Wow so it's been a couple of days since I last posted, how have you guys coped? You better tell me you had withdrawl symptoms or I'm going to be hurt.
So fill the gap. Thats my new catch phrase, beware I will probably still be saying this when I get home. It describes eating. Around here its very easy to get hungry, food is a bit of a mission every time you want to eat. Many of the hostels don't have kitchen facilities, though a lot do breakfast which helps considerably. However even sorting lunch and dinner, and trying to do it on a budget can be tricky. So quite often you find yourself wandering around for long periods of time fairly desperate because your hungry and just want to eat and go to bed. Not tonight though, Sophie thought to check the places in town before we headed back to the hostel and we found a kebab place, or Doner as they're called here. It was cheap and very good, and filled the gap nicely. We haven't always been quite so lucky, our first meal in Barcelona is an example, one minute rice with a bit of tuna thrown on top. It filled the gap but thats about it.
Things are defintely improving. We found our way to the second hostel in Amsterdam with no trouble, and even to both of the hostels in Berlin with no problems. Big success for us. The hostel in Amsterdam was a bit strange but good. It was just four beds which was a nice change, though the other two were filled with 40 year old English guys away for a weekend. One of whom was very chatty, with a full on 'Lock stock and two smoking barrels' accent. So we saw Anne Frank house. It was a little disappointing, not because of the place, because we were hussled around by French and English school children who were large in number and not good at being quiet and respectful. So I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have. We then wandered up to the red light district. Lunch time was an interesing time to go I guess, but it was the time we had. To be honest I found it a little underwhelming. The sex shops basically reminded me of Krd, there were just more. And the prostitutes standing in windows just depressed me. I guess it being so open I expected it to be a little more classy or something, but its still the sex trade and the girls still looked as dull eyed as I'd expect a hooker to anywhere in the world. One was even wearing playboy bunny underwear. We didn't hang around for long, just took a stroll through and then headed off to the Van Gogh museum. Which was huge, and very full. It was quite a nice building, and did house a lot of Van Gogh paintings. They'd also done quite amazing work into collecting items and artwork from around his time, things that influenced him and that he influenced, so I got to see a couple of Monets as well.
We left Amsterdam..yesterday, though it really doesn't feel like it. We turned up to catch the bus, having gotten up at 6.30 so we could be on the tram at 7, to discover it was going to be an hour late because they didn't get in till 11 the night before (they were due at 6) and Europe has strict laws around bus drivers and rest periods. So we waited on the street outside the hostel in the cold for an extra hour, not so fun. Also it turns out we're still not getting booked on the bus properly which is a pain, so it was lucky we got seats.
We arrived late in Berlin, 7.30, but thank god its light till so late around here, so we had plenty of daylight left to find the hostel. We stayed at one last night, a place called Amstel house. It was ok, but the one we're at now is more our speed, smaller and a little more peaceful. Amstel was near a very good restaurant however which we ate at last night. It was Italian, sort of. They had a steak menu a page long, so you could choose what kind of cut, and how much of it you wanted. I could have eaten at that place for a week and still not have tried all the things on the menu I wanted to.
Today we spent the morning finding our way to the new hostel, and then the early afternoon getting confused in the laundromat, but managing to get our clothes clean and mostly dry. We then headed off into town and lay in Tiergarten reading for a while. I finally finished the Obama book, which I plan to leave behind here because I'm tired of carrying it. By the time we'd done that it was 5 o'clock so we decided it was time to have a quick look at the Holocaust memorial and head back to the hostel to find food. Two hours later we started to head towards the train station (before turning off and finding the kebab place). The Holocaust memorial has been by far one of my favourite things to this point. There is an exhibition below it talking about the Holocaust, in which the Germans do not shy away from talking about the horrible things that the Germans of that time did. It was set out really well I thought. However the exhibition had nothing on the memorial. Its hard to describe, and photos don't really cover it properly. Its a whole lot of concrete blocks varying in size, getting quite tall in the middle, and the ground underneath is uneven. You can stand in the middle and forget your in the centre of a huge city. I think they did a fantastic job designing it.
Off to the side, just inside Tiergarten is the memorial for the gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust. Some what humble compared to the other it was still quite nice, and I'm glad we found it.
It rained tonight, we made it back to the hostel just in time. Luckily it looks like the weather will be quite good for the rest of our time here, which I'm thankful for, I think I'm going to really like Berlin, I do so far. And thank god its warmer here, I've managed to get out of my jeans and into shorts for the first time since Barcelona. The only day I haven't worn them was the one I was washing them. A bit of a problem it always being cold when you only have one pair of long pants.
Over and out from me for now. With free wifi I'm sure I'll be back soon. However I think Sophie and I might actually manage to venture out at night tomorrow, to go and try a German beer. Maybe.
No comments:
Post a Comment