There is no bunker

5th August 2012 (Berlin, Germany)

Took it easy in the morning and had brunch at a cafe near our hotel. You know it isn't a tourist spot when the menu is only in German. We ordered the big breakfast, which looked like it had some sausages, egg, bread and yogurt and indeed it had all those things except the sausage was sliced as part of a cold meat platter. I really don't understand why people eat cold meat for breakfast, it's gross. It seems to be popular in Central and Eastern Europe. Can't wait until I get to France where it's croissants and brioche territory.

We returned to Checkpoint Charlie to get the souvenirs we missed out on the day before, then on the way to the Stasi Museum dropped in on a couple of hipster souvenir joints where Boff fell into a friendly argument with the proprietor about whether Alexander was a better film than Troy. (Fuck, I can barely remember either of them and in my mind they blend in with that horrible Sam Worthington movie, Clash of the Titans and that other one about Titans and the one about Medusa. Those may all be the same film, who knows.

The Stasi Museum was free of charge but sparse and we got more value for time going to the Berlin Wall display down the road where a section of the war remains and below, in the old ruined building where the Gestapo used to meet, they have a timeline from pre-World War II to the fall of the wall.

Photo of the day is how I will always think of Berlin, full of trains and graffiti.

Quote of the day from the souvenir store guy: "There is no bunker."

Pergamon, I choose you

3rd August 2012 (Berlin, Germany)

We arrived in Berlin in a couchette, which, if you've never been in one, is a train carriage that gets converted into two rows of triple bunks. As you can imagine, space is tight and no one gets to sit up in bed. Boff and I thought, since we'd arrived at the station early, we'd get dibs on the biggest luggage space. Unfortunately the carriage already had four people in it from a previous stop so we were forced to take up what little floorspace there was with Boff's suitcase and my bag.

The good thing about couchettes: sleeping flat and a croissant and hot chocolate for breakfast.

We checked into Hotel Amadeus, which is a modest 2-star place in Charlottenburg, which happens to be right around the corner from a large erotic retail store (with kino!) but very handy to Charlottenburg Station.

We then wandered into town to see the Brandenburg Tor (gate) before heading to the Pergamon Museum. The Pergamon was on Boff's must-see list. I had no idea what it was but tagged along anyway. It turned out to be an awesome thing made of stuff, by which I mean, an archaeologist excavated at Pergamon, an ancient Greek city located in modern day Turkey, and then brought all the artefacts to Germany. Then he recreated the bloody thing in the museum so there is a scale re-creation (with real pieces from the original) of various ancient structures.

Photo of the day is the Ishtar Gate, which is actually from Babylon but whatevs, it's still a thing made of stuff.

We then had German tapas at a place called Zum Schwarzen Hasen (Black Hare) nearby. The food was really well presented and delicious and not too expensive—recommended, especially if you're not too keen on German food but want to try lots of different things without rolling home.

Finding ourselves at Alexanderplatz, we decided to take the lift up the TV tower to see Berlin by night. I can tell you now, it's not a very interesting view so don't bother going late. I did read all the corresponding info about the monuments and special buildings, though, even though I couldn't see them.

[I'm typing this on the day I'm to leave Warsaw. I had a bad night—some idiot in my room woke up at two-hourly intervals for a smoke out the window, which of course drifted into the room. In the middle of the night I think he also had a puff in the bathroom because when I went in shortly after, instead of just the after-smell of a smoker in the cubicle, there was actual smoke clinging to my hair when I left. Yuck, yuck, yuck.]

Horny mountin'

27th July 2012 (High Tatras, Slovakia)
It's getting to the point where I'm thinking things like 'we're in Slovakia, so this must be Friday', which I thought would happen much, much later in the trip. Photo of the day was taken at 5am when the train from Poprad-Tatry (at the mouth of the High Tatras) took us to Stary Smokovec, which is the first major ski resort area of the mountains. Apparently everything is considered part of the ski resort, even though summer is the most popular month and everyone comes to do the hikes.

We arrived at 5.30am when nothing was open not even the toilet (the toilets cost 30 eurocents, usually worth it because they are quite nice compared to other train station toilets I've been to, but I can't think of how little the toilet attendant must earn, and what a subsistence!).

Boff, Kathleen and I sat down until 7am in the dawnlight catching up on journals, blogs etc and then went to see if the hostel had any beds available. It didn't, so we ended up having breakfast at a weird cafeteria/buffet place and then seeking the assistance of a very funny (thankfully English-speaking) information lady, who booked us in at another place that was half the price down the road.

By 'down the road' she meant one station away at Horny Smokovec, which was a 10-minute walk. Yes, I am writing this from a hostel in a town that has the name of a porn star. The rooms weren't ready so we washed up as best we could and headed back into town, took the funicular up to a place called Hrebienok and commenced a walk that took us past four waterfalls (vodopad; 'vodo' means 'water', 'pad' must mean 'fall').

We were all light on sleep, and bad sleep at that, so we opted not to do the full day walk and instead wandered around until we got hungry and took the funicular down to to town to have a late lunch. There are a bunch of couriers who work the mountain carrying things on their backs. The kinds of things they carry: crates of beer, propane gas, bar fridge—sometimes all at once. I don't think you could pay me to do that job.

At the hostel, which was actually a room above a Polish restaurant, we had a shower and a nap that took us to dinner, which ended up being the Slovakian specials at the Polish restaurant. Including blueberry dumplings.

Am finding Slovakians quite hard to figure out. The ones I've encountered have tended to be abrupt or slightly frustrated with our inability to speak Slovak (caveat: I don't even have Lonely Planet to help me grasp the language, the closest is Czech). We've managed, so far, to find our way around using Bahasa Tarzan (ie charades), money, and people with some words of English to have had a decent time. The only truly helpful person was the info lady. I was surprised at how good her English was considering she was quite old and most others who have a few words under their belt are young wait staff (all with an attitude).

One saving grace is that everything here is quite cheap (if you don't talk to Boff about how cheap Romania was). We're talking 12 euros for a hostel bed with free internet, 7 euros for a breakfast for two, and 1 euro for 500ml of beer (or 1,20 euro water/tea if you prefer). Let me order another pint...

Getting busy

26th July 2012 (Budapest, Hungary)
Walked to the train station (Keleti) via yet another on-the-go cheese and bread breakfast. Pekseg, I quickly learnt, is the Hungarian word for bakery. We went to get my Eurail pass stamped and reserve a sleeper ticket for our journey to Poprad-Tatry (in the High Tatras) but the lady refused to sell us a reservation, citing the short journey (2.5 hours to Bratislava, 4 hours from Bratislava to Poprad-Tatry) as a reason not to get sleepers.

We then walked through City Park to Heroes' Square. There is a castle on the lake there that looks like different parts of it was made in different eras, but charming all the same.

We wanted to go to the art gallery, which was highly receommended by my Hungarian friend Emese but it was closed as it was in between exhibitions. Instead we wandered through Heroes' Square and then went to the fine art museum on the other side, which had ancient pottery on the bottom level and European art on the top. Things began to devolve when I started saying things like, "he's going in for the blowjob" about a painting of Diana and Actaeon, then Boff and I started making up stories about the paintings until we could walk the galleries no more and went downstairs to have lunch.

After that we went to Budapest Zoo next door. It was quite a good zoo, very big (too much to see in the few hours we had allocated) and mostly modern, especially a natural history education centre in the middle that had live exhibits. The photo of the day is a pair of tamarins. I stood at the window trying to see them when one came and sat on the window sill and chittered at me. I called Boff over and as he bent down to take a photo another came along...

We ate dinner at a place called The Owl House, whose menu promised some authentic Hungarian cuisine. Yes, there was goulash and paprikash involved. They played George Michael's 'Ladies & Gentlemen' right the way through.

We took the night train to Bratislava. It turned out that I'd forgotten to get my Eurail pass stamped so I had to pay for a ticket from Budapest to the Slovakian border, then a Slovak inspector charged me from the border to Bratislava. We had nice carriage of passengers, a Czech businessman, a young Hungarian couple on their way to Berlin who helped us with the militant Hungarian ticket inspector, and a Canadian lady called Kathleen who ended up travelling with us to Poprad-Tatry.

Boff, Kathleen and I switched trains at Bratislava (I got my pass stamped at the station) and ended up in a crowded carriage of dodgy-looking Slavic men and found it very difficult to sleep for the four-hour journey.