7-24-09 Berlin Nightmare

We awoke early in the morning in our Prague flat, got ready and went upstairs for breakfast. The breakfast was buffet style, but they weren't serving coffee! "Egads!" I exclaimed to a packed dining hall, "where is the coffee!" "Looks like they don't have any," said my sister, a look of forlorn on her face. We loaded up our plates and took a seat near the window. As we ate, I noticed the French guy I had met the night before sitting with a few friends. Before we left I gave him my contact info, and said that if he's ever in Oregon he should look me up. He never did, sadly.

In order to feed our coffee addiction, we checked out of the hostel, left our bags with the front desk, and ambled up the street to the nearest cafe. As we sat outside to enjoy our coffee, the firespinner I had met last night walked by carrying his staff. I called him over and introduced him to my sister. He said he was going to Charles Bridge to "spin" for an hour, and if we had time we should check out the free tour given at 11 o'clock because the guides took you everywhere in Prague, and told you all the history. "You can't miss it!" he said, so we agreed to check it out. Hell, what else were we going to do?

When we got to the square there was a folk festival going on. Women dressed in traditional garments danced around men
wearing leiderhosin and clogs, while a band played songs that sounded like mixes between polka and Irish folk music. The smell of cinnamon wafted over the scene from a cart selling a Czech version of the "elephant ear."

The tour began with a bang as our guide came bounding into the group of tourists speaking a mile-a-minute. Most of the people didn't realize the tour had begun until she was half way through recounting the 9th century. Those who hadn't done their reading were left scratching their head wondering what the term "Bohemia" meant, among other things.

Our guide took off at a healthy trot stopping only at the major landmarks, talking constantly and waiting impatiently for people to catch up. Prague, she said, is full of mystery and tales of ordinary and extraordinary madness. My favorite being a story about a withered arm found in St. Vitus Cathedral, in short they never found the rest of the body. I decided it must have been the gargoyles behind the whole thing.

After three hours of walking through Prague, our guide left us at the foot of Charles Bridge. She wished us bon voyage as she
disappeared into the crowds moving back to Old Town Square to meet a new group of tourists to do the whole thing over again. We walked across the bridge, touched the statue of St. Luthgard and saw a troop of gypsies.

With our Prague trip complete we returned to the hostel, got our bags and made for the station. The train to Berlin wasn't for an hour, so we killed the time by drinking some beer with a fellow backpacker named Constantine. He turned out to be a medical student from New York who had been doing rotations in Prague for the past three weeks. He said he was heading back to the states, but not before hitting up Berlin for a three-day drunken party with his friends. His shoulder length curly black hair framed his smiling eyes and large mouth, and he was funny in dry, clinical sort of way, so we invited him to sit with us on our way to Berlin. "Great!" he said, offering us another beer.

That was when the bad luck began. Our train to Berlin was delayed two and a half hours, and we were informed that it no longer would be picking us up at the our current station. "Bad luck!" I said to myself, not knowing this bad luck would eventually follow us all the way to Berlin. We finally caught the train at the other station, and weren't all that surprised to see our cabin would again be full, promising another sleepless late night ride. However, instead of a bunch of old, stodgy people, as was the case from Rome to Vienna, we were accompanied by a group of young Spanish ladies. One of which lived in Berlin and spoke very good English. We talked all the way to Berlin while passing around a bottle of red wine one of the Spanish ladies had snuck on the train.

We arrived in Berlin at one o'clock in the morning, tired and hungry and slightly drunk, and in the middle of a train conductor strike. Nobody was going anywhere, and so we were stuck in East Berlin without a hostel reservation and no idea where to go. This sort of thing happens only once every four years, and it just happened to start at the moment of our arrival. "Bad luck" I said to myself as we descended the train. We talked to a couple of Americans who were handing out pamphlets telling people where the nearest hostels were. They told us to check out one hostel called "The White Rabbit" which was only three or four blocks down the road. We said thank you, and entered the cold Berlin night.

This is how I felt at that moment of time

Every hostel we found was either booked solid, or impossible to find, so by 2:30am we all sprung for a cab that would take us to City Center Berlin Hostel where Constantine had reserved a bed. When we arrived we asked if they had two spare beds, which thankfully they did. My sister went upstairs to sleep, but I stayed up and thought about how incredible it was to be stuck in a foreign country with nothing but your mind and perseverance to guide you. Then I ate a Snickers bar and went to sleep.