Berlin, Germany

Having eaten a final delicious Prague cake from the tourist-targeting bakery on the corner, Mel and I hopped on a bus to Berlin. It was a four-hour journey through a magnificent landscape. At one point, I was forced to climb out into the magnificent landscape to fetch my passport from beneath the bus, as we were boarded by border authorities, but that’s enough said about that.

Despite having learned all about S-Bahns not even a month back in Munich, we had an outrageously frustrating time figuring out how to get to the hostel. Or, at least, I was frustrated. Mel just stood there all superior, following me back and forth from the bus station to the train station and knowing exactly what to do. Which is what we eventually did, having doubled back to the train station for the second time.

Never give me a map. Never, never!

Our difficulties seemed set to continue when we stepped out at Alexanderplatz and became momentarily convinced that the graffiti-covered crack den across the street was our hostel. It wasn’t. It was just a graffiti-covered crack den across the street. And our actual hostel was pretty cushy, as it turned out.

We stepped out into the cold grey city street and hiked up to the Brandenburg Gate, the tourist symbol of Berlin and something important to do with history etc. It was all lit up in the darkness, and there were people dressed up as Darth Vader and US soldiers waving flags in front of it: cool.

Funny story about the Brandenburg Gate: the statue at the top signifies Victory, and was stolen by a covetous Napoleon when he stomped through Prussia. Following Napoleon’s defeat, some fairly triumphant Prussians returned Victory to her rightful place atop the Gate, and named the square beneath ‘Pariser Platz’. So now Victory is staring down on the vanquished Paris, a nice little nose-thumbing to the French.

We walked through the Gate and found ourselves at the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, a huge space filled with rising and falling blocks of granite. As you walk further into the Memorial, the granite blocks rise over your head and distort surrounding sounds, completely sucking away all evidence of the nearby traffic. It was striking. It was particularly shiver-inducing at night, and the people playing a rather inappropriate game of hide and seek didn’t much help my nerves.

We then paid a visit to the Memorial Museum beneath the blocks. The Memorial Museum provided a brief overview of the major Holocaust atrocities, but its focus was on anecdotal evidence from those directly affected. There were some truly nightmarish stories.

Next we visited the Topography of Terror, a museum about the Gestapo within the ex-Gestapo headquarters. (Mel and I almost mistakenly broke into a German Parliament building along the way, but that’s another story.) There were lots of photos, headlines and Nazi report extracts: fascinating! And we got to see a stretch of the Berlin wall outside the museum.

After the obligatory schnitzel and bratwurst dinner, we headed home and rested up for the next day’s adventures. The next day’s adventures started with a buffet breakfast, which I largely mention so as to credit my mother for our upbringing: yes, we did a Mum and took rolls for lunch. Shh.

We started the day with a three and a half hour tour of Berlin. Unlike our Prague guide, this chick knew what she was on about. Among other sights, we visited Checkpoint Charlie, the American checkpoint along the Berlin Wall, through which people used to smuggle themselves sewed inside car seats. We also got to see the site of Hitler’s infamous suicide bunker, upon which now lies a rather ordinary car park.

After the tour, we made our way to the East Side Strip, the longest remaining section of the Berlin wall. There was some fantastic artwork, and a really scungy atmosphere. And that was the closest we got to ‘alternative Berlin’ the whole time we were there, but I think Mel was secretly relieved to relocate to the city centre with its cleanliness and dampened threat of assault.

Our next stop was the Jewish Museum. The building was the best part, really. It was insanely creepy, deliberately constructed to evoke feelings of unease in its visitors, all sloping walls and empty ‘void’ spaces. There was a section of staircase that ended at a blank wall. The Holocaust Tower was particularly affecting: there was nothing inside the unheated space but darkness with a narrow strip of natural light at the top.

Most confronting of all was a gallery dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. The first room contained ten televisions with ten dissonant voices, each singing a different song over the top of the others. The second was a room full of cartoonish faces shaped out of metal, all grimacing, some big and some small, that made harsh clanking noises when you walked on top of them.

After that, we sought out a church left in ruins by the Allies and were wholeheartedly unimpressed. Dinner was more impressive: mmm, currywurst. We then took a quick look at the Reichstag before heading home.

After the old breakfast buffet routine next morning, we walked across half of Berlin, mostly within the Tiergarten and mostly in the general direction of the Victory Column at its centre. It took ages, but we finally got to the column and stared up at it for a bit before walking back to the Brandenburg Gate.

And so ended our adventures in Berlin, city of bears.

Prague, Czech Republic

Having bid farewell to Lucy, Mel and I hopped on a train to take us from Bratislava to Prague. Upon arrival, we hoisted our stuff through the fairly dodgy, unattractive streets until we reached our hostel. Next stop was the supermarket down the road, which sold ridiculously cheap Lion chocolate bars. Mel wanted to stay forever, but I somehow pulled her away, and off we went to pick up Maddie from the bus station.

And then we spent four hours in a police station where, I kid you not, they typed up a stolen wallet report on a typewriter. A typewriter. Four hours. We played some inspired charades. Celebrity heads was also a winner; you’d never guess how long it took Maddie to figure out she was Mr Squiggle. About as long as it took to type a police report on a typewriter. Also, they lied about the public transport situation at midnight, which is when we managed to escape, so all in all, Prague started off on shaky ground.

Monday was better. Monday was pretty awesome, actually. First off, we moved from dodgy outskirts hostel to shiny central hostel. Having finally located our new hostel among the twisty little streets, we dashed off through tourist-tarred streets to join a walking tour. The tour guide was fairly sketchy on actual Prague knowledge but was entertaining enough.

And the actual city was jaw-droppingly beautiful. Cobbled streets, cathedrals on hills, sprawling palaces, mosque-style synagogues, shrivelled thief’s arm, Kafka statues, Mozart’s concert hall, a Ringwraith or two…

After the tour, we crossed Charles Bridge and climbed up to the castle, stopping for a quick streetside picnic along the scenic way.

Once at the enormous sprawl of palace complex, we took in the view and made our way around the buildings. The highlight was the cathedral, all gothic towers and flying buttresses.

We drank gluhwein and watched the sun set from the top of the castle courtyard.

Next stop was the Museum of Communism. More like the Museum of Anti-Communism; it was essentially a propaganda machine condemning the Soviet propaganda machine. It was really interesting. Lots of pictures of Stalin; I almost felt I was back in Bratislava…

And following dinner – bread dumplings, smoked pork and cabbage – we headed back to the hostel, having done our best to see Prague in a day.

Bratislava, Slovakia

Lucy, Mel and I arrived with a round of applause in Bratislava, courtesy of a rather turbulent Ryanair flight. I was a bit surprised we even made it onto the plane, considering the mammoth size of Lucy’s bag. We took the bus from the airport, and then another bus from the station, and generally struggled to find our hostel. It was worth the wait: free drinks, a café breakfast, remarkably persistent Slovenian guys… everything an Aussie girl could ask for.

And then Mel’s bed started collapsing onto my legs.

Having survived the night, we got up, ate breakfast surrounded by Stalin at the little socialist café down the road, and commenced wandering the streets. They were fairly empty. Fairly grey and unattractive. Possibly to balance out the sheer monumental blueness of the church that we found on a walking tour that afternoon.

The tour guide provided a rather interesting perspective on the profits and advantages gained by Slovakia during World War II. I’m sure she didn’t mean to make it sound like the country’s alliance with Hitler was Springtime for Slovakia, but that’s how it came out.

It turns out that Bratislava is the city of upskirting statues. The city centre was peppered with random statues performing various feats.

Oh, and Lucy went cycling. Wish I had a photo of her trying to get down from this thing…

Another amazing Bratislava moment occurred at dinner, when my traditional garlic soup was delivered within an enormous bread roll. Lucy and Mel were pretty jealous of me, I can tell you that. While they ate their schnitzel, I gorged myself on garlicky bread, and rounded things off with some strange sheep-cheese dumplings.

We woke late the next day and headed up to the local castle, climbing millions of stairs, bringing back vivid memories of Montmartre. The castle delivered fantastic views of three countries (apparently).

Dinner was a slightly less exciting affair as our local was bereft of garlic soup buns. We got cuppa-soup noodles, bread and chocolate from the supermarket instead, along with a truly incomprehensible bottle of alcoholic something. It had a pear on it. We started our New Year’s celebrations at the hostel with our Slovenian friends. I broke a glass. We left, having somehow extricated ourselves from the Slovenians. And then we were dancing in the streets, avoiding unofficial fireworks by the riverfront, and moving from town square to town square with the celebrating hordes.

A very excellent way to bring in the new year.

Munich, Germany

When picking the family holiday spot for a couple of pre-Christmas days, the choice boiled down to Munich (for the markets), Barcelona (for Gaudi) and Amsterdam (for the coffee – I mean, Anne Frank’s house). We finally settled on Munich, and it was fantastic. The markets were just the start of it.

Mel and I flew into Munich (with Zoe and Will, by amazing coincidence) on Thursday night, took a train to the central city station and then utterly failed to meet up with Mum and Michael until we chanced upon them in a place decidedly not outside McDonalds. Our hotel was cushy. Free coffee machine cushy.

Friday consisted of markets in the morning, Dachau in the afternoon and schnitzel in the evening. We’d decided to visit the Dachau concentration camp the night before, having learnt how close it was to Munich. Unsurprisingly, it was a harrowing sort of visit, on a cold, grey day that did well to reflect the atmosphere of the place.

Having walked through the iron gates – ‘work sets you free’ – we stood at the edge of an empty parade ground, where the prisoners were forced to stand (or lie, sick or dead) for hours on end during roll call. They would have worn little more than pyjamas, and putting their hands inside their pockets amounted to inviting torture. Makes you think a little before complaining about London drizzle.

We were shown through the original processing centre, where prisoners were stripped of their identity (assigned numbers), their dignity (told to remove all clothing) and their possessions. We also saw reconstructions of the prisoners’ living quarters, and how they changed from the start to the finish of the war. At first, each prisoner might have had a bed. At the end, as many would have died, suffocating under the mass of people above them in the same bunk. The perimeter of the complex was lined with grass. Nazis used to periodically throw a prisoner’s cap across the border and tell them to get it – a death sentence, as snipers were ordered to kill any who stepped foot on the grass.

The next day we went somewhere completely different: Neuschwanstein, the most Disney-looking castle outside Disneyland. We caught a train into forest country, land of gingerbread houses and snow-covered fields, the whole Bavarian cliché, and got off in a town called Füssen. Being me, I somehow caused us to miss the hourly bus to Neuschwanstein, so we hailed a pair of taxis and got ourselves up to the foot of the castle-bearing mountain. We then hailed a horse and cart to take us the rest of the way.

Horse ‘music’. That’s all I really have to say.

Once up at the foot of this glorious fairytale castle, all nicely decked with snow, we hiked around the side, passed a ‘do not enter’ gate and made our way to this rickety matchstick bridge that had suicide written all over it. I ducked out for the view, snapped a courageous photo, and ducked right back onto solid ground.

We eventually climbed up to the actual castle and took a tour. The whole thing was incredible – brilliantly overdone, all dressed up with fantastically camp Disney-style scribblings. There were Arthurian legends, there were swans, there were a couple of naked women chucked in as an aside… everything Mad King Ludwig II might take a fancy to. The doorhandles were made in the shape of swans. Amazing.

Incredibly enough, we bumped into Zoe and Will on the way down the mountain. Mum, being Mum, decided a photo was necessary, so there’s photographic proof somewhere.

After the long train ride home, Mum and I homed in on the Christmas markets, hunting down gingerbread and biscuit cutters. I got a moose cookie cutter! Best thing ever. For dinner, we met up with the others for a pub meal. I had lentil and sausage stew, followed by strudel. To get home, we had to claw our way through flocks of gluhwein-guzzling locals. They love the stuff.

Sunday was our final day in Munich. Mel, Michael and I took a Third Reich tour of the city, which took us around to some really interesting places. The Indiana Jones book-burning square comes to mind.

I think Munich airport must be the most awesome airport I’ve ever been to. It had its own Christmas market! Ice rink and everything. We had one last bratwurst then left for London.

York, Yorkshire

York was nothing less than a winter wonderland, all castellated city wall, fake snow and Harry Potter ice sculptures. It was like walking into a festive cliché. I had an amazing time, and York jostled its way to the top of my ‘favourite British towns’ list.

Half the fun was sharing the experience with Zoe. She was the one who originally convinced me to go on the International Student House’s York trip. We all met at the ISH at 7:30am on Friday morning, from which we left for Kings Cross and eventually wound up in York.

First off, we took a tour of this mediaeval Disneyland. Among other things, we saw a church that had once housed its very own hermit. Not the most glamorous career. We also walked along part of the city wall towards the monumental York Cathedral. Lots of stained glass in that building. It was all removed during World War II to prevent potential bomb-damage. Bomb shelters were for glass only. (Civilians < glass.)

After a quick peek at the Shambles, a famous windy alleyway of a street overhung by houses, we went for dinner at a pub called the Black Swan. I had a gigantic Yorkshire pudding and beef, and then shared some spotted dick with Zoe. Good stuff.

Day two began with Vikings. We headed down to the JORVIK Viking Centre for the full Viking experience, which encompassed guides in costume, a ride with mannequins, and ‘authentic’ Viking smells. Mum, your cubs would love it.

Next came the York Castle Museum: a collection of rooms, objects and narratives done up like the past. I learned heaps about the evolution of toilets and soap and mourning clothes and mince pies. They even had an indoor street scene, complete with an actor performing a one-man Dickens extravaganza: A Christmas Carol. He tried his hardest to grope Zoe, but she fended him off with admirable skill and dignity. Humbug.

We then went and had cream tea at Betty’s, a famous teashop that was beyond brimming every time we passed it. Somehow we squeezed our way in at low tourist tide.

Next we heaved off for dinner. We met up with a couple of the others and embarked on an epic quest to find a pub with room to spare. This took about an hour. We wound up with approximately ten minutes in which to eat before we had to rush off for a ghost tour, which was hilarious. I didn’t get scared, and that’s saying something, as I’m still fairly jumpy around unfamiliar bathrooms (thank you, Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock). Only screamed once. The guide just made fun of everyone the whole time.

On Sunday morning, Zoe and I hiked out along the town wall and found ourselves at the Yorkshire Museum. Lots of interesting stuff there: Romans, mediaeval churchy stuff, dodos, and a really fat over-stuffed platypus.

One museum obviously wasn’t enough, so we struck out for the National Rail Museum, which wound up being more or less as fascinating as it sounds. There were some very cool Thomas-esque tank engines and more than a couple of trains that bore close resemblance to the Hogwarts Express, but apart from that… we bought nice postcards.

We wound up our York trip with a carol service at St Denys, a local church. It was lovely – lots of kids scrabbling around for chocolate coins, and a fairly awful band accompanying some fairly questionable singing. Just how I like it.

Paris, France

Mel, Steph and I went to Paris and we did everything. Everything. Well, except all the stuff that my friends told me to do, but I have to reserve a little reason to return to Paris. That’s my excuse. That, and sore legs.

We suffered an appalling early start: the Eurostar left King’s Cross at 6:30am. I somehow managed to miss the whole tunnel part, possibly because my eyes were shut. Once in Paris, we headed straight for the Eiffel Tower, bags and all. It’s bronze. I never remember that. The view from the second level was breathtaking; I remember that much, at least.

After dumping our stuff at the (very cushy) hotel, we struck out for a lower sort of tourist attraction: the Parisian catacombs. The warning signs out the front were fairly foreboding – ‘not for people of a nervous disposition’ – but the length of the queue was scarier. To while away the time, I went and fetched some chocolat chaud and pains au chocolat: the perfect remedy for drizzle, fear and queueing.

The catacombs themselves were about as morbid and creepy as you might expect. And they stretched on forever! Half of Paris is built on bones. We wandered past a total of six million ex-Parisians – all arranged in decorative (if monotonous) style along a dark labyrinthine tunnel. I kept having visions of skeletal hands reaching out and grabbing my ankles à la Carrie. Nice.

We emerged into evening gloom (it was about 4 o’clock) and headed over to the Arc de Triomphe. The Champs Elysées was stuffed with people, busy busy, especially closer to the Place de la Concorde, where market stalls lined both sides of the street. It was a fantastic Christmas market, but perhaps a bit too popular. We bought our crêpes and struggled along against the tourist tide.

By this point, we were all becoming a little exhausted, so we headed down to the Place de la Concorde to find our bus home. This was something of a trial. We’d been feeling pretty good about our decision to use the Parisian bus service to get around, right up until we realised how bloody hard it was to locate bus stops. We spent a million years trudging up and down the Champs Elysées, searching fruitlessly. We found the stop right as tensions reached the ‘homicidal’ range. And we got home. And we watched Miss France on TV until we all felt a bit better.

Sunday was just as crazy busy as the day before. Having managed to get to Paris on the first weekend of the month, we found that we’d stumbled upon free Sunday entry into all major museums - quelle chance! Taking full advantage of this, we hit up the Loeuvre – here, da Vinci; there, Napoleon – and then the Conciergerie, which seemed to be hosting some strange sort of art exhibition on the theme of animals. I have never seen such a fine unicorn pelt.

Next up was the Notre Dame: just as gothic and monumental as I remembered it. There was even some organ music accompanying us up the aisles, adding to the fantastic Victor Hugo atmosphere.

After feasting on some baguettes in a nearby café, we caught the bus up to Montmartre and somehow hauled ourselves up the killer stairs. Mel barely survived. But all was worth it when we reached the Sacre Coeur and its spectacular city views. (I didn’t faint once inside, to the sorrow of nuns everywhere.) We then explored the touristy bits of Montmartre – berets, paintings, hawkers everwhere – and came across a Salvadore Dali exhibition. Loved his Alice in Wonderland stuff. Just as surreal as advertised.

Crêpes followed, and then a brief visit to the Paris Opera House. We returned to the Gare du Nord, and there ended our Parisian adventure: back on the Eurostar with one last baguette, half-crippled by the endless walking, and masters of the Paris bus system.

Fin.

London: Hallelujah

A couple of weeks ago I rediscovered London. It started off on a Friday and featured a good deal of my good friend Zoe. We went to the Charles Dickens museum in Bloomsbury, which is situated in one of his numerous London houses, and contains a lot of interesting Dickensy stuff: portraits, his favourite armchair, first editions of his works, all that sort of thing. This was actually our second attempt at the Dickens museum. First time around, we turned up to find the place closed. It was good to finally get it under our belts.

We followed literature with some art. Having headed down past Holborn to get to the National Gallery, we joined quite the crowd of elderly tourists and took a tour. Very cultured, aren’t we?

But wait: there’s more. Saturday brought a free tour of Westminster Abbey (kindly organised by the King’s College Chaplaincy). I’d already visited the Abbey a couple of years back, but it was nice to get back in there and revisit some of my favourite memorial slabs of stone. The tour took us through places inaccessible to the ordinary visitor. We got to stand on the raised altar bit where the Royal Wedding happened, and see where the queen was coronated. She was crowned with her back to the people: brilliant.

Along came Sunday, and with it, the Old Spitalfields Market with Alice and Maddie. Maddie and I struck out for Liverpool Street Station, heading across London Bridge and past the Monument, catching a glimpse of a Harry Potter guided tour and giving semi-informed directions to a lost tourist. The Market itself was top notch, delivering a very nice bundle of Wodehouse books and some pistachio-flavoured Turkish delight.

I left the others to go and meet up with Zoe again, this time at an advent carol service at St Martins in the Fields, the rather impressive-looking church opposite Trafalgar Square. We went expecting to sing carols; instead, we got a fairly powerful sermon from the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. There was lots of talk of hell and judgement, nicely balanced by some wonderful choral singing.

Monday arrived, but my London touristing barely paused for breath. Zoe and I went to 39 Steps, a play based on an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Our restricted view seats turned out to be incredibly worth it when we found ourselves in an otherwise empty row, and we managed to land ourselves an unrestricted view after all. The play itself was great fun – a slap-stick pastiche of the film noir genre, with the fourth wall broken clear through by a very talented cast.

On Tuesday, Maddie, Polly, Kyveli and I headed back to Westminster Abbey to attend a performance of Handel’s Messiah. While we were seated behind the choir, the acoustics were fairly monumental, delivering a full-bodied performance of the Hallelujah Chorus. We even got to sit in the wooden choir stands! It was a fantastic night.

Finally, on Wednesday, after struggling through some more uni work – yes, that all continued as per usual – I went along with Alice and Maddie to a bar to see a band called Foreign Slippers. It was great music, great cider, great times. The perfect end to a rather hectic week of Londoning.

(Do you love the birds? I do. I dragged Zoe out to a very random, very eccentric, very awesome exhibition in Shoreditch, and we did a spot of bird-watching.)