I went to Berlin and didn't speak German. What's even worse is that I didn't really try that hard, either.
It all started to go wrong at the hotel reception. The immaculate staff at the Amano spoke perfect English, I'm not talking the level of English you'd expect in a decent hotel, I mean the kind of English where you can't even place the speaker's native accent.
My travelling companion gave it a better shot that I did, at least making attempts in cafes to order in German. But when the staff clocked that we weren't German, they switched to English. In quite a few cases, they were English (or American) themselves.
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