How to read your Berlin dates

Most Berlin advice is written for a generic week. Your trip lands on specific days, and those days decide what you can actually do. Museums on Museum Island close on Mondays. Regular shops shut all day on Sunday, with bakeries, kiosks and the station malls at Hauptbahnhof, Alexanderplatz, Friedrichstrasse and Zoologischer Garten as the usual exceptions. Public holidays close shops citywide and put transport on a Sunday timetable.

Some windows matter before you even land. The Reichstag dome is free but registration only, and it fills first. Museum Island timed slots tighten in summer. Big city dates change the picture too: the marathon weekend closes the centre in late September, the Festival of Lights fills the evenings in October, Christmas markets soften the Sunday rule from late November, and New Year's Eve reroutes the whole centre.

The checker above reads your exact dates and tells you what closes, what to book by when, how much daylight you get, and whether my walking tour runs while you are here. It is free, and there is no email wall: the whole result is on this page.