So we are now in Amsterdam (arrived yesterday afternoon), after a couple days cooling our heels in Cologne. The rest of my time in Berlin was just great - on the third day we went to see Potsdamer Platz. In old Berlin, Potsdamer Platz was a place of commerce and retail, a grand square surrounded by the grand houses and headquarters of many important people of commercial interest. As time went on, through the Great Wars, it was bombed and forgotten, and finally the Berlin Wall bisected the whole thing. There's bits of the Wall still there, big oblong concrete rectangles [View Full Entry]

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On Friday afternoon we took the U-Bahn from St Pauli Backpackers, the hostel where we´d stayed, to the Hauptbahnhof, and caught a train for Berlin. On the train we ran into some eighteen year old backpackers from Florida. The Americans we do run into come uniformly from the southern states, for some reason. We chatted with them for the ride (they told us about how they´d liked Sweden), though I was tempted again and again back to my book. The Book of Lost Things, it´s called, kind of a twisted Alice in Wonderland thing. It may be set aside though; I [View Full Entry]

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Here in Hamburg, they have a special name for their special weather. Schmuttelvetter. Even if you know no German, it works as an onomatopoeia to tell you what it´s like; grey, cool, air full of drifting drizzle that slowly soaks you without you knowing it. We arrived here night before last, after a late night short haul from Berlin, where we were supposed to stay. Since the only train we could catch was an Inter City Express (ICE TRAIN!), it was going to be really expensive, so we decided to use a day of travel on our rail pass. So we [View Full Entry]

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So we get in, take the U-Bahn to our hostel, excited and happy to be in Berlin, finally! Only they neglected to tell us when we made our reservation that we must call the day before check-in to confirm our arrival. So we get here and our reservation is cancelled. Bastards. So now we´re on our way to Hamburg instead. We´ll be back here in a few days, but in a different hostel. Happens, but I am pissed off. [View Full Entry]

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Ah so. The German say this a lot...I'm not sure if it's an aglicism or a German word. Ah-so. So the slow morning I wrote my last blog, we took a long time getting out of the hostel. We took straight to finding the Pinakothek der Moderne, the modern art museum, and it wasn't easy...at first we bought tickets at the Altes Pinakothek (museum of very old art) before seeing the ticket and realising that we were in the wrong place. We had to return those tickets to a very grumpy German man. We asked for directions to the Moderne and [View Full Entry]

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Well I´ve been in Munich for two full days now and it is an awesome place. I´ve had two great days, and for the first time on this trip, I haven´t really minded getting back into a big city. Usually we miss the country and the sea, but not this time. After arriving here on Monday, we went out walking. It was pretty late in the day, so we decided to just go; instead of making a plan and a destination. So we took the U-Bahn and S-Bahn (subway lines) to Marienplaty and went from there. The streets around there are [View Full Entry]

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So after a big swing out west and then along the south, I am back in Munich, one week later. After my last entry we went to Mittenwald and stayed there one night. It would have been nice if it had worked out there but at the same time the place was far out of actual Mittenwald - most DJH hostels aren´t actually IN the towns after which they´re named. So we left early in the morning from Mittenwald the next day and went to Berchdesgaden, a nice little mountain town in a projection of Germany down into Austria. It´s surrounded [View Full Entry]

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Another enormous gap and now I realise that if I continue at this rate I´ll only do another three or five entries by the end of the trip. That´s no good. Split So. After checking into the hostel in Split, we had a bit of a chill day. Kathleena decided she was going to go shopping, and we walked around and around the old town. There are narrow cobbled streets, lots of marble, and some very, very old buildings. It´s right on the sea, but the sea isn´t quite as nice as Dubrovnik. The reason for Split being a big tourist [View Full Entry]

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So! I've been lax again with the blog and as always it bites me in the ass. Remembering what I've done each day, organising it, etc. Here we go. On friday we left Sarajevo after a nice stay there enjoying the old town. Our last day we went to see Tunel 3A. This is a tunnel that the Bosnians dug during the siege, under the UN-controlled airport and to free Bosnian territory outside of Sarajevo. It was a real lifeline for the people there-supplies, food, ammunition, everything came through there. They showed us a video with a bunch of war footage-bombs [View Full Entry]

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Well here we are in Bosnia, after a grueling twenty four hour commute from Sofia, Bulgaria. We've been on four trains, two of them transnational, and when we arrived last night, we were absolute shells. Completely knackered, running on fumes. We arrived at the Sofia train station two nights ago with minutes to spare, and spent a few frenzied minutes running around (backpacks on) trying to locate our train. It adds a whole new level of difficulty to things when the country you're in uses a completely different alphabet than you're own. Like, it's still Cyrillic, like they use in Greece, [View Full Entry]

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