.