Day 8: Warsaw

It may be a Sunday, but this doesn’t mean we’re having a rest day. Having read so much about Warsaw in the days leading up to our arrival yesterday, and having had such a nice evening out, we’re keen to get around and see as much as we can of this city.

The weather outside looks promising, but we strap the waterproofs to the bag as it’s meant to be rainy on and off during the day. Instead of heading east into the Old Town and main tourist area of Warsaw we’re instead walking west and heading towards what we’ve heard is the best museum in Warsaw; the Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego (the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising).

Our first challenge is to cross the main road that runs north-south through the centre of Warsaw. It’s called the Al Jana Pawla II and it’s the first of many things we’ll come across named in honour of Poland’s favourite son. We’re being extra careful here to cross the road in the right place (zebra crossing of course) and at the right time (with the little green man – who is nice, but not as iconic as the one in Berlin). We’ve read that you can get fined in Poland for jaywalking and don’t want to fall foul of the law because of the way Cairo has conditioned us into crossing the street.

We arrive at the museum and the area around it is definitely busy. Probably because it is a weekend, but maybe also because today there is free entry. From reading around we’ve found that nearly every museum has a “free entry” day once a week. It’s a good idea and one that we’re happy to take advantage of, even though we would have gladly paid for the exhibits we’re seeing today. In the UK the policy towards museums is that central funding should make as many of them free to enter as possible. In Egypt it is that there should be two prices; one for tourists and one for Egyptians. The policies in all three countries are great ways of encouraging people to get involved and visit museums.

It’s busy inside, but nothing compared to the the DDR Museum in Berlin. It takes a little bit of getting used to to navigate our way around, but soon we have a map that we follow and keep an eye out for the street numbers which point the way to the next section of the exhibition.

We learn a lot in this visit, thanks to the good displays and segmenting of information (large info boards at the start of each section, medium sized boards for each subsection and then more detailed information for artefacts and photographs to illustrate the subsections). But we’re also learning a lot because the museum focuses on an area of history during World War 2 that although we (well, Scotty at least) know of, we don’t appreciate the detail of what actually took place.

The Warsaw Uprising was the uprising of the people and army of Poland within the German occupied Warsaw in 1944. People who had been part of the Polish army were joined by civilians who were also willing to help get rid of the occupying forces. It wasn’t just men and boys involved, though, as everyone played a part whether it was providing medical care, getting food and water, making improvised weapons (the only weapons they otherwise had really were those they took from captured Nazi troops or buildings), or being message ‘runners’ through the streets. The German response to the uprising was first one of simply defence, but then a policy came of ‘if we can’t have it, they can’t either’ and there was the active destruction of buildings by the army. What was astounding was seeing pictures of central Warsaw with only a few buildings left standing. By the end of the war over 80% of Warsaw was in ruins. The numbers, and the images, were staggering.

The Uprising wasn’t successful in that it ended with troops conceding to the Germans and being taken to concentration camps – many found themselves in Auswitz. But what the stories in the museum did show were that Polish people, and especially the people of Warsaw, were very proud of what they had achieved – which is very strongly saying ‘we won’t go down without a fight’.

We found the museum fascinating and were musing on our new knowledge and understanding when we left. In the courtyard outside things again seemed busy – we’d not known a museum before have so many security guards and men in suits with earpieces for communications. Our first though is ‘maybe this is what they do here’, but our second is ‘what date is it?’ and we quickly realise that today is the closest Sunday to the start of the Uprising. Looking around we now see about half a dozen older gentlemen in their suits wearing a the red and white WP armband, which shows that they were part of the resistance in the uprising. With the veterans here there’s only one person missing from a significant event and soon a car pulls into the square in front of the museum and there is a small surge of people towards it with cameras as the passengers get out. The President has arrived.

As we leave the museum we pass the garden which runs alongside it. It is set up for the event with a stage, screens and seating. It’s touching to be here, visiting and gaining understanding on such an important day for the city. What we’ll find over the next few days is that celebrations will continue and the Warsaw Uprising, in a way, will be a common thread running through our experience here.

As we walk back towards the central area of town, we take a small detour down some side-streets.  The area here was the former Jewish Ghetto, and hidden behind the new buildings lie the dilapidated ruins of the original tenements.  Earlier we’d passed a plaque indicating an entry point to the Ghetto, but this was heart of it.  There’s no sign – other than the abandoned courtyards behind chained fences – that this part of town held such of dark history, although on one of the street fronts we do see a tenement building surrounded by new builds.

It’s past noon now and we walk back towards the main tourist area. Our sights are set on the PNiK tower and we make our way towards it. The guides were right that it is a landmark to help you find your way in the city, but we’re also enjoying the descriptions of it being like something out of Ghostbusters! We cross the road, marked with a zebra crossing designed to look like a piano keyboard, and try to find our way inside.

 

The building and the complex surrounding it are huge – it takes us 15 minutes to circumnavigate just half of the base and find the way in to the tower.  On our way round we pass a multi-screen cinema, two theatres, a concert hall, and a nightclub.  This truly is a palace of culture, but it’s time for lunch so we start to formulate a plan: go up the PNiK, get lunch in the cafe there, then decide what to do next. The plan seems like a good one but is then foiled on two accounts. The first is that what were blue skies all morning are now turning grey in the distance, and the second is that by the time we reach the top it’s more of a ‘cup of tea and chocolate bar’ cafe than anything lunch-worthy. We’re here now, though, so we enjoy being on the viewing platform of Poland’s tallest building.

 

The viewing platform is on the 30th floor – way below the very top of the structure – but still far enough up to have a good view over Warsaw.  Or at least it would be a good view if it wasn’t for the dark clouds beginning to envelope us and block the horizon!  Before long it begins to rain and, having found that the summit cafe and gift shop are barely worth a couple of minutes’ of our time, we take the lift back down again.  I should clarify that we took the lift up, as well.  Sat on a stool inside is a rather dour and miserable woman who looks up as the doors open, then carries on with her text messaging.  It seems somehow perfectly Communist to employ this poor woman to spend all day pressing the buttons for up and down.

Outside it is completely bucketing it down, so we take a seat on the base of one of the Greco-Roman columns to work out a plan.  We know we need to find lunch, and decide to head down the major-looking road on the other side of the enormous car park/parade ground.  During a period when the rain eases, we head across to find that there is absolutely nowhere to eat other than McDonalds – obviously Warsaw is not a place for sandwich lunches!  With the rain picking up again, we reluctantly go inside and chew over our lunch while the rain continues to come down.  Two motorbikers, their bikes heavily laden, pull in under a tree – one with a Spanish number plate, the other with Turkish – and they too take shelter inside.

As the rain eases, again, we choose to head further down the road towards Nowy Swiat and check out the ‘other end’ of the main street from the Old Town.  We’d read about an are known as the Secret Garden hidden through a small courtyard off the main drag, and which houses lots of dive bars.  We don’t, however, make it that far.  The rain picks up again – truly hammering down – and we are forced inside.  We have luckily stopped directly opposite Warsaw’s other major brewpub, Beirhalle, and so decide to shelter inside.  It’s not as easy as it sounds, though, because we have to walk about 100m down the road to a road crossing first, and then all the way back up the other side to the brewpub directly opposite where we were standing.  We don’t want to take any risks with being charged for jaywalking!

The brewpub is filling up with other people who have the same idea.  We each order a drink, and settle down for what could be a very long wait indeed.  Virtually all traffic on the roads has stopped.  The only vehicles still out are buses, and they have their windscreen wipers going at full speed.  People huddle together under the scaffolding opposite in an attempt to shelter from the downpour.  This is truly an almighty storm, complete with bright flashes of lightning and deep rumbling thunder.  The TV in the pub is showing the Hungarian Grand Prix (it’s wet there, but nothing like here).  After a few minutes, however, the picture becomes choppy and eventually disappears altogether – although we originally thought it was the bar’s satellite dish that had lost reception, it turns out that the Polish national TV station was unable to broadcast due to the severity of the storm and had its own satellites knocked out.  By the time service is resumed it’s just three pundits trying to fill time while they attempt to recover the incoming pictures from Hungary.  When they do, all that are shown are the finishing positions from 11 onwards…we’ve missed the top results due to the storm!

 

The beers here are not bad, but not as good as those we sampled the previous day in BrowArmia. Although this is technically a brewpub we suspect that the size of the premises, and absence of any brewing equipment, means that they do the actual brewing on the site of the other brewpub in the mini-chain which is more on the edge of town. However, at the door there is a fridge containing a lovely looking array of brown bottles with simple stickers on the front. Take-away homebrew! We contemplate getting a few, and later slightly regret not doing so – they would’ve tasted lovely during the radio show broadcast from our hotel room.

The rain continues to lash down, but it’s mid-afternoon and we don’t want to spend the rest of the day sitting in a pub watching intermittent sports coverage.  So, as there is a slight reduction in the rain (although not a complete halt) we decide to don our wet-weather gear and head back to the hotel.  It’s a miserable trek, as the rain soon becomes heavy again, and we feel water seeping through every part of our clothing.

Back at the hotel we throw our soaking jackets into the bath while we change the rest of our clothes.  Leaving everything to dry, we reach out the netbook and prepare for our weekly radio broadcast.  We move the two sitting chairs and coffee table to face out of the window, and open the curtains for a view of the PNiK in the rain.  The show runs smoothly, or at least as smoothly as a radio show broadcast from a netbook using a single microphone can be smooth.  You can take a listen to the show by clicking the link below.

Sziget The Slow Way – Part 2 – Berlin and Warsaw

With the show finished we pack away the stuff and prepare to head out for dinner.  Although we’re tempted to take advantage of the hotel restaurant, and save ourselves a further soaking, we decide to at least walk a few metres down the road to a place called Five.  Alice cracks a joke about it being an eatery operated by the failed boyband, but on entering we find that it’s a very classy and very nice place.  It’s on the ground floor of one of the towering 1960s Communist prefabs, but it is so well renovated you wouldn’t realise it.  The service is slick and snappy; the food is divine.  Everything considered, the price is unbelievable and the waiter knows it.  As he hands us the bill he winks and asks, “A good price, yes?”

Day 7: Berlin to Warsaw

Our alarm wakes us up and, although it’s a shame to be leaving Berlin (so much more to explore, like getting out to the Olympic Stadium, seeing more of West Berlin and exploring more small bars and Brauhauses), at least we aren’t missing much in terms of the weather; it’s still raining outside.

We finish packing, check-out and then are soon outside by the bus stop. It’s been a really great hotel in terms of location – much closer than we thought to all the sites we wanted to see around the Museum Island and on a bus route directly from the station. At the station we have half an hour before the train so get some breakfast in a coffee/croissant deal. We’re paying where we can with our Post Office credit card (no commission) but this place cheekily changes the currency into GBP before the transaction. We’ve come across this before, in France, where some businesses are able to use their own currency converter to change the price into your own currency. Might be useful for some people, but for us we know it’s not as good a deal.  Behind us, the TV news features a story that – although we don’t understand the subtitles – has pictures of a lot of umbrellas, a lot of rain, and a lot of miserable people (including a damp queue of people on Museum Island – they must’ve just missed us from the frame!).  We assume it’s a comment on the unseasonable weather we’ve been experiencing.

We’re in a compartment again for this journey, and have it to ourselves for the first 45 minutes.  As the train is leaving the station we ride across town through the grey of Berlin’s concrete housing blocks.  Away from the cultural quarter where we were staying, East Berlin really does seem to conform to the architecture you expect.  Identical high-rise buildings gather around concrete gardens.  The small stations are square and squat.  The miserable weather adds to the effect.

As we pass into Poland our mobile phones begin chirping with text messages from Orange again.  We begin to regret deleting them before taking a photo, because they’re a fun little record of our journey.  But the truth is they’re a complete pain – every change of country has triggered three texts to each of us, but they haven’t all come through at the same time.  Both in Amsterdam and in Berlin mine have arrived at about 1am: not the best wake up call when you’re fast asleep!

The high rainfall is evident from the flooded rivers we go over.  In one place we see a small group of trees submerged.  It certainly explains the high flow rate of the Spree when we were in Berlin.  It was causing white water as it came through one particular weir, and on our last night was bashing moored boats against the quay.

Once in Poland the number of people getting on and off the train increases, as do the number of ticket checks.  A man circulates the train with his cart of snacks and drinks.  He peers through the door and begins a stream of Polish.  It sounds so unlike anything else we’ve heard on route – French, Flemish, Dutch, German – and we begin to realise that the Polish phrasebook borrowed from the Ps will probably come in very handy.

At one point our compartment is full, and the unlucky people in the centre seats without a table or arm rest do an intricate dance to buy coffee, take off the lid, pour in the milk, stir, and then reseal the cup without anything to rest it on.  Our offers of the tables near us are met with knowing smirks as we show that the tables don’t go flat and would be more of a hindrance than a help to their coffee preparations.

We pass a very large amount of farmland.  Enormous fields stretch into the distance – some growing crops while others house a range of animals.  The housing, on the whole, is little different to what we’ve seen on the rest of the journey east, but in the larger villages and towns we pass there are noticeably more square concrete constructions. On the rural side though things are a lot more basic, with some dilapidated barns and single track crossings of the railway line.

We pull into Warsaw Central station just after 3pm and take our platform sign photo beside the train.  Others do the same – either everyone has the same idea, or we’ve started a trend.

We make our way up to the main concourse. We’ve read up in the Lonely Planet that signage isn’t Warsaw’s strong point and we must agree that it isn’t clear that you have to go up a second set of stairs to leave the station. Nor is it clear where the ticket office is once you are at ground level, and we find ourselves on the street being directed back inside through a different door before we start seeing something that resembles a ticket hall / concourse. Inside there is a row of windows and a snake of people waiting to be seen. We spy a Travel Centre and an Information Centre so head in the opposite direction as we’d read that the Travel Centre has English speakers to help you book your tickets – would the queues here be even longer then?

We take a number in the Travel Centre and start to wait our turn. Hoping that it won’t take the “hour” quoted in one guide book to book the tickets Alice pops off to the Information Centre to see if they have any maps – Warsaw is the one city on our journey for which we have no map. The main tourist information centre has been moved apparently during the building work in the station and so this place is very limited and seems to have information on hiring a car and physical activities in Warsaw – nothing of use to us.

Meanwhile our number has been called quicker than expected and Scotty is up at the counter. We’ve two journeys that we need to book tickets for; a local trip of Warsaw to Krakow and then our international trip of Krakow to Bratislava. We ask about the Krakow to Bratislava first, as this is our international trip and so justifies our use of the international booking office! It’s confusing with the dates (as it’s in fact our second trip in Poland, not first, so is six days away rather than just three) and Alice comes back from browsing to help out with this process. The adviser wants to sell the overnight train from Krakow to Bratislava, but as we’ve pre-booked hotels everywhere we want to travel during the day. My last (and only) experience on a sleeper train doesn’t endear me to the idea of changing our plans. The journey will take 8 hours which will be a full day, but at least it will get us there. The price isn’t bad, either, and we’re able to pay by card (Post Office commission free credit card is a life saver with all our travels!). As we get up to leave we ask if it is possible to book the local train here too, although we assume we’ll have to join the queues and flick our way through the Polish phrase book (borrowed from the P’s who bought it when they had a cleaner for a while who was Polish) to negotiate the ticket. Luckily we can put off attempts to speak the language a little longer as it turns out we can book the domestic train here too. The journey will be just three hours and will get us into Krakow around lunchtime.  We begin to formulate a plan for the next stage of the trip (arrive, dump the bag at the hotel, walk into the historic centre for lunch) but we quickly move back to the present and the fact that we are in a new city and now ready to explore.

We leave the station and find our way to the main road by means of a printed Google map and street signs. The author of the In Your Pocket guide we have been reading is a huge fan of the street signs in Warsaw.  Not only are they colour-coded for each district of the city, but many also list the building numbers and direction of numbering for the block you are in to help you avoid travelling miles in the wrong direction down the long streets.

When booking our trip, Warsaw was just one of the names that came up as a city we wanted to visit.  It seemed to fit in with the train connections map, so it quickly became part of the itinerary. When we started speaking to other people, though, we realised that it wasn’t a ‘staple’ on the Europe circuit in the way that our other choices were. In fact, when talking to people about it we couldn’t really justify our choice beyond “we want to go” and “it sounds interesting” as we hadn’t really read much and so didn’t know much about the city at all. We then started hearing from people about the concrete jungle that the city had become after the Nazi occupation, and that there wasn’t anything to do there, or anything of interest. It was also proving difficult to find a map of the city – a quick visit to Standfords in Covent Garden had sourced pop-out maps for all our other cities (apart from Bratislava for which we found a guide book at the P’s), but nothing for Warsaw. We started to wonder if we’d made the wrong decision. Just a few days before arriving we began to think that if there’s nothing of interest we can at least find a cafe somewhere and catch up on the blog! But then the night before our trip, and then again on the train journey from Berlin, we started to look at a PDF we’d found on Warsaw and the random In Your Pocket PDF recommended in the Grauniad, and things started to change. Suddenly we were reading about a city with an amazing history that spanned its people and its buildings.  We couldn’t wait to explore and see for ourselves.

So it was with this in mind that we set off from the station towards the hotel – would we see this city as grey, concrete and lifeless, or as the heart of a country torn apart by war and then rebuilt with passion?

We had decided to walk from the station to the hotel as although there were two trams that ran the route, we would only be taking them one stop (one block) and then would need to walk another block to the hotel.  We set off and notice that the buildings are grey and mainly concrete, but also notice a lot of building activity and a lot of newer builds in glass with a dash of chrome. It’s clear from the glass and the neon signs on top of the buildings that a lot of international companies and brands are moving into the capital.

We find the hotel with ease (and without the wheel on the case falling off – bonus) and quickly remember why we were looking forward to this place – it had only been half a dozen Euros extra each night to upgrade from a standard room without breakfast to a business room with breakfast: bargain. The front desk offer us a further upgrade to a suite, but with just one case we don’t think we can justify separate rooms for sleeping and living! We’re also offered a list of newspapers to receive as part of the package and, although the Kindle is serving our news appetites well with the Kindle Guardian edition, we opt for a hard copy – it is free after all.

We are finally checked-in but before we go on our way the front desk asks us if we’d like a map of the city. We’d been hoping he’d ask this as we hadn’t visited the Tourist Information on the way to the hotel. The receptionist is excellent and goes way beyond simply handing us a map. He gives us a hard copy guide book of the city as well as a map, and then highlights the important areas to visit; the main touristic street of Nowy Swiat, the Old Town, the Palace of Culture (which he notes is a good way marker as you can see it from most places in town) and Park Lazienkowski, which he tells us is, in his opinion, the most beautiful area of Warsaw.  He also points out the XXX which is a fountain in the public park, and tells us that we’re in luck as tonight they have a multimedia light show starting at 9.30pm This guy has been great!

Up in the room as notice three things.  The first is that we definitely didn’t need the upgrade as the room is pretty big already; the second is that our window gives a direct view onto the Palace of Culture everyone has been talking about. Some call it an eye-sore, others the "elephant in frilly knickers” (?) but this ‘gift’ from Stalin and the people of the Soviet Union to the people of Warsaw is definitely iconic. It looks like the Empire State Building with Big Ben plonked on top in the gothic style of something you’d see in Ghostbusters.  Third, we find that ‘business class’ rooms come with a Nespresso machine.  Having never heard of these, let alone used one, we use the hotel WiFi to read the instructions but shy away from making a coffee as we can’t find any milk!

It’s late afternoon and we decide that we want to see this fountain light show, but don’t want to head off exploring too much too soon.  It is, after all, raining.  Having been sat on a train for the best part of 6 hours we decide to take advantage of the hotel gym for a bit and so head downstairs.  It’s the first time Scott has run since tendonitis flared up in his ankle, but a gentle 20-minute run feels good and gives us both a chance to stretch our legs after the day’s travelling.

We shower and decide it’s time to head out.  Knowing that we want to arrive in time for the multimedia fountain show at 9.30, we decide to walk first to the main tourist street to grab some food.  We’ve read about a couple of microbreweries here in Warsaw, and decide to try one out.  We arrive at BrowArmia to find a canopy over the street packed with people who got there before us.  A man with a guitar is setting up a lot of sound equipment under some red lights, and we are shown to a table a row back from the street.  It turns out that this is a good place to be, as it soon starts raining again and the people nearest the street get a good soaking.

The menu opens to a list of beers.  It seems that either (a) they only brew on rotation and consequently only have certain brews in stock or (b) they’ve sold out of a lot of stuff.  We settle on a Pils and a Marzenbrau – a German summer brew– and find each of them flavoursome and with superb body.  It’s impossible to compare them to the microbrewery in Berlin as they’re different styles, but we’d happily drink lots more of both.

Having subjected our bodies to an onslaught of pork and potatoes over the last week, we each decide that it’s time for something different.  Scott orders pasta with beef, and Alice gets salmon on wild rice.  The food arrives incredibly fast and in enormous portions.  We barely speak to each other as we work our way through the plate, and struggle to finish.  Our plans of an ice cream en-route to the fountain show are most definitely scuppered.

Instead, our walk is marked by the appearance of old men selling umbrellas from tatty suitcases.  They’re doing good business, though we opt to stick with our tried-and-tested combination of waterproof jacket and baseball cap.  Fortunately the rain eases for a while and we’re able to look around at what is happening in the street, which includes a group of very angry looking people handing out newspapers outside a gazebo.  On the side is printed ‘we demand…’ and, funnily enough, a list of demands.  They basically amount to wanting a completely new investigation into the President’s plane that crashed last year.  We wonder if the tape strung between lampposts to stop people walking into the road is connected to this.  Either way, we’re impressed that a length of flimsy plastic tape keeps everyone on the pavement.

We walk past the political slogans and onward toward the Old Town.  It’s a curious moniker, considering its history.  The Old Town does indeed date back to the 12th and 13th centuries, and was enclosed by an impressive fortification.  However, during the Warsaw Uprising (or which you’ll hear much more later) the Nazis systematically destroyed the city – including the Old Town – and reduced it to rubble.  In the years that followed, the people of Warsaw cleared away the ruins and began raising funds to rebuild the city.  From 1973 they did just that.  Using photographs and paintings as their guide, in addition to some surviving architectural plans that had been stolen by the Nazis during the occupation and later retrieved, the entire Old Town was rebuilt just as it had been.  They built on the original foundations and just a couple of years after being completed the entire area was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list as a place where historical architecture had most faithfully and accurately been reconstructed.

We, though, are unable to fully appreciate the extent of the achievement.  In the rain the area doesn’t look quite as impressive as it would do in bright summer sunshine, and so we hope for better weather over the next couple of days.  Instead we walk through the Old Town and trace the edge of a hill until we find a way towards the new fountain park.  Hundreds of people are already streaming towards the same place, and we’re pleased that we gave ourselves enough time to make it there and grab a good spot.  Milling around near the fountains, though, we realise that other groups of people are gathering on the grassy hill above the fountains and we decide to head there instead.  Although not as close to the ‘action’ as we could have been, we gain a commanding view not only of the fountains but also the river and the ring-road.  This doesn’t sound very exciting, but we are taken by surprise when a night-time road race with hundreds of runners begins to head past – that will be why the road was taped off earlier.  It feels as if Warsaw is throwing all its culture at us at the same time and we can’t help feeling that it’s a shame that earlier in the week it failed to be named Europe’s City of Culture 2016.

At 9.30pm exactly all the lights in the park go out, and we hear the fountain begin spraying at an enormous rate.  A video is projected onto the spray, followed by a laser writing an introduction to the show in both Polish and English.  With bombastic orchestral music building to a swell the spray suddenly stops and the various jets of the fountain burst into life.  They’re each lit from beneath with colour-changing lights (it’s amazing what you can do with LEDs these days) and are synchronised with the music.  As well as spurting up to various heights, the jets of water also spin and rotate while changing colour.  The description really doesn’t do the show justice – in total it lasted for half an hour but we could definitely have stayed much, much longer.

     

After the show we walk back up the hill with what appears to be the rest of the population of Warsaw.  There must have been thousands of people watching the show, and they’re all now converging on the medieval streets of the Old Town and the New Town (a strange name, considering it was built in the 15th Century).  Swept along with the crowds we find ourselves in the middle of a square where an artisan food market is being held.  Eventually the crowds thin as we approach the old city walls, and while some people go to their cars parked in the alleyways and backstreets the majority catch the bus or tram.  We, however, walk back to our hotel.  The rain has started again, and after 30 minutes are pleased to be back in our room and able to hang up our clothes to dry!

Before heading to bed, though, we take advantage of the curious cloud-cover to photograph the Palace of Culture at night from our 10th floor window.  It’s lit up with eerie blue and yellow lights, and the tip illuminates the clouds around it.  Yep, it definitely looks like it could have a part in Ghostbusters.

 

Day 6: Berlin

Rain.  Lots and lots and lots of rain.  We get up a bit later than the previous day and so just have a banana and a coffee for breakfast in the room.  We’d already decided on a plan of action for today, knowing it would be wet, and so head back to ‘museum island’ and join the queue for the DDR Museum.

The museum is on the canal-front, on a site where the DDR’s elite used to meet and dine.  It appears, however, that everyone else in Berlin has formulated the same wet-weather plan as us and is similarly queuing to escape the rain inside.  We line up and join the scrum to get into the museum.

It’s a shame, really, that the museum has such a small footprint.  It’s packed with material, virtually all of which is interactive in some way – a Trabant you can get inside; a recreation of a flat inside a DDR apartment block complete with furniture and fittings to be played with. Each area too has information panels or sources that you pull out with various levers and handles – these are great to encourage you too ‘look’ for the information and dig in more depth. The key problem is that a lot of information is hidden in dead-end passageways which, with the sheer number of people currently inside the museum, means it’s a constant battle to see everything.

We are impressed, though.  The museum covers every aspect of life in the DDR in a generally objective way.  It’s notable when we walk round Warsaw a couple of days later that we picked up a lot of knowledge about Communist-era town planning and architecture from the DDR museum.  For someone who teaches the rise and fall of Communism at IGCSE level, it was particularly interesting.  The exam syllabus requires only a fleeting overview of specifics on life under Communism in Eastern Europe that I myself only have a slim knowledge and understanding.  However, although there’s now lots more that I can claim to know about this period of history as a result of our time in the former Eastern Bloc, I doubt that I’ll be able to find (a) the time or (b) the justification to introduce much of it into the classroom.

We spend 2 hours looking around the museum – much longer than we planned – and emerge through the exit door into the museum restaurant.  Looking outside we find that it’s still pouring down with rain, and so opt to eat lunch here.  The menu is fascinating – all ‘classic’ DDR dishes, prepared under the watchful eye of a man who was a sous-chef in the original restaurant 20 years ago.  The restaurant is a superb extension of the museum itself.  The menu has a series of notes for the dishes on offer, describing the origin of the dish and in some cases an explanation of why it was created.  Pork, for example, was often used in the East as a replacement for veal.  Other ‘western’ foods have their own DDR equivalent.  Beef burgers were replaced with pork burgers and given their own name.  Conventional pizzas became square, and again renamed.  Even a DDR cola drink was created, although the menus does highlight that Pepsi had a license to bottle their drink in the DDR but could only sell it to visiting Westerners.

Alice goes for the DDR pizza option (called a ‘krusti’ and with salami she gets her daily does of pork) while I choose to eat Berlin’s most famous cuisine, the curry wurst.  It’s a simple dish of fried, sliced, skinless sausage that is smothered in spicy ketchup and sprinkled with curry powder.  It tastes like a hot dog in cheap ketchup with curry powder.  Perhaps that’s the idea.  I can certainly see its appeal as late-night, post-pub street food but having it for lunch was perhaps not the most sensible choice.

We leave the restaurant and it’s still raining, but the downpour has eased to a drizzle.  The previous night we’d been mulling over the idea of going up the TV tower, and although we’re keen to try it we realise that doing so in such low cloud would be rather pointless.  We do, however, walk around its base.  The plaza surrounding the tower is in the process of being renovated, and we find ourselves weaving through grey concrete corridors to get inside the building.  The place is deserted.  But then we emerge on the other side of the base into a park of the square that has had its refurbishment complete and find it packed with people queuing to go up the tower in the cloud.  Clearly our ability to find ourselves off-the-beaten track has not been affected by the rain.

Around the TV tower we begin to see what Easter Berlin ‘used’ to be like.  Large grey rectangular concrete boxes look out onto grey concrete walkways on which are placed grey rectangular concrete benches.  The regeneration of the area around the Brandenburg Gate up the museum island gives an idea of what the town planners are hoping to achieve with their vision of urban renewal in the old Communist area, but considering they’ve already removed one of the most important DDR-era building in the shape of the palace of culture, I think it would be a terrible shame to remove every last piece of DDR architecture.  The 50 years of Communist rule are an indelible mark on this part of Germany and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, and removing every trace of its existence would – I believe – be an injustice to the people who for so long lived under it.  In the same way that people are now scrabbling to rescue the last few remaining sections of the wall, I fear that when the last prefabricated concrete apartment building falls people will say, “we should have kept one to remember”.

This concept of memory and nostalgia is evident in a shopping mall we visit opposite the TV tower.  We go in on the pretext of buying something with which to make sandwiches on tomorrow’s long journey to Warsaw.  Leaving the supermarket, we wander through the rest of the mall.  A small, squat, darkened bar sits at the centre.  Next door is a shop selling DDR memorabilia.  We buy a map showing Berlin in 1961 after the wall was built – that’s the new addition to the wall display in my classroom.  The owner – clearly excited to have made a sale – told us about a shop upstairs that sold exclusively DDR goods.  Our interest piqued, we find the shelves stocked with all the things we’d seen a couple of hours earlier in the museum.  The companies and factories are still operational, and producing the same things they did at the time.  There’s a buzz of excited sentimentality.  It’s like when we visit an Olde Sweet Shoppe and find all the things we used to have as kids.  Like that, but not quite.  This supermarket – which offers a mail-order service – seems to be the last ‘real’ way to access the items of a society that disappeared almost overnight with reunification and the immediate import of Western goods.

We walk back towards museum island, having decided that we’ll have a snack in one of the cafes.  Through the drizzle we navigate to the side of the New Museum but end up in a dead end of building works when we try to get through to the next museum along. We retrace our steps, take a bridge off the island, walk north and then find another bridge onto the island again, through the building works but giving us access to the Pergamon Museum. We’ve chosen this one as although the Old Museum has the Nefertiti bust, the guide says that this is the better museum overall to visit. The entrance is covered still in building works and we have to follow not the sign for the entrance, but the “no entry” sign of the exit to find the cafe. Normally museum cafes are a good bet for a snack and a tea, but this one is quite pokey and the building works, combined with its near cellar position mean it’s very dark inside. Because of the rain they have cranked up the heat making it a little too warm for comfort. We’ve come too far to turn around and find somewhere else so we order a coffee and some cake each and rest our tired legs.

When we have finished we set off back to the hotel to spend more time off our weary feet before dinner. This isn’t too far a walk and we think again at how pleased we are with the location when we really weren’t so sure about it when we were booking the room.

For dinner we decide to return to the area south and east of museum island where we were last night. It seemed to have a range of little streets and cafes that look like they have potential. On our way we walk past a set of public bikes for hire. They’re like the Boris Bike, and after a while playing with possible puns to give to these, we settle on the Merkel Cycle.

After realising we haven’t got a clue how the bike hire scheme works, we walk on to the Georg Brauhaus again as we want to try their dark beer. The light yesterday was very good and so we have high hopes for the brown. We couldn’t try it yesterday as after 1.5lt of the light we didn’t have space for the dark as well! We order a medium of each and both taste the dark. It’s not dark like a stout, but more of a rich and sweet dark from the malt and sugars. It’s really very yummy and definitely a distinct taste from the light. Mmmmm, we could have more of this but we’ve resolve to try somewhere new and so we get up after our beers, have a final gaze at the large copper mash tun and then head into the street. It seems a lot quieter out tonight than last night and, although this may be because we are out for dinner an hour earlier than we were before, it’s more likely is the damp weather is causing people to stay indoors. While the beer garden was heaving yesterday (we couldn’t get a seat outside) there isn’t a soul on the wet seats but still space indoors for punters.

We walk around a few streets looking at menus and through doors. Everywhere looks quite similar, and the only unique place is called Kartofell House (potato house) so we decide to try this. When we get in the door the waiter is quite dismissive which is a little off-putting, but it does seem busy there so we wait our turn to be seated. For the next five minutes no one comes to seat us.  Another group comes in behind us and we see a couple already seated who are waiting with their menus closed for someone to take their order.  There’s three empty tables, but we’re not seated, and the people who are sat and waiting to order look frustrated.  We’re not impressed and decide to give them two minutes to seat us before we try somewhere else (the restaurant is opposite three others, so it is very easy for us to take our business elsewhere). The time is up and so we leave. We’re soon across the road checking their menus and we spy from the corner of our eye that another two groups/couples have left the place prematurely too.

Opposite is a group of three restaurants that at first glance seem to share a common area, but then on closer inspection they are actually separate. We head to one with a few good German dishes on the menu and this turns out to be a great choice. Inside is a vaulted ceiling, and the windows leaded which creates a really interesting room. The place is a gem and looks to be really quite popular as there are always people coming in the door. The food is great; Alice has something without pork for a change, but it’s braised boar in a wonderfully rich red wine sauce with cranberries and red cabbage. She remarks that having red cabbage over two days makes it feel like Christmas!

Having stumbled upon a really great meal from one that could have been a very mediocre, our night draws a lovely three days exploring Berlin to a close. People have recommended Berlin to us before; saying that we would really love it here, and we have done.  It’s one to ‘add to the list’ for the future.

Day 5: Berlin

It’s raining, but we vow not to let that stop us.

Waking early, we’re out of the hotel before 9am in order to walk to the Reichstag.  For Scott this is a building of some note – he has, after all, taught about events that took place there in quite some depth for the last 7 years.  The reason we set off early to get there is due to a tip in the guidebook that said you should expect massive queues if you arrive too late.

But before reaching the Reichstag we walk down the major boulevard Unter Den Linden with the iconic Brandenberg Gate in the background.  Something about the scene doesn’t seem right, but it’s only when we get there that we realise we’ve been walking from the East side and almost and the photos of the gate are taken from the West.  Now, of course, the wall has been removed and there is an enormous plaza surrounding the gate that used to make up the wasteland between the main wall with the West and the ‘hinterland wall’ blocking off access from the East.  In the photos below, Alice is in what was the East while Scotty is in the West.

 

Around the corner we begin to spy the Reichstag.  The first thing we notice is the enormous glass dome, rebuilt after reunification and now a major symbol of the new Germany.  We notice a winding queuing area marked out in front, fully equipped with X-Ray scanners and burly security guards.  This is, after all, still the main parliament building.  But although we’re sure we’d pass the security checks, getting in is to prove impossible for us today.  Our guidebook is a couple of years old, and the Reichstag have recently begun requiring visitors to pre-book their visit.  It’s a frustrating disappointment, but we take a couple of photos and move on.  Back at the hotel later in the day, Scott looks into whether we could book to go up tomorrow instead.  Easing our disappointment slightly, he finds that the dome is actually closed to visitors for a week’s maintenance while we’re here: even if we had booked in advance we still wouldn’t have been able to climb the dome!

By this point the rain is getting heavier, and we decide to hotfoot it to Potsdamer Platz where we plan to get some breakfast.  We cut through the enormous Tiergarten, the location – as MummyB reminds me – of numerous spy novels, and find lots of people out jogging.  Although the trees are so dense now, the entire area was cut down by the people of Berlin in the years following the Wall Street Crash for use as firewood.

Emerging from the park at a major intersection, we wait to cross the road.  We notice that the funny little red and green man on the traffic lights around our hotel isn’t used here – it’s a much more conventional (and boring) design.  Only later do we realise that the design difference is a surviving symbol of the divided city.  The DDR actively set out to find a different design to the West, and as we criss-cross the old division throughout the rest of the day we notice the traffic light symbols switch between the two.  In most areas where the wall stood there is now a twin line of cobblestones set in the pavement, but it’s easy to miss and so I personally find that the walk/don’t walk symbols are a much better way to work out which side you are on.

There is lots of new development around Potsdamer Platz, including the huge Sony Centre.  Between the newest builds is a roofed plaza where we find some breakfast. The reason for the huge amount of development in this area is because of the Wall; the space required for the two walls and the wasteland running in between has left huge tracts of the city centre now open. In many areas they have been developed like this into new builds, but others remain large open squares, like at the Brandenburg Gate. There are some old sections of wall here in Potsdamer Platz and an information point where we read up and see a detailed map of the wall through the city.  A surviving length of wall is now used as an open air gallery (which we’re disappointed to learn only features post-reunification art, rather than, as we expected, being art produced during the divide).  Other parts of the wall remain in situ to the north where they now form part of a nature reserve.  Apparently this is a protected area because the wasteland between the walls offered new habitats for wildlife – an unexpected consequence of the division, we’re sure!

We follow the guide on the information board and walk along the old route of the wall south and then east along Niederkirchnestrasse.  Here we come across a long section (about 100m) which has been left in situ and as it was at the end of 1989. The majority of the wall has been heavily chipped and the metal skeleton revealed, damage that was done in the weeks following the fall of the wall.  However, not long after reunification this section was deemed a protected area and there is now a small fence running about 70cm away from the wall at waist height to preserve it. We both agree with the stance the Germans have taken here and find it important that the wall is preserved to tell the story of the division. The site of this section of wall though is also significant because it is also where the SS Offices once were during the Third Reich. They have since been demolished, but in their place is a very good exhibition space called The Topography of Terror and we spend a good hour reading the display boards and studying the pictures there which tell the story of Berlin from the Nazi rise to power to the fall of the wall.

 

The rain pauses for a while when we are reading the display, but manages to come back to a constant drizzle as we finish and contemplate what to do next. Because of the drizzle we decide against going to the Holocaust Memorial just yet and head instead to Checkpoint Charlie. We don’t know what to expect, but know that if we are visiting Berlin we can’t exactly miss it out. When we get there though it is disappointingly touristy as a traffic island is all that remains in the middle of the main road with a small booth and sandbags on.  Two men pose as border guards with the American Flag in hand and will allow you to take a photo with them for 2 Euros. We need a drink and bathroom break so take advantage of the ironically placed McDonalds (just before the “you are now leaving the American sector” sign).

The rain is easing up and so we decide to head for the Holocaust Memorial.  We pass the Trabi Museum and the Currywurst Museum, but as we approach the memorial the rain becomes very heavy again and so we decide to stop for a lunch break, rather than trying to do our visit to the memorial justice in the rain. We don’t want to stop for too long, or for anything too fancy and so we decide to pop into the nearby Subway for a quick sandwich. Having said that they take a fair while to prepare our sandwich, but during this time at least the rain has stopped and so the timing is good to now head to the memorial.

Arriving there we find a mass of grey concrete slabs, and we begin to walk among them. They are about 70cm wide and maybe 2m long and at first vary between knee and waist height. We can see that they stretch over nearly a whole block and so walk further in. Gradually two things happen; the ground beneath us starts to gradually slope downwards and the blocks themselves start to increase in height. Soon, instead of blocks at waist height they are above our heads and tower above us. It is a real maze and we stick close together and pick our way silently through the memorial. On the eastern side of the memorial there is a small staircase down which leads to an exhibition area. We are keen to find out more, especially about the concept behind the memorial installation.

The exhibition is free to enter and gives a chronology of the persecution of Jews leading up to the Holocaust.  It is an interesting contrast to the Topography of Terror which did not explore anything thematically, but simply chronologically. This allowed it to give a very factual approach, but at times did not aid a full understanding of strands that ran through the story – such as the increasing persecution of certain groups. After presenting an overview of the Holocaust, the exhibition leads on to two rooms that present individual and family stories. The stories of individuals were told through letters or other ephemera that they had left; such as postcards, writing in the margins or books, or even writings on toilet paper that had luckily been preserved. Like with Anne Frank, these were normal people but what is amazing is that their accounts survived and that it is through these that their story and the story of what happened can survive. The exhibition told these stories simply and well, and a final room was dedicated to access to the database that is being compiled by the families of the victims.

It’s mid-afternoon by now and we’ve been up and on our feet a fair while so we decide to head towards the hotel. We go along Unter Den Linden again but when we are at the top of it we see that the weather is finally clearing up.  We decide to find a cafe for “Kaffe and Kuchen” instead of just heading into the hotel, so we cross the bridge of the canal and start a walk along the Spree. We spy tables and chairs at the top a strange looking construction that is on the river and intruding on the views of the Berlin Dome. We decide that this could be an interesting place to stop for a drink, so we pay our 2 Euros and go inside.

It turns out not simply to be a cafe with views of the city, but an exhibition space. We spend a good half an hour wandering around and looking at things before finally having our sit down! This is the Humboldt Box has been built on the site of a new development to give an overview of the project. Whereas the exhibitions we had seen earlier in the day gave a lot of information in text form with very simple displays, this contains lots of multimedia and interactive elements.

The project is a mixture of the ridiculous and the fantastic.  Since the 15th Century what is currently a large area of grass and construction vehicles was a royal palace.  It had been extended and renovated right up until the start of the First World War, and all the museums and other significant buildings in the area faced onto it.  With the Communist take-over after WW2, though, the palace was seen as a symbol of imperialism.  The Communists destroyed the palace and completely removed every last reminder of it.  In 1972 they built their own palace on the site – a people’s palace – and had it up and running in less than a year.  By all accounts it was an amazing venue with 15 restaurants, a bowling alley, dozens of exhibition halls and also the main DDR parliament.  They had, however, fire-proofed the structure using asbestos and in 1990 – in one of the last meetings of the DDR government before reunification – they decided to close the building for safety reasons.  The new German government later spent 28 million Euros to remove the asbestos from the building, and by the early 2000s were using the building as an exhibition space.  However, they then decided to remove it.  Despite strong opposition from groups wishing to leave it in place as a symbol of the defunct DDR, the German government passed a bill that led to the systematic un-building of the structure over a period of years.  In its place, they have decided to build a new palace.  On three sides they will recreate the original (15th century) facades, and on the fourth – facing the River Spree – will build a modern style front.  As said above, the entire project is a mixture of the ridiculous and fantastic.  I can’t think of any nation on earth that would agree to the enormous costs involved – 83 million Euros to build the new structure – when they’d already spent 23 million making the thing that preceded it safe.  And then spend 10 million removing it!  It’s completely insane, but brilliant.

The Humboldt Box is simply a temporary structure to tell this story and, presumably, to try to generate some of the money they need to complete the project.  We eventually climb the 5 storeys to the roof terrace, where we find the rain has stopped and the cloud is beginning to thin.  We take advantage of this first break in the weather to get a good view over the area that we’re now becoming very familiar with on the ground.  We grab a seat and have a hot chocolate each.  This is ‘proper’ hot chocolate – just some melted chocolate in the bottom of the cup and a jug of hot milk to pour in.  It’s delicious, and a great way to round of the afternoon before we head back the the hotel for a couple of hours to rest our tired feet.

 

We check back through our guidebooks for recommendations on places to eat.  We’re keen to avoid the numerous international restaurants and go, instead, for ‘real’ German food.  While we realise this actually puts us at the mercy of the dreaded tourist menu, our desire to eat pork outweighs the worry.  We read about a brewpub – a Brauhaus – along the river and head there.  The Georgbrau brewery is in a part of town that suffered heavily during the war, and it has been reconstructed from old photographs in the original style.  With the weather being now quite bright and pleasant we struggle to find a seat outside so instead opt to grab a table by the window.  Walking through the pub, we see an enormous copper mash tun with a blackboard behind it.  ‘Hell’ it says – which apparently means ‘dark’ – 10,30.  12%.  The first number we realise is the original gravity of the brew.  The second we are confused by.  An original gravity reading of 1030 would never be able to make a brew at 12% ABV.  You’d be lucky to get 4.5% out of it.  Maybe it’s the attenuation?  But that would drop the gravity by more than 200 points, which again is impossible.  It’s then that we remember that in the Heineken Brewery they wrote temperatures as %C rather than °C.  We assume, therefore that they will be fermenting the brew at 12°C.  This seems right for a lager.

We look through the menu, and order.  We opt to order a 1.5L jug of beer to share between us – it’s less than a pint and a half each – and it comes with two dainty 20cl glasses featuring the brewery’s logo.  We have to make a quick decision when the moustached waiter takes our order; dark or light? We glance at each other quickly and then opt for light as its probably more conducive to 1.5l drinking and eating. It’s a fizzy lager, but has a mild hop taste and a lovely rich malt finish.  It’s incredibly drinkable, and we enjoy sipping away while wait for our food.

The menu is made up mainly of German traditional dishes, as we expected it would be in a semi-touristy place like this. Alice opts for the pork with dumplings and red cabbage and has to put her mind to it to find a day since leaving Egypt when she hasn’t had at least one pork-based product. I go for the schnitzel – a ‘must have’ when in Germany we agree. Neither of us think we can quite manage Berlin’s second most famous meal of “pork knuckle” which at 1kg in weight rises a good 10cm above the plate as it’s being carried along from the kitchen.

We finish our meal and then go for a walk around the small streets of the Nikolaiviertel area where the streets are pedestrianised and quiet with the odd restaurant or corner bar.

   

Our walk takes us along the bank of the Spree where we marvel at the number of rabbits that are running wild on the grass in the parkland here. We decide to stop for a drink on the river before making our way back to the hotel as we’re enjoying the nice evening.

The bar we choose has a menu that lists not only the beers they have, but also the mixed beer drinks they offer. These include the standard shandy that we’re familiar with, but also a drink they call "Diesel” which is beer mixed with cola, and then a ‘red’ and a ‘green’ beer which is beer mixed with different cordials to give a new, odd, colour. We’ve seen these beer mixers in other places we’ve visited and can only conclude that people order these bizarre drinks so regularly that it is worth their while including them on the menu. Maybe they are also a ‘German thing’ and included to give people the authentic experience – we don’t know. Although they also include in their listings a white wine spritzer, they don’t include the classic ‘red wine and coke’ that we were introduced to at Sziget by some Dutch girls, but the list does include ‘beer with Fanta’ which apparently is also popular in South America.

We amble back to the hotel, enjoying the dry evening and playing with the camera settings as we try to eclipse the street lamps in our night shots of the city’s landmarks.

 

Day 4: Amsterdam to Berlin

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!