6am – 9am: do not go to the hostel

Your bed will not be ready and the common room at seven in the morning is a room of people in your exact situation, which helps nobody. Take the S-Bahn to Warschauer Straße and leave your bag in a locker there instead. Berlin transit runs a single ticket across S-Bahn, U-Bahn, tram, and bus. Buy a day pass at the machine, validate it once in the yellow box, and stop thinking about tickets for the rest of this list.

Walk out onto the Oberbaumbrücke while it is still empty. It was a border crossing until 1989, which is not obvious now and is the whole point of standing on it.

9am – noon: breakfast is a real institution here

Berlin takes breakfast more seriously than dinner, and it is served until roughly two in the afternoon on the reasonable assumption that you may have had a long night. Find a café in Kreuzberg doing a proper Frühstücksteller: bread, soft cheese, cured meat, a boiled egg, jam, and coffee that keeps coming. It costs about ten euros and it will carry you until evening.

Nobody will rush you. Sitting for two hours with one coffee is not tolerated here so much as expected.

Noon – 4pm: the East Side Gallery, then somewhere with grass

The East Side Gallery is a kilometre of the Wall left standing and painted, and it is crowded and worth it anyway. Walk it once, quickly, without stopping for photographs of the famous panel. Then get out.

Cross into Treptower Park or, if you have the energy, take the U-Bahn to Tempelhofer Feld, a decommissioned airport whose runways are now a public park. People cycle down the tarmac where planes used to land. It is the strangest and most Berlin thing on this itinerary, and it is free.

4pm – 8pm: sleep, seriously

Check in and sleep for two hours. This is the item people skip and then regret at eleven at night. Berlin does not start until late; you have time.

8pm onward: dinner, and knowing when to stop

Eat at a Döner counter in Neukölln or a Vietnamese place in Friedrichshain. Both are better and cheaper than anything targeting visitors, and both will feed you for under ten euros. After that, the honest advice: if this is your only night and you have been awake since a five a.m. flight, do not attempt the club everyone told you about. The queue alone is two hours and the door will read your exhaustion before you reach the front.

Go to a bar in Kreuzberg instead, stay until one, and come back for the rest another time. Berlin is not going anywhere.