Day 3: Berlin to Prague (via Dresden)

What i remember most about this day (apart from seeing my future home- more on that later) was waking up extra early to be on the bus in time. Being the youngest and very green about how serious the manager was about leaving and late comers behind i was the first one on the bus. haha. But it today was to prove a nice relaxing day.

We began with the morning song and after we were outside the city and on the open road. We took it in turns to introduce ourselves and tell everyone a funny happening.
this proved to be hilarious. my favourite part was listening to everyone talk about their travelling and where they had come from. So many people had gone about their travels so differently and come from all over the world. the dominant group were aussies! yew. then came the Yankies and represntatives from India, Hong Kong, South Africa, Canadia, the UK and of course NZ. not meaning to toot our own horns but we were one hell of a group :)
So after a hilarious bus ride we arrived at our lunch destination- Dresden.

And what a beautiful city it is. Unfortunately for Dresden it was targeted by the allies during the war and as such was severly bombed and damaged during WWII. You can still see the bullet holes and such today. But a very intellegent goverment sought to rebuild the city in the same fashion as before the war. So instead of having a mix match of architctural eras such as Berlin had. Dresden was all old world charm :)

 Me infront of the The Fürstenzug: (Procession of the Princes) its a large mural of a mounted procession of the princes of Saxony, made out of 25,000 Meißner porcelain tiles. It details the thousand year history of the Princely house of Wettin.

On our quick walking tour we saw Dresdens main attractions, such as the Opera house, the domed Frauenkirche, the Royal Residence – once home to the Saxon Kings – and the Zwinger Fortress, a massive palace where royals went to party!

 

The Frauenkirche- i.e Church of Our Lady- Severly damaged in the war and only just completely refurbished in 2004. you can see the different ages of the stones :)

It was our first sunny day since beggininng the trip 3 days ago. It was still freezing and not snowing like Berlin. but the sun was enough to warm our spirits and keep us going. Many of the group took time to indulge in the german equivalent of gluhe wijn. i.e Warmed wine. Having already had it a couple of times in dutchyland i opted for something simple and familiar. MACCAS.... im so ashamed haha.

 The Zwinger Fortress, where the rich and famous of another century came to dance and play... unfortunately it was crawling with tourists and as it wsa winter the gardens were being renovated and looked generally pretty un impressive. that being said i could just imagine beautiful men and woman dancing together under the moonlight here. Something like pride and prejudice- But with German subtitles haha.

After saying goodbye to Dresden we boarded the bus and buckled down for the four hour drive to Prague. I mostly slept and looked out the window, much to my dismay. my camera was not handy when i came across my future home.... a bunch of castle ruins high ontop of a mountain and just above a lake in the boring outskirts of rural prague :) I will go back there and find it one day...

Driving into prague was unfortunately un impressive as we drove via the industrial area and were staying outside the old city centre, upon arrival at our hotel we found the bus couldnt quite fit by an illegally parked car, as you would expect a bunch of willing boys got off and managed to bounce the car out of the way and we were able to set down and head upto our hotel rooms.

 

Bouncing the car out of the way...

This is where the fun begins. Our first night in prague we were treated to a traditional prague dinner in an out of the way resturaunt in the city centre. i was so at awe by everything i saw that i couldnt quite reach for the camera. Then we were accosted by a russian man who only knew how to say 'pretty girl' and 'fucking hell', so we moved into the resturaunt pretty quickly.
we all sat together and enjoyed dinner. being too tired and without shame i used my fingers to roll up a crepe so i could better eat it. i soon found myself the centre of attention and the butt of all future contiki jokes! my sides hurt from all the laughter and it was a great mood setter for the upcoming pub crawl!!!

 

My traditional prague dinner: this is the main course, its a kind of meatloaf with heavy sauce and then a dollop of whipped cream and strawberry jam ontop... it was suprisingly tasty for the first few bites. And after those few bites i was overwhelmed by the rich sauce and the sweet jam.. defintely an acquried taste haha.

In an down and out of the way bar we found ourselves supplied with free and unlimited vodka and absinth shots as well as beers and white wines. It was a tiny place and with only a short amount of time there we found ourselves lining up the shots and going for gold. MY poor darling paige found herself all too worse for the wear before we made it to the second pub and was then quickly taken home. i however managed to dance myself stupid, talk lots of shit, get lost from the group and making friends in a random Kfc parlour and finally at a 5 floor dance club with 300 16 year old danish tourists! it was a fantastic night/ morning! as it was 4.30 before i crawled into bed covered in disgusting beer and smoke ash and still dancing to an imaginary beat!

from left to right: Nikki, Emily, Paige, Ashley, Stacey and Feliz (who got engaged here in prague the next day!!! crongrats again guys!)

Berlin Day 2:

Today we began our day with a pitiful 5 minute ' photostop' at the East side gallery of the Berlin Wall. 

this place was something else.
i cannot imagine what i would have been like to be fenced in as the people of the communist Germany were. Today the significance is somewhat downplayed by the constant stream of cars racing by and the all too colourful artworks. Upon a closer study one realises that all the artworks are indeed centrally themed around freedom and peace and therefore should naturally be colourful. By my 5minute stop did not leave my time for anything else than a quick run, and silent contemplation and then a frustrated toot from the bus driver.
but nether the less i had much to think about as we made our way toward the city centre of berlin for another walking tour.
This walking tour was fantastic, it took in all the sights.

Including:
The Bebelplatz- Where 20,000 books were burnt as a censorism of pro- jewish ideas or even for the simple fact that the author was jewish. I love that when you look down into the glass window that shows empty library shelves as a reminder of the lost book, that the first thing you see is your reflection. What better a way to remind people of their own responsibility in this world. If not to stand up against and racist ideal, then to at the very least to fight for our right to protect our freedom of speach, thought and pen.

The former place of Hitler's war bunker, which is now currently a car park infront of some boring apartments. Im glad they tore it down, im glad that when i stood there and looked at that sight all i could see were cars dripping oil, rubbish littering the street. and much to our bewilderment, an attempted drug drop. it is a beffiting memorial for evil adolph.

The Holocaust Memorial: oh, i could have walked this place for hours and never come out again.
'The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38 m (7 ft 10 in) long, 0.95 m (3 ft 1 in) wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.8 m (8 in to 15 ft 9 in). According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.' (cited by Wikipedia)

I liked that it was random and post modern, that it wasnt a simple statue in a park. No memorial is ever going to prorperly convey the sheer weight of the attrocities committed. But i think this memorial suceeds in making the hoards things as they wander, instead of posing for a photo and moving on.

The former headquarters of the gestapo:
those sick few who were incharge of co-ordinating under Adolph Hitler.

Check Point Charlie:
Now wasnt this place a decrepid tourst trap! We were warned by our tour guide not to get to close as the fake officer who was there to pose for photos would demand two euros per photo. I decided two euro was a small price to pay and i began to approach him with a polite smile on my face. '2 euro for a photo little girl'he called. now immeadiately i was pissed off. freaking tourist whore mongerer. So i bluffed and said i was just interesting in knowing if this is the original building. i had known it wasnt thanks to our lovely and very informative tour guide however the officer cried out 'yes yes yes, do you want a photo or not'. i told him i didnt have to small change on me. and he turned to me and said 'do you have a daddy or a boyfriend here little girl...' i immeadiately started hurling insults at the bastard as i walked away. telling the other young girls behind me to not touch the pervy old guy. My god did he put me in a bad mood.

seeing as check point charlie was the last stop on the tour i set off into the streets of berlin in quite a huff at the decrepancy of some people! much enraged i did not want to go back to the museum island and indulge in the exhibits within the oldest museum in germany, or the really well displayed hitler exhbit in the national gallery. Instead i wandered the back streets of berlin for hours on end before finally sitting down on a grassy knoll and playing with a border collie in the sun for a few hours.
Although i did end up going back to the Neue Wache Memorial: Originally a guard house and an arms storehouse it now serves as a war memorial. Inside is a mother and her fallen sun. The somewhat beautiful thing about this memorial is that there is a hole in the roof, so that like the soldiers fallen and the mothers left behind, this statue is left to withstand all weathers- i.e all tests of strength and measures of grief.

I also stopped by the Karl Marx statue. why on earth they have a statue commemorating the father of communism and the catalyst for the creation of a divided germany i do not know. But i will forever remember the story of how my friend time jumped the fence that surrounds it to punch the statue square in the face. take that commie bastard!

After making my way home i met up with the contiki group and we headed on out for indian for dinner! what a lovely evening it was getting to know one another and indulging in some fantastic curry dishes. if ever in berlin. try the mango coconut chicken! FANTASTIC! i was defintely not ready to leave this city the next morning....

Berlin- Contiki

And so my holiday begins. with mike, myself and johnny managing to get lost on our way to the amersfort train and arriving just in the nick of time for me to load up on some snacks and board my 8 hour train to berlin... what a way to begin haha.

I arrived incredibly parched and sick in Berlin after the  trains cafeterria man informed me that no i could not buy a bottle of water unless i could pay with credit card. So after running to the nearest store and drinking a bottle of water in one gulp i bought myself a tram ticket and headed in search of my contiki hotel.
Now what google maps does not tell you is that although it will tell you which tram goes where it will not tell you that in Berlin, there are two trams with the same number, each going opposite ways on the same line... you can probably guess which tram i got on. haha.
luckily enough i had a compassionate tram driver who not only let me stay on the tram while he was servicing it. but in broken english and german managed to deliver me to my hotel after having to chase me down when i got off at the wrong stop haha.

finally! i was at my hotel, i was safe and i was only an hour behind schedual. time to party!!
the first night wasnt to crazy everyone was crowded around the hotel bar meetingand greeting. i instantly loved everyone. what a crazy eclectic bunch of people everyone turned out to be. I arrived back in my hotel room wondering how it could possibly get any better when there unpacking her things was stacey. ahhh her aussie accent was like music to my ears! it was so long since i had heard my 'own language' haha. she and i talked and talked and talked before turning in for the night.

Day one:
Today we awoke early and boarded the contiki bus for the first time. It was also the first time we listened to our contiki song- Dance with somebody. by Mandio Diao. Every morning it was played to us so that in some distant day in the future, when the song came on the radio, we would remember our contiki trip.
After bopping along to our song we quietened on our way to the Sachsenhausen Concerntration camp just outside Berlin. Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used primarily for political prisoners from 1936 to the end of the Third Reich in May, 1945.Today it is a mueseum open to the public and a very powerful reminder of the evils of the history of men.

Entrance to the Camp

Walking through this place was oddly numbing. All i could think of was how many people would have spent their last few days here in this place i was now. There are many information boards with survivors testaments about life in the concertration camps. The most chilling that i read was accounts of people describing the sound that dead bodies make as they are rolled out of the back of a gas chamber truck and into a mass grave. It took a lot of time to walk around on my own here. At any moement i felt like my heart was going to break. I almost lost myself as i stood infront of the hanging posts and the gas chambers.
It literally left me speechless to read about the punishments that were handed out to prisoners- whippings, being suspended by your arms for hour, being strung up by your long hair and the list goes on.

The gasing chamber and the Hanging/ firing range. Most inmates were forced to watch the hangings, you were whipped if you closed your eyes to long.

I departed incredibly sombre and unnaturally cold. I was so thankful for my life that it was as if i had the injustice of the not so lucky jewish peoples weighing on my shoulders... I was very glad to be back on that bus.

It was now close to lunch time and the begginning of our free time. After being dropped back into the city centre i oined a couple of people heading upto the Berlin Tower. The elevator did nothing to help my irrational fear of heights (and stupidly terrorism) but my was the view amazing! It was a bit of a shame that the windows were caked in snow. The same snow which just a few minutes earlier we wereso happy to see falling.  But it wasnt so great when you are trying to take photos after waiting half hour to get up the crazy expensive tower haha.
That being said the view was quite incredibly. The architecture from the birds eye view was so incredibly diverse that it seemed to be a random cluster of eras jumbled into one city.

  Berlin tower from below..... and above                                     
After the tower and a quick bite to eat we made our way towarsd the Brandeburg Gate-  the only remaining gate of a series through which Berlin was once entered and the place where a) Hitler would hold his many war parades and b) where the Prussian Kings and Queens used to enter and exit the city through.
Once we managed to escape the many gypsies that harrased us for money we possed for pictures infront of the gate and i managed to hug a giant bear walking around. A lovely and very well to do french couple were so kind as to offer to take group photos for us that when they started crouching on the ground to get good angles for the shots i had to suppress a fit of giggles. It was so refreshing to see a bit of enthusiam and the photos were fantastic quality!

On our way back to the bus we managed to get a few quick photos infront of the German Parliment building which is unfortunately closed until further notice after a recieving a series of terrorist threats. damned terrorism.

Dinner that night was fantastic. i found myself sitting with the boys at the mexican resturant next door to our hotel where i discovered the amazing taste of desperados beer! its beer with tequila essence haha! after the boys departed i shuffeled on over to the girls table for some chit chat, everyone fell in love with the story of how i fell in love with mike haha. the moment was however somewhat runined when the group of boy who had recently departed tapped on the window to show us they had found a place that sells desperado's beer (and their huge smiles at this discovery haha).
But we could not stay and chat forever, we had a walking tour to get to!

The Eye Spy tour took us to a few significant places that focused on the times of communist Berlin, we saw one of the "Dead zones' from the Berlin wall.  A Dead zone is the part directly before the wall that was laiden with mines, guard dogs, razor wire, and which dozens of trained men had the guns pointed at. Therefore making escape over the wall impossible.
We did however learn of a sucessful escape under the Berlin wall staged by students as well as how many people became informers on their own families during communist times. You can apparently collect any files on yourself along with the names of who was ratting on you today. Although its proved not to popular as the general rule of thumb seems to be 'forget and remain silent for many topics in Germany'.

following the berlin wall and scavenger hunting through berlin!

Its quite crazy to believe that the Berlin wall only took 6 weeks to complete and that some parts- those that were situated between exisiting buildings went up over night! Today there is a stone path memorial that serves as a marking to where the original wall stood. We followed the trail of the wall to our first pub and then we began our scavenger hunt! After discovering the small clues that led us to a tiny tabacco store in what looked like an abaondend railway i was selected to go in and deliver a secret code word and recieve a newspaper containing directions to the next pub. the word was sauerkraut, and the man just laughed at me and refused haha. we managed to find the pub in the end and after a lot of drinking and fun we headed out clubbing where we danced the night away and ate fresh, hot, salty pretzels from our beloved tour guide Tim.

At 3am we crawled into bed soon to begin day 2....

CONTIKI TOUR FEBRUARY 2011

Berlin

    Visit the moving Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial

    See the Tiergarten, Alexanderplatz, Russian War Memorial, Brandenburg Gate & historic Reichstag building

    Take in commemorative artwork & the remains of the Berlin Wall

    See the site of 'Checkpoint Charlie'

     Berlin historical walking tour

     Eye Spy Berlin

Dresden

    See the rebuilt baroque architecture of the Royal Residence, Zwinger Fortress, Opera House and Frauenkirche 

Prague

    See Hradcany Castle, the Cathedral of St. Vitus, Charles Bridge and Wenceslas Square

    Visit the old town square and see the astronomical clock

    Locally guided tour of Prague

     Lunchtime cruise

    Traditional Czech evening

Kutna Hora

    Visit this World Heritage town and Church of Bones

Vienna

    Scenic drive along the historic Ring Road

    See the Hapsburg Palaces, St. Stephen's Cathedral and the State Opera House

    Vienna Classical Concert & Dinner

Bratislava

    Visit the historic old town

    See St. Martins Cathedral, Michael Gate and Baroque Tower

Budapest

    Sightseeing of Buda and Pest

    See the Castle District, Royal Palace, Church of St. Matthias, Chain Bridge and Fisherman's Bastion

    Hungarian dinner cruise in Budapest