An official takes our passports and studies our faces to see if we match our photographs. I try to breathe and look at ease. But then he waves us through.We buy a travel card and take the bus to Charlottenburg Station, just as my mother told me. We are tired now; we stare silently out of the window at the cobbled side streets, the canal, the hoardings; at Charlottenburg Castle, pale and splendid, that I recognise from one of my mother’s postcards. Daisy is intrigued by the foreignness of everything: the street names and the hoardings, the German posters for Hannah Montana.At the station we take a train with red and yellow carriages, which seems to have come straight out of an old spy movie. Through the window we glimpse vast city vistas, building sites and distant opulent buildings and the shining glass on massive office blocks, all the glamour and frenzy of the city. Alongside the track there are graffitied walls and flats with sun-awnings, and from a balcony at the top of a block of flats someone has hung a sheet that says ‘Tuck Capitalist Overkill’ in shaky black letters.At Hackescher Markt we find the tram stop out of the back of the station.
