Vienna, Berlin, Australia day and A Pepperoni by Another Name... ?

What can I say about the last few days… since I last checked in from Vienna? Did I mention Vienna? I don’t remember. Anyway, Vienna was the same as when I was the same as when I was there last time, funny enough, except staying about half an hours walk from the “circle” along a long shopping street… the same stores as you would see in any shopping street in Europe, pretty much… the only other difference is that I was here last time in May-ish. So the weather was a lot better… it was so windy that I couldn’t even stand still to take a photo unless sheltered by a building…. Couldn’t even lean against a tree… amazing. And it left me not so amazingly pissed me off… anyway, I managed to walk around the whole city and get back in time to go to sleep.

The first night I got into Vienna I met some cool people and, in the way of Hostels Everywhere, we decided to go on a little pub crawl. It was good fun and ended up at of all places an Australian pub in the middle of the city with a Coopers Sparkling ale… fantastic. The second night I was there we were a little more… subdued. Sitting around chatting about nothing in particular, a girl walks over and plonks her self down, and turns out to be a 4^th year med student from Flinders Uni in Adelaide. Crazy. Anyway, she was on a weekend trip down to Vienna from Prague where she’s doing a 2 month placement thingy… naturally we got chatting and in the end decided to catch up again in Prague and go and have a drink or something… and that’s about all that happened in Vienna that was really interesting… it really is a gorgeous city and still one of my favorites for no real reason that I can really put my finger on… nope. Been sitting here trying to decide what it is… cant think.

Prague on the other hand was, and always has been; pretty much top of my list of places to go to when I was in Europe. Again, not for any particular reason. Although I’d heard the beer was cheep and the women gorgeous… I don’t really think they were the reasons… I don’t know. Anyway Prague turned out to be very much like Vienna and Budapest in its design… on a river. Gorgeous old buildings… Like Budapest it is overlooked from one of the hills in the city by quite an imposing castle. More so than the one in Budapest because it is still more in once piece because of the lack of bombing… That is one of the amazing things about Prague, is that it was never bombed in the war… so although it has left all of the buildings in their original state… because all the other cities did was in a lot of cases re-build all the nice buildings, Prague has the effect of just having really big old dirty buildings. This is obviously why people seem to always say that it’s such a black city… I didn’t find that at all… I found it, like Budapest, Dirty. But not dirty in the same grimy way as Budapest, more in a lived-in sort of way… its hard to explain unless you’ve been there… or seen my photos which with any luck and lack of procrastination on my behalf, should appear on Facebook at any time… watch that space…

So anyway, met up with Emma – the girl from Adelaide a few times which was nice… had some traditional foods; goulash, bread dumplings, roast duck, wild boar, Chinese... Beer... One night we went out and actually had Hungarian… I hadn’t eaten out in Hungary, so I thought I’d try their traditional food as well… Turned out to be an amazing if not rather expensive evening… very good food and a bottle of nice Hungarian wine… all down in a restaurant, which seemingly like most of the restaurants in the Czech Republic seem to be in old wine cellars or breweries… very cool. And once you stopped hearing the terrible Hungarian music, the atmosphere was really quite… atmospheric. Um. Another time we had Beer flavored Ice cream. And yes. It was terrible…

Fitted a lot in a few days… considering at least twice I slept until after mid-day.

Went up to the castle, took some photos, walked around the city, took some photos… actually walked almost from one end of the old city to the other… from an old but gorgeous grave yard and church to the castle… was amazing, but I had sore feet by the end of it. Over the oldest bridge in the world (I think – sounds good though doesn’t it) past all the statues, including one that we decided was St Hilton, cause he had 5 stars in his halo. It really is a gorgeous city… I have a feeling I’ll go back there eventually…

And I think that’s about all I did in Prague…

From there I was headed to Berlin and Australia day… I really found I didn’t know that much about Berlin, in any respect, apart from obviously about the fact they had the east/west wall thing that came down, and Pink Floyed played… and um… Nazi stuff… which you sort of learn a bit about unless you specifically study history. Which I didn’t. But I DID do geography. So I knew where it was at least. Anyway, my first few days were really spent doing very little… just wandering around a bit taking the odd photo here and there… they have some amazing grafiti in Berlin.. Anyway, Australia day came and we headed out at like 3pm ish I think... it was early anyway, even for Australians… fantastic… went to a pub that had advertised some Australian things… music etc… the only beer they had was VB. And the obligatory Fosters on tap… so I ended up having Strongbow cider… a few shots of jaegermeister with red bull and a crown lager which we’d picked up from the Australia shop earlier that day, where the girl realized we were Aussies and gave us a mintie. So funny… anyway, it was a really good night, and I didn’t get really drunk which was amazing and fortuitous, because I was up in time the next day to go on the walking tour of Berlin. We went from the pub to a pizza place which had a huge range of pizzas… I decided on pepperoni with chicken… sounded nice... but apparently pepperoni is like a not hot chili in Germany, so I was a little disappointed when the pizza came out with these enormous green things on it… not happy. But whatever…

Even though it was raining … not hard, but frustratingly steady all day, it was a good tour, and I learned a lot more about the city which according to the guide, is mostly a replica, having been 90% bombed and flattened in the Second World War. Fantastic.

You’d almost never know…

Highlights were the Jewish memorial square, which is an amazing piece of landscape architecture that is left open to the individual as to the specific meaning of it, but LOOKS like an enormous grave yard with graves of differing heights from 1 to I guess 12 feet high. Walking through it is completely different to looking at it thought, and I felt distinctly like a small child lost in a sea of imposing huge adults… quite an interesting feeling.

Anyway… my general opinion of Berlin was that it’s getting there. It has some great old architecture, museums statues, etc… and it has some fantastic new architecture, like the dome above parliament, the TV tower, the bank which is actually a whale, and the train station Hopfbahnhof which is without a doubt the most amazingly designed train station I’ve ever seen… sooo cool.

Anyway, I’m running out of describing words… so I’ll leave by saying that I’m on the train to Krakow sitting on the most uncomfortable seats I’ve had so far… they feel like cardboard with one enormous spring underneath… shitty… ALMOST but not quite as bad as the coffee I just bought…

Ciao.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe