Packing for Berlin

This blogpost is a response to the one Avi wrote a few weeks ago about his travel essentials. While he focused mainly on his carry on items I will share my practices for packing in general.

The occasion is that I recently flew to Berlin where I met with him for the first time since our team building at the Bulgarian sea side.

The items that I take with me no matter where I go are my phone and computer so I stay in touch with the world and my running gear so I keep up with my training schedule.

n order to keep my things tidy throughout a trip I pack everything in organisers. T-Shirts in one compartment, running clothes in another and so on.

Avi is into rollerblading ever since I know him and we had plans of discovering a piece of Berlin on wheels so this time I also took my skates with me. Since we attended a bunch of meetings with strict dress code I also took my suit (not on the picture above) which I put on only a few times a year. Non of these qualify as travel essentials for me though.

Besides being organised the other basic principle is to stick to the necessary minimum. I try not to take stuff with low probability of eventually wearing or using. I also adjust the travel inventory to the timeframe of the trip and the wether forecast at the destination city. As you can see below we pretty much used everything we took with us.

The travel inventory of my latest trip was roughly as follows:

Clothes

• t-shirts
• jeans
• underwear
• sweatshirt and hoodie
• waterproof jacket that goes with the suit as well if necessary
• cap

Sport gear

• running shoes
• running clothes
• gps enabled sport watch (check out the logs of our morning run)
• sport glasses
• skates
• sport cream

Electronic devices

• computer with charger
• phone with charger
• thunderbolt to ethernet adapter
• headphones (usually I take a self powered portable speaker as well, but since Avi took his Braven with him it was pointless to take another speaker)

Tooth brush and tooth paste

Suit (I guess no need to elaborate on this one)

Miscellenious

• notebook and pen
• business cards
• pc banking tokens
• wallet, ID card, bank cards and some cash
• passport
• sunglasses
• vitamins
• Swiss army knife

Parallel to our trip we managed to make a good progress with the user interface of Mellow, our collaborative photo database application. Stay tuned for a sneak peak of the UI.