On your marks

Keen for a change after six fantastic years of living and working in London, my boyfriend and I have taken a break and moved to Berlin. And while our days are now very different from the fast-paced and action-packed lives we led just two weeks ago, running - and my approach to it - is one thing that has pretty much stayed the same. I always hated running on a treadmill in the gym (Come Dine with Me may be entertaining but essentially you are going nowhere) as much as I hated the hour it took me to cover the six mile commute from Westminster to Dalston.

Initially, running home was a time-efficient way of killing two birds with one stone, and allowing me to justify the bottle of wine I bought at the end - a sweaty and out-of-breath girl handing over her change to a bemused shopkeeper. But over time I became addicted to the different views of London my different routes to and from work would give me. Butchers drinking outside Smithfields market at 6am, canal boats along the Lea Valley and even the evening rush-hour around Holborn are not marked on the tourist trail, but they perhaps give a better insight into what London life is like. So as I run through Berlin, this blog will mark where I've been and what I've seen. And my routes will create a bigger picture over time.

This first post is a very short run around the block of where we are staying for the first month - Libauer Straße 12 in Friedrichshain and just near Berlin's equivalent of Shoreditch. Although it has become more upmarket since we fell upon it by chance nearly seven years ago, its outdoor cafes-cum-restaurants-cum-bars (depending on what time of day you rock up) are pretty high up on my list of a perfect place to hang out in the summer.

On the way down to the bars from the station (Warschauer Straße) there is a photo-machine which always has a queue of friends outside waiting to get a physical momento of their night out which won't get lost among the tons of images uploaded onto Facebook every Sunday morning. My boyfriend and I have photos from here when we first came to check out Berlin last year. And out current landlord has some of him and his girl framed in the hallway. Has anyone under 30 not got one of these in their purse of wallet?