RtW Day 10: Leaving Berlin

A lot has happened in the past few days, and strangely enough, putting this off hasn't made writing it any easier.

Routing

If there's any piece of advice I could give to prospective European travellers, it would be to sit down, plan and book your trip a month or two advance. Freaking out about where you're going to sleep in a crowded, foreign city two days from now is not the best way to manage your trip... it sucks, and it has the effect of rewriting your plans for you.

So with that in mind, I'm sure that you all understand that I had to drop Prague from my list. I'll go, I promise, just not this trip. Trying to figure out the routing between Berlin and Geneva was going to be a bloody nightmare and it was just easier on my brain to work this out. So, the new plan is:

Frankfurt » Amsterdam » Berlin » Nuremberg » Geneva » Milan » Florence » Venice » Rome » Seoul

I had to do Florence before Venice because securing a place to sleep there that week was really hard. The Florence leg looks cool though, as I'll be staying at a hostel that does an 8hour day trip to Tuscany -- a place I wanted to see but didn't think I'd have the time. I've now booked a place to sleep in all my host cities except Rome, where I'll be staying 14days and the hostel there is telling me that I can't stay for more than 6days.

Also, for some reason, everyone here seems to want cash. Visa can say they're accepted everywhere as much as they like, but I tell you: it's just not true. Even some of the hotels I've stayed at have been cash only. Financially, this could get ugly for me.

Other Travellers

Since my last post, I've run into a lot of other (English-speaking) travellers. Americans for the most part, nearly all of them have been "good Americans". There was, however one group of "ugly americans" on the train from Duisburg to Berlin. They were on their way to Munich in a few days for Oktoberfest and they were loud, crass and just generally impolite. While I've met 7 other Americans on this trip who have been both polite and friendly, I can't help but think that these ugly ones are solidifying that lasting image that Americans get around the world. It's no wonder the tour guide I met in Berlin sometimes tries to pass for Canadian.

Some of the other cool people I met include Simone, an Austrian woman in Amsterdam on business staying at the same hotel as I was. She spoke 5 languages and we had some great breakfast conversation. I also met two Canadians (from Toronto no less!) on the Amsterdam » Berlin train who were visiting family in Germany. They knew enough German to be able to let me know that I'd gotten off at the wrong stop (!!) which was super-helpful. Lastly, I met a very nice girl named Vivien on my last day in Berlin. She had a Canadian flag on her backpack, as she'd spent a few months in Canada and was now returning home. We went to the Lego pavilion at the Sony Centre and then hung out at the Reichstag 'till the sun went down munching on German chocolate and talking about all things German from politics to the educational system. Fun stuff. She comes to Canada from time to time, so I might even see her again at some point :-)

Touring Berlin

I stayed in two different places during my time in Berlin. The first was a really pretty hotel on the South East end of the city called the Park Plaza Wallstreet Berlin. The rooms were gorgeous, the bathroom massive and the Internet incredibly overpriced. I stayed there for a couple nights before I moved to my secondary home which was actually an apartment in a central area of town called "Potsdamer Platz". The "Inn-sight Apartments" buy or rent apartments from Berliners and the rent them out to tourists as hotel rooms. The rates aren't cheap, but you do get to see what it's like to live in a city like a resident. My flat had a kitchen, and huge living space/bedroom with amazing floor to ceiling windows that opened up wide. It really was a beautiful place to live for 3 nights.

Unfortunately, my new digs didn't have any internet access though (not even some wireless I could steal from the neighbours) so I ended up forking over €30 to T-mobile to pay for 30days of internet access at any Starbucks in Europe... Given my past trouble getting a place to jack in, I figured it might be a good deal. We'll see.

On my second day of touring, I was sitting at the Starbucks in front of the Brandenburg Gate when I overheard someone giving a guided tour of the area in English to a bunch of young English-speaking types. I followed a bit, enquired and found that the tour was free (you tip the guide) and I decided to get in at the start of the tour the following day.

If you're going to tour Berlin, this is the way to do it. Our guide, Jared, a young man in his late 20s had been living here for a few months and was living off tips for tours like this one. His knowledge was extensive and both academic and anecdotal. He showed us around, bringing us through the Brandenburg Gate, the Jewish memorial, Checkpoint Charlie, the book burning memorial and the Berliner Dome. He filled in the large gaps in my understanding of how Berlin worked and helped me to understand just how amazing the fall of the wall was. That tour was really the best part of my trip.

When the tour ended, I wandered into East Berlin and visited the Fernsehturm, a CN tower-like structure overlooking the city that was decorated as a football for the World Cup a few years ago. The view is pretty damn impressive and of course, I took lots of pictures. On my way back home, I stopped by the Karl Marx & Friedrich Engles monument and took some pictures including one of me trying to look as Soviet as possible :-)

My last day in Berlin was when I met Vivien, and we had a lovely time until she had to catch her train out of town. She left me to see the Reichstag alone and I reached the top (a very long line) by nightfall. I got a lot of nice pictures both of the glass dome and of the view from it. They'll be in my imager soon.

What's Next

Now I'm on the train to Nuremberg and I'll likely be there in an hour or so. Since I've finished my Harry Potter book (Azkaban), I'm hoping I can find an English copy of Philosopher's Stone or Chamber of Secrets while I'm in Nuremberg, but I'm not holding my breath. For now, I'm just enjoying the train ride (seriously, this is the only way to travel) and hopefully, my next place to crash will have something I can plug my laptop into :-)

Snippets

My time in Berlin's been tough. To be honest, I'm having a really tough time dealing with the loneliness and that feeling of exile that comes with being surrounded by Babel. There were a few times this past week that I've considered just abandoning the trip, but on the whole, I'm glad I haven't. Here's some stuff I noticed while I was gallivanting:

• "WC" means "bathroom". This is important to know since WC is the symbol for it in the train stations and there's often no English (or German for that matter) to go along with it.
• Bathrooms cost €½ and in the Amsterdam train station, they're co-ed.
• My train trips have taken me across the rural areas of Germany and this area has wind turbines everywhere. Interestingly though, I saw a group of 9 turbines huddled around what looked like a slag heap in the distance. I can only assume that they were being used as a source of power for mining.
• All new buildings in Berlin are built to a much tougher code than the ones we use in Canada. Doors and windows are designed to withstand draughts, and hallway lights are off by default, automatically turning on as you enter the hall. To Germans, this is normal and our leaving them on all the time appears wasteful to them. Similarly, the toilets all have two buttons to flush to control water waste.
• A lot of hotels and apartments in Germany use a different kind of window design (apparently) designed in Germany. They allow you to open the windows wide, like doors, or open them just at the top. I have pictures in my imager to better explain.
• The Reichstag, seat of parliament in Germany is not really where the power sits. Despite the new design setup to allow Germans to peer down on their government's decisions, (the dome over the Reichstag), the President and the other high-ranking types actually work in another building near the Reichstag. According to Vivien, that's where the real power sits.
• The entire wall is still there... sorta. Throughout the city, as you walk down the street, look down and you'll find that in the path of where the wall was, the city has laid a series of bricks, two by two to mark where the wall was. Some people living there actually suffer from a condition that doesn't allow them to walk over this line. The wall was up so long, that for some, it's like it's still there.
• The headquarters for the Luftwaffe (the Nazi airforce) still exists as it survived the bombing during WWII. After the war, the Soviets turned it into the Ministry of Ministries, a sort of meeting place for all the Ministers that ran the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
• Smart Car makes a coupe.
• When you ask someone here if they speak English the response is almost always "Little bit" accompanied by their holding their index finger and thumb together as if they were attempting to squish your head.
• Any attempt to speak German however is very welcome. Thanks to Margaret's phrase book, I was able to tell the waitress that I just needed the bill in German: "Die Rechnung, Bitte" and she was delighted.
• The logo [DB] (Deutsch Bahn) is everywhere. It means "German Railway", but they appear to own a little bit of everything.
• T-Mobile appears to be Germany's Bell. They have all the phone booths and a large portion of the wireless network.
• Berliner Pretzels are awesome.
• The Canadian Embassy in Berlin is unremarkable and I walked past it three times before I realised what it was... so I went to visit.
• My appetite has dwindled considerably since I left. I blame the jet lag, but I'm hoping it picks up soon.