berlin
after a fairly nightmare day, which started at 6am (we both woke up stupidly early, probably due to excitement. big kids, huh?) we finally set off on our travels around the time that we were originally supposed to be boarding a plane. first leg of the journey was a train from fareham to london, where we would be staying the night at the lovely ironicdutchess's.
surprisingly chipper at fareham train station
we didn't sleep too well that night either, possibly due to the fact that we forgot to take our sleeping bags, oops. anyway, we woke up stupidly early again, although this time because we had to. our eurostar was at 08:39 but of course we were advised to get there early because of how many people were travelling via eurostar that day! also, they'd spelt my name wrong on the ticket (colmeman!) and we wanted to check it was still okay (it was).
the eurostar wasn't really anything exciting to be honest, just like any old train. even when we went under the sea it wasn't that amazing, just like going through a tunnel. (which, DUR NANCE, it is). i dunno what i was expecting really. the under the sea bit didn't last that long - for a while i wasn't sure if we'd actually gone in the chunnel or just through a tunnel in the uk. the cars on the wrong side of the road finally clued me in.
can we count france as a country visited? hmm...
it didn't take very long at all to get to brussels. which is a bit strange looking back on how long it took us to make other journeys! an hour stopover in brussels where we had our first proper holiday challenge - reserve seats on a train to cologne. we succeeded thanks to the fact that pete knew how to say "do you speak english?" in german and that EVERYONE in germany answers that question with "yes a little" and then it turns out that actually they speak it better than you yourself do.
brussels (DUR)
the train to cologne was rather nice - there were little screens that told us fun things like how fast we were going (answer: very fast). however we did learn our first travelling lesson - always remember to reserve seats in NON SMOKING carriages. another hour stopover in cologne, again we successfully booked our seats to berlin.
this was the only sign saying cologne we could find in the whole friggin station!
our hostel in berlin was the circus hostel (the rosenthaler platz one) and we can highly recommend it. i would definitely stay there again - it was probably the nicest hostel we stayed in the whole holiday, and we did stay in some great places! it was also really easy to find from the hauptbahnhof which was good for us having spent the past 12 hours travelling. we didn't do much after checking in, just grabbed some food (pizza - how german), decided we would do a walking tour the next day, then fell into bed.
our room at circus. notice the brightly coloured walls - something a lot of hostels seemed to have!
after finally getting a good night's sleep (and also finally being back on track with the holiday!) we woke up and got ready slowly on saturday, grabbed some breakfast (buffet available in the hostel cafeteria place) and then waited around for the rep to pick us up for the walking tour. we were duly picked up and taken to somewhere else where another guy met us. this was our tour guide - his name was preston, he was american and he was very very good. brewer's walking tours also come highly recommended. he showed us pretty much all of the major tourist sights as well as lots of lesser known places, and there were stories to go with everything, things we wouldn't have heard about if it wasn't for him. for example, the jewish memorial is a big bunch of blocks - most people think it's some sort of arty thing rather than a memorial - which are covered with a special chemical that prevents graffiti. the company that this chemical coating was bought from also produced the poison gas used in the gas chambers of the concentration camps in ww2...
...y'know, the poison gas used to kill the jews that this memorial is honouring...
checkpoint charlie... which is NOT WHAT EVERYONE THINKS IT IS. and by that i mean, it wasn't where they made sure no east berliners got into west berlin or whatever. it was just so the u.s. army could make sure they got all their soliders back whenever they had a foray into the east.
the reichstag. my gcse history came flooding back...
after the tour ended (it was five hours and cost just 10EUR by the way!) we got directions from the tour guide and made our way over to the east side gallery. walked up and down it, before realising we should probably grab something to eat. subway it was.
for the record, most of the photos i post in these entries are going to only feature pete - i've only uploaded my photos!
after that we just kind of wandered around for a bit. revisited some of the places we did on the tour and went to a couple of churches (churches will be a recurring theme in these entries). also reserved our seats for the train to warsaw the next day. we ended up back at the reichstag about half an hour before it closed, mainly because both the guide book and our tour guide said the best time to come was early morning or last thing at night. clearly neither took into account the fact that saturdays are a different story - the queue was still ridiculously long and, after a guy put out a sign which basically said there was no way in hell we were going to get in before it closed, we left.
deciding we were possibly hungry enough for a bit more chow (even though lunch had been rather late) we decided to go to a place recommended in my hostel world guide, called oranium. we had an AMAZING meal at this place. you get four tapas for 10EUR which was pretty cool... even better when all the tapas we ordered were GORGEOUS. i can't remember everything pete had although i know he had delicious salmon. i had rosemary potatoes, hot chicken strips, feta stuffed olives and gorgonzola broccoli. mmm, my mouth is watering just thinking about it. so yeah that was a good meal. for reference, the restaurant is on oranienberger(sp?) strasse, which incidentally is the main street for prostitution in berlin (although not round by where all the restaurants are!) did you know that prostitution is legal in germany? and that prostitues successfully sued the government for loss of earnings when they were doing construction work on oranienberger str?! i thought that was great :D
err, then it was bed for sweet sweet sleep.
the next morning we had buffet breakfast again, this time stealing some bread rolls, meat and cheese (european breakfasts, see!) to make sandwiches for our train journey, mehe. then really there was no time to do anything else so we headed over to the train station. it was absolutely pissing it down - clearly berlin was sad to see us leave ;)
overall i was pretty pleased with what we managed to cover in berlin considering we'd lost a day! this was mainly thanks to the tour of course. if we'd had more time we probably would have done schloss charlottenburg and the zoo area. ahh well, next time...! i think we both really liked berlin, although it does seem to have a really bad graffiti problem...