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Published: January 10th 2010
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Not actually a whole lot to report today actually, unless anyone is interested in the details of a very long and unexciting train ride between Prague and Berlin! We had breakfast early on and left the hotel at half past nine to get the subway to Holesovice...which I have to say is the worst major train station I have ever been to. I know it isn't Prague's main train station, but for a city that is used by interrailers as much as this is, they really need to think about sorting it out. It's basically an underground cave, and about as organised as Newcastle United during the transfer window. Platform announcements aren't made until roughly thirty seconds before the train is due, and with nowhere to sit, there is nothing to do but crowd together under the tiny monitors and make a run for it as soon as the number pops up. It was also swelteringly hot on the day that we happened to be there, which didn't help matters. So, the platform is announced, we all race to the platform...and no train. Half an hour later? Still no train, and no announcement to tell us where the train might be.
There was no staff around on the platform, and of course no-one wanted to leave and ask because sod's law says that the second they did the train would show up and leave without them. Eventually, 45 minutes late, the train came along. The platform was completely packed, so any attempt to find the carriage we had reserved was never going to work out, and so we just jumped on and found the nearest unreserved compartment. It was a long journey of about five hours, but our compartment was really quiet (an Australian girl, two German girls and an Armenian guy who got into a bit of bother with the passport agents for a reason that we couldn't really figure out! Oh, and this was a noteworthy journey for being the only one to actually have passport agents!) and I got a fair bit of reading done, so it was alright.
We eventually made it into Berlin HBF at 3:40pm, about an hour late (with not one announcement on the train to maybe explain why!). We made our way to the S-Bahn platform in the very huge station, and were immediately sprung on by a very helpful lady who
showed us how to use the machine and get our tickets (I'm sure we could have figured it out ourselves, but it was sweet anyway lol). The Berlin trains are ridiculously organised and regular, so we got on the train straightaway and travelled three stops to Zoologischer Garden. It wasn't the nicest journey in the world, because there was a trio of old drunken Irish men right next to us acting like twats, and to be brutally honest, Berlin from the S-Bahn looked a bit of a...well, shithole is probably the best way to describe it! And it didn't help that it was very rainy outside, making everything look so much more grey and ugly than it might otherwise. Anyway, we made it to our hotel, the Savoy, easily (it was just a couple of streets from the station) and it seemed very nice apart from the horrible smoky lobby. It was nice enough that we really didn't want to have to leave and head out into the rain, but we were getting very hungry by this point with nothing since breakfast so didn't have a choice!
As the hotel was just a street off the Ku'Damm, we headed
there and had a bit of a walk up and down past the awesome shops (Cartier and the like). It was a pretty place really, if not spectacular. We then went to trusty old Hard Rock Cafe for our tea (once we found the thing, because I had somehow noted the address down wrong! It was only by fluke really that we saw a tiny poster for it with directions in the corner down one of the side streets!), where we encountered the most fabulous waitress, who was spectacularly jolly even by Hard Rock standards lol. I filled myself up on a red, white and blue burger and then we went back out and walked in the opposite direction down the Ku-Damm to get a closer look at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. It was here that we encountered a first-German charvas! We actually have never seen charvas anywhere outside of the North of England, and it seems the reason for that is because they're all hiding out on the west side of Berlin, heh. Anyway, it didn't dramatically help our mood as we wanted to be able to properly take in the church and what it stands for, but
that was quite hard when we had stupid charvas shouting at us, trying to get in the way of our photos and basically just doing the usual annoying things that charvas do. Plus it was still very grey and rainy and we were tired and getting a bit grumpy-poor Berlin wasn't standing much of a chance in the 'good first impression' stakes! We happened across a UCI cinema next to the church and decided to have one last chance of finding an activity for the evening, but after waiting in a queue for ten minutes, we were told that every film they showed was dubbed rather than subtitled. Oy. There wasn't a whole lot else to do around that area, and we couldn't really be bothered to traipse across to the more central areas, so we gave in and headed back to the hotel for the night...hoping against hope that the next day would be a better one!
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