Day 19: Berlin here we go

Its 5:30am. Is that the sound of seagulls walking on the roof of the boat again? I opened my eyes to be rudely welcomed by the sound of rain. All I could think of in my head was "NOOOOOOOOO!". Of all times to rain, it had to choose the time that we were carrying our huge backpacks through the dark streets of Amsterdam. Nevertheless, travel had to be done and it wasn't going to happen if we didn't hope out of bed.

We made it through the rain and arrived at the Amsterdam Central Station. It was still dark and while we were walking towards our platform we walked past many ecentric people. One such (homeless) person was sleeping standing up. He was swaying side to side and if there were to be a slight gush of wind I think he would have fallen over.

Our first train arrived and took us the the Schipol Airport where we had to catch a connecting train. All excited that we made it to our final train for the day we haphazardly hopped on any old carriage. What we didn't know was that not only do our tickets specify which seats we sit on but also the carriage in which those seats are located. We assumed the the seat numbers go from number 1 to number X at the end of the train. About 20 minutes in to the journey, just as we got comfortable, an irrate man and his family approached us. "This is our seat!" he proclaimed in a deep german voice, "I have proof". We quickly and naivley replied, "We have proof too!". Long story short we were wrong and did the walk of shame to our proper seats (3 carriages back). We were to never make this mistake again.

We arrived in Germany many hours later. Our hostel wasn't as close to the train statin as it was in Amsterdam. Instead we had to make our way to the eastern side of Berlin (which is the previous communist side). We arrived at the station near our hostel to find walls painted in graffiti and the buildings with its soviet facade. Things were just getting better for us.

We checked in to the hostel after going the long way from the station. It wasn't actually that bad inside. We were staying at the Generator Hostel. It was an old soviet office building and has since been converted into a huge hostel with hundreds of rooms. All the lights in the building are blue or green to make you feel like you are in a "generator". A little corny but i guess it also stops people from shooting up.

That night we went on our ritual dinner hunt. We found a nice little Italian restaurant near by. They had a sign at the from that said "Passta". In all fairness to the owners they did cross out one of the "s". After meeting the waiter in the restaurant we understood why they spelt pasta the way they did. They were spelling it the way they said it. Pettsy does the best impersoniation of this and I will upload a video of it when I get the chance.

After dinner we played Foosball and poker with M and Ms. We had yet another early night in preparation for New Years Eve.

Tim

Day 18: Admin in Amsterdam

My sincerest apologies for not updating the blog for almost 2 weeks. This leg of the trip has been quite hectic moving around countries, celebrating new years and finding a computer. It is amazing how many hostels don't have computers.

Today we went to the main train station to book the train tickets for the next part of our trip. This exercise which we thought would take 30 minutes max ended up taking almost 2-3 hours. We had to take a ticket and wait in line. This took most of the day and by the time we had finished waiting it was mid afternoon. I hate admin!

We needed to decide what we were going to do on our last day in Amsterdam. Instead of doing "mainstream" Amsterdam activities we ended up on a tour boat that took us around the canals. We were not impressed. It was a tour that talked little about the history of the city but instead identified objects as a building or a bridge. Not something worth 11 Euro or 22 Australian Dollars.

We ate dinner as usual and headed off to bed early because the next day we had to catch a train at 6 in the morning. We were "excited".

Tim