Road trip to Europe: part 2

We touched down in Berlin having had quite a satisfying sleep on the plane. Passport control seemed a little more strict than normal, but then German passport officials are always very stern. We walked accross the park to the station. It's one of the weirdest stations I know.

There's a long corridor underneath eight platforms, with no signs announcing trains and no ticket office. The train times are posted on a grubby leaflet, stuck to the wall.

When the train did arrive, however, it made up for it by being a double decker train. We sat on the top deck, of course. It doesn't take long to get from the airport to the city centre. From my guidebook to Poland, I had figured out that the best thing to do would be to take a train accross the border to Poznan, on the Berlin-Warsaw express, and then another train from Poznan to Gdansk. I guessed that trains going east would leave from the Ostbahnhof, so we headed to there.

I guessed right. However, the train would not be leaving until the morning. I was glad that I can speak German as the men at the information desk did not speak English. I checked that there were no other trains to Poland before the morning, but there weren't. If we hadn't spent the previous night out in the cold, we might have thought that this would be a problem. As it was, we felt that we could deal with almost every situation that was thrown at us.

K had never been to Berlin before, but I had. We decided to go sightseeing. First we left our bags in one of the lockers, and I changed my tshirt. I instantly felt a lot better. I felt quite skanky as I hadn't taken my shoes off in so long, and I wondered how long it took fo foot rot to start to take place.

I didn't know my way around the Ostbahnhof, so we took a train to Freidrichstr. and went to a nearby pub. After some hearty German food and a beer, we felt ready to tackle the city. The pub was playing really terrible German music, and we were quite annoyed at having to leave at 1:00, when it shut.

As K hadn't done history at school, and I did a degree in the bastard subject, with most of my last year concentrating on german history, I gave her a bit of a guided tour. We started off by walking down to Unter den Linden. There were christmas lights everywhere- not the tacky half-arsed ones you get in the UK, but full-on fantastic ones. Unter den Linden wasn't that nice, as there were some building works. However, over by the Brandenberg Tor there was a huge tree. I've not seen any as good as that. It was so huge, it was tethered with three thick metal cables. There were wooden stars and moons tied to the end of the branches. It looked really magical, with the Tor just behind it.

We went to see the marker, pointing out where the wall stood. It's funny to think that there was a huge wall right in the middle of this crossroads. Then we walked over to the Reichstag. I'd seen it by day, and had been up to the dome, but I hadn't seen it at night. It looked fabulous with the dome all lit up.

K wanted to see the remaining section of the wall, so we walked over to Checkpoint Charlie. The hut that was the checkpoint is still there, along with a sign marking the end of the American sector. We started walking over to the wall, and walked past a skip, when suddenly the skip shrieked!! We ran to the other side of the road as quickly as we could. K said she thought that there must be a man in the skip, and at first I thought that was ridiculous. Then I thought that it was probably less ridiculous than it being the skip itself making the noise. Nevertheless, we didn't go over to investigate.

The remaining section of the wall is impressive, it's somewhat taller than I remembered. It's hard to think what it must have been like before the wall came down. Life on the East must have been hard for people to take the risks they took to get to the West. The East is still pretty grey, and bleak in places. What makes me really think is that the DDR had the highest standard of living of any of the eastern bloc. Parts of the USSR must look like concrete hell on polluted earth.

By now we were both quite cold and tired, and we headed back to the Ostbahnhof. K fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, so I made her a pillow and cover out of bags and coats, and she went to sleep on the bench. As it wasn't yet 4:00, and our train didn't leave until 6:40, I decided to get some sleep too. I lay on top of my bag, to stop it being stolen, and used my coat as a blanket.