We set our alarms to make sure we’re up in time to get to the station for our first train of the day, but needn’t have worried. The bad sound insulation to our room means we can hear the conversation of the other B&B guests in the kitchen and this serves to wake us up on time.
We have breakfast and chat briefly to Frank, the owner, about our time in Amsterdam and the next leg of our journey. Alice writes a post-it note about the B&B to add to his collection of messages from previous guests while Scotty carries out the final packing of the bags, and then we’re off.
Hauling the suitcase up and down the many cobbled bridges of Amsterdam isn’t exactly fun, but we make it to the station with plenty of time to spare. We buy a sandwich for later, and go up to the platform in the hope of taking a photo by the platform sign. We walk the entire length of the platform – quite a long distance considering the immense length of Dutch trains – before we find one right where the platform ends.
You may be wondering why we went to such lengths to find a platform sign. Well, it’s all about continuity. Part of the idea of this trip was for us to get to Sziget ‘the slow way’, and so on every travel day Scotty will be wearing his Sziget t-shirt in order to get a picture by the platform signs. By the time we eventually get to Budapest, we’ll have put together a full photo-diary at every station along the way.
Our train pulls in. It’s a double-decker train, and as Alice hasn’t been on one before we opt for the top deck. It’s only a 20 minute journey to the small station at Hilversum where the international trains pass through from the airport, but we see enough windmills to keep the Dutch stereotypers in business for a long time.
Changing at the curiously small station at Hilversum – curious considering it’s Amsterdam’s main international terminal – we’re struck by the number and make-up of other people on the platform. Virtually everyone is in their late teens or early twenties, and they all have backpacks and one of the plethora of ‘Europe on a budget’ books. Scotty thinks back to the times he went InterRailing around Europe, and highlights some of the differences, starting with the enormous amount of pointless ‘stuff’ they all seem to be carrying. Most, if not all, have impractical headwear – a pork pie hat and large over-the-head headphones made one particular guy stand out. That and his immaculately tended fringe that suggests he also carries a large amount of styling gel as well. What happened to a cap, a t-shirt and a pair of zip-off trousers (so you had trousers and shorts)?
The number of people backpacking also seems to have grown exponentially. We muse on the possibility that there’s so many of them because Amsterdam is held in such awe by students, but it’s still a lot more than we really thought possible. Virtually all of them are also travelling in large groups. ‘Back in the day’ the majority were solo travellers who only joined other people when they were in a city. Perhaps group package holidays are no longer popular with the young crowd, and they’ve broken off to slum it around Europe’s major cities for a few weeks instead. There’s certainly been an enormous growth in the amount of cheap accommodation available. 10 years ago you were hard-pressed to find a Youth Hostel let alone any other kind of budget place to sleep, but now Youth Hostels themselves are losing out to enormous pack-‘em-in hostels with their own bars and clubs where you don’t even need to do your own washing up. These kids don’t know they’re born!
As our train to Germany arrives, though, the end of the platform begins to clear. We paid a very small extra fee for First Class on this journey since it’s a long trip and we knew we’d appreciate the legroom. All the backpackers – bar a bunch of Canadians in chino shorts and polo shirts – move down to the Standard Class carriages. At least that part of InterRailing hasn’t changed.
We board the train – a German InterCity – and find that our seats are in a small compartment with four other, separated by a sliding glass door from a corridor that runs down the carriage. The other seats remain empty for about 75% of the journey, though, so we certainly feel we’ve got our money’s worth on this trip. We take advantage of the time to catch up on the blog, read ahead in our guide to Berlin, and check today’s Guardian newspaper on the Kindle. Technology has certainly made modern travelling a different experience to what it had been!
We realise we’ve passed into Germany thanks to text messages from Orange, our phone company in the UK, telling us their roaming tariffs. I look out of the window and notice that the car number plates have changed. And at the next station – the first stop in Germany – the border police board the train and check our passports. We realise that despite still feeling ‘young’ and being dressed in jeans and t-shirts we must be the model of respectability compared to the Canadian backpackers in the next door compartment, who have their bags searched for drugs from Amsterdam. As a 17 year old, flying to visit my cousin in Boston, I had to fly via Schipol airport and remember being pulled to one side and searched for drugs before boarding the plane. They did the same at the other end. Clearly a 17 year old in a leather jacket and with stubble is the kind of person who traffics illegal narcotics.
The journey continues in comfort. Despite having spent 4 hours on the train from
Hilversum, our arrival in Hannover to change onto the high-speed ICE train to Berlin seems to come about quickly.
The new train is sleek and silver. We’re in a normal carriage rather than a compartment, but as it’s still First Class there are only 3 seats alongside each other rather than 4, resulting in more space to spread out. There’s also loads of legroom.
We order a hot drink from the waitress – we have to pay for it, but it’s still nice to have it served to you at your seat and in a mug rather than a paper cup – and settle down to another 2.5 hours of travelling. Although the waitress later comes to collect our mugs, Alice somehow ‘forgets’ to hand hers back, and so we’re now the proud owners of a DB Bahn mug. I guess it makes up for paying for the tea.
Alice notices that electronic screen at the end of the carriage gives various updates on the progress of the journey, and points out the bit where it says we’re travelling at 200km/h. Everything else, though, is gibberish to me. I only studied German for one year at school (I opted to stick with French at GCSE) and so other than occasional numbers and some of the more common nouns I’m at a complete loss regarding both what I read and what’s said to me. Alice is also struggling a bit. Despite studying German for GCSE she’s stuck in Arabic – the, now, default foreign language/tourist mode – and keeps racking her brain to get German words in.
This isn’t, on the whole, a new experience for me. Living in Egypt has taught me to accept my illiteracy, and value the few words in spoken language that I can pick out. The difference is that in Cairo I look like I don’t speak Arabic. Here, I look the same as everyone else. And so the assumption – quite understandably – is that I also speak German, which I don’t. I was proud of remembering how to ask for a coffee on the train, but when I was offered a complimentary book of poems I was completely flummoxed. I also inadvertently passed up the chance of a free chocolate and a warm wet-wipe as we travelled through the German countryside that was littered with wind turbines and solar panels. If anything, it’s made me aware that I’ve become perhaps a little bit lazy in my attitude to foreign languages as a result of the inaccessibility of Arabic in Egypt. Believe me, we’ve tried to learn the language (and paid a lot of money for the privilege) and we feel we can ‘get by’. Compared to others – some who have lived in Egypt a lot longer than us – our level of spoken Arabic is impressive. But at the same time we know that there’s an unspoken agreement that if the person we’re dealing with can’t speak English, our conversation will mainly be conducted through mime and pointing. Outside Amsterdam – where English is the most common language as a result of the small number of native Dutch speakers – the assumption that you can speak the local language as opposed to them needing to switch to English is very clear indeed.
Despite this, we make it to Berlin’s amazing Hauptbahnhof just 10 minutes behind schedule.
The station is a piece of modernist brilliance. It feels like you’ve arrived in a massive spaceport – all shiny metal and escalators. There’s lots of glass, too, and loads of flashing lights. It’s like a cross between a Star Destroyer and the city in Blade Runner. And we’ve not even left the platform yet.
We make our way outside – somehow climbing three stories in the process – and locate the bus that will take us to our hotel. We do our best to follow the route on our map, but trust the hotel’s directions that ‘the bus stops directly outside our front door’. They weren’t lying. A few minutes later we’ve checked in and made it to our room which, as is often the case for us, is as far away from the lifts as possible.
It’s at about this point that we realise one of the wheels of our suitcase is already becoming very loose on its axle. Clearly the cobbles and bridges of Amsterdam did more than just wear me out! I’m not convinced the wheel will last the full trip, but there’s nothing we can do about it other than give it the occasional kick and so we’ll just have to trust to the gods of music festivals and hope it holds up.
Knowing we’re in the hotel for three nights, we take advantage of this extended ‘drying time’ and become all domestic by doing some laundry. The theory is that as long as we keep on top of it, there’ll always be something clean in the limited clothing supply we’ve brought with us.
Having hung the clothes to dry, we now want to get out and explore. Actually, we want to get out and have some food (it’s gone 7pm by this point) and so we grab the map and head out. Crossing the road and walking down the street opposite, we spy an enormous dome with a huge gold cross. Just next to it is a tall pointy tower with a ball on it. Consulting the map, we realise that these are the Berlin Dome (i.e. the Cathedral) and the famous TV tower. We had absolutely no idea that we were staying this close to them, nor that the ‘sights’ of Berlin were such short distances away from each other. Considering we’d been weighing up the necessity of buying a multi-day travel pass, the fact that we managed to circumnavigate half of central Berlin’s most notable architecture in a gentle 30 minute stroll was quite a revelation.
We eventually stopped to eat at a restaurant behind Alexanderplatz. Alice was excited because it was ‘German cuisine’, which meant sausages. Settling down at a table in the square, we congratulate ourselves on a good day’s travelling and at choosing a restaurant with enough pork to sink a battleship (no offence intended, Bismarck). While the photos below shows Scotty posing with a beer that would do the cartoons proud, Alice is delighted at the feast that awaits her with sausages, bacon, pork steak, mashed potato and sauerkraut piled up in front of her.
What a great start to our time in Berlin. It’s just an enormous shame that the weather forecast is for torrential rain for the next three days!
No comments:
Post a Comment