Lemon tree travelogue

Teddy Bears, Witches and Ridiculous Drinks

We quickly arrived at our hostel, hardly looking up as we walked there - it was definately colder in Prague than Berlin had been. We got our key to room 36 on the third floor and struggled up, backpacks weighing heavily, to our little room where we dumped our stuff and flumped.

Martin wanted to shut his eyes for a while before we ventured into Prague, so while he slept I sat outside our room reading. Conveniently we had a little sitting area opposite our door. Just a few chairs and a table...and an ash-tray! Woo-hoo! Going out into the freezing cold every time I wanted a cigarette was something I would happily forgo while in Prague.

Having settled into our hostel (our room has yellow walls with a blue teddy-bear pattern) we went out around 6-ish to get our first proper glimpse of Prague, and our first proper draught Czech beer.

The first bar we went into wasn't very full, and the people who were there were of the local variety who fell deadly silent when we entered. It was really sweet though, with a strange witch motif - everywhere hanging from the ceiling were model witches, all the pictures were of witches, and the shelves all had little witch dolls on as well.

We had a very enjoyable Czech beer in there and toasted our health - Na zdravi!

It also had the luxury of a video jukebox, although it didn't look like any of the videos had been updated since 198x. A particular highlight was a medley by Helena Vondrackova which incorporated "Downtown" re-written in Czech. More disturbing was when Modern Talking came on and it was revealed to me for the first time that Claire used to have one of their albums, and was able to sing along - "Atlantis is calling - S.O.S. for love" indeed. We went into another bar down the road next, the cafe outside the museum, before plunging into the old town to see the main tourist sites lit up for the night.

We were feeling the cold and poor Martin was still suffering from a cough, which was aggravated by the freezing air. However all the cold and our aches and pains were forgotten as we stepped into the old town square. It was a magical sight - the astronomical clock: colourful and unique, and on the other side of the square the Tyn church: a beautiful cathedral with a fairy-tale quality. All mystical looking in the frosty night. We both stared around us, taking in all the sights and sounds. This was the feeling I had travelled for but hadn't found in Berlin. The excitement of new wondrous things, feeling the child-like joy of finding treasures, of exploring all the amazing things the world has to offer. With a new spring in our step we carried on walking.

We were heading for a specific bar, Pivnive Radegast, singled out in our guide book as an old fashioned Czech beer hall with cheap food. It took us a good while to find it, and when we did, it was derelict. So we re-traced our steps and went instead into a really cool (and expensive) bar - L'Enfer Rouge - playing laid back hip-hop whilst we decided where else to go.

In the end for dinner we went to a Czech restaurant just off from the Old Town Square, that was clearly a tourist trap, and they obviously saw us coming. Straight up we had ended up ordering ridiculous fruit brandies in over-sized glasses, that provided a good photo-opportunity, but that also cost the same as a main meal did!

The food was OK, although as I experienced in Slovakia last year, ordering food in this area of the world can be slightly random - I'm never sure if the menus are badly translated or the waiters just have trouble conveying the orders, but my "Pot roast with green peppers" arrived as a steak that even my Dad would consider over-cooked, in a black pepper sauce.

We didn't make a long night of it, and were in bed by 10:30, proving that our room was warm, even if the teddy-bear motif on the walls was a little unsettling, and the curtains did very little to affect the actual level of light in the room.

Berlin -> Praha

Although our train wasn't until 9:40ish we set off bright and early on the Saturday morning for Prague, as we hadn't been to the station we were departing from before, and weren't 100% sure how to get there. In the end we had a leisurely 45 minutes sipping coffee before our train arrived. Purchasing tickets had been an easy online transaction, where you printed out your own ticket with seat reservation, but we made the mistake of reserving seats with a table. That meant instead of a relaxing 4-and-a-half hours with each other we got 4-and-a-half-hours with each other plus one of the most irritating children we have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I honestly thought Claire was going to snap at one point and literally throttle him. And if Claire was going to snap before I did then you know this child must have been genuine hellspawn. And so the journey passed very slowly indeed...

Despite Satan's spawn, the journey was magical. Once we got out of Berlin the scenary changed from a concrete jungle to a beautiful snow covered forest. A couple of hours into the journey our passports were checked which meant we were leaving Germany. The scenary was then magnificent. We were surrounded by snow-capped mountains that were split by deep valleys, and rivers running alongside. There were quaint little villages set along the rivers, frozen lakes where people were ice skating, and a sense of calm everywhere. It was amazing watching the train winding this way and that. I felt like we had landed in a fairy-tale. What a magical journey.

Now I must confess that I had the foresight in Germany to get €50 worth of Czech money so we could get the metro to our hostel without messing about. What I didn't have was the foresight to realise that once we got to Prague the unmanned metro station would exclusively have machines that only take coins. And that every shop we went into in the station was going to have signs saying "No tourist info, no change" in the window. After a couple of abortive attempts to make small purchases with large notes and then haggle over how the change arrived, which in the process exposed that the exchange stall in Berlin had palmed me off with a dud 100Kc note, Claire succeeded where I failed. She approached a change kiosk and got the necessary 50Kc we needed by swapping Czech money (note variety) for Czech money (coin variety) - genius! - and finally we were off to our hostel.

As I mentioned when talking about our flight from Doha to London, whilst I have been travelling most of the time when I think of a song I want to listen to, I don't get a chance to, so I have been saving them up into playlists on my iPod, and listening to it all in one go on the lengthy transport parts of our adventure.

I also mentioned that we wanted to make this travelogue fully interactive. So, for this next exercise you will need:

- 3 pictures, one of a forest in the snow, one of a picturesque river valley in the snow, and one of a miserable looking grey towerblock.

- a small Polish child between the ages of four and six. Preferably they will have a cold, sneeze loudly in your direction without covering their nose or mouth, sniff every ten seconds, when they are not whining give their mother a running commentary on everything you do, and kick your shins at 50 second intervals.

In order to complete the interactive exercise, hold the picture of the snowy forest up to your face for two hours, then hold the picture of the river valley up to your face for two hours. Every fifteen minutes or so interrupt the scenery by holding up the picture of the miserable looking grey towerblock for somewhere between ten to thirty seconds. On one occasion only, about halfway through, hold the towerblock picture up for three minutes and shout "Look, there's Dresden". Ensure the child is annoying you at all times.

You'll then need to listen to the following Berlin -> Praha playlist tunes:

• DAF - Goldenes Spielzeug
• Kraftwerk - Planet Of Visions (2004 live version)
• Pet Shop Boys - Left To My Own Devices
• Cabaret Voltaire - Kino
• Franz Ferdinand - Do You Want To
• Front 242 - Felines
• David Bowie - Be My Wife
• The Fall - Cab It Up! (Peel Session Version)
• U2 - Salomé
• A R Kane - Lollita
• Suede - Beautiful Ones
• Pet Shop Boys - Before
• Swans - The River That Runs With Love Will Not Run Dry
• Goldfrapp - All Night Operator (Part 1)
• Marillion - Assassing
• Madonna - Hung Up
• UB40 - I Would Do For You
• Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express / Abzug / Metal On Metal (1990 The Mix version)

(If you don't have a small Polish child available, kick yourself in the shins every now and again out of time with the music to simulate the effect)

The Magnet Club

Pete Ashton writes one of the websites I read, and last year he did a series of reviews called "Going Deaf for a Fortnight" where he went to a gig to see unknown bands every night for two weeks, and reviewed them for his website and made a fanzine out of it.

Well, inspired by that, on Friday night we embarked on the first part of "Going Deaf in a Foreign Land". We are hoping to go to a gig or club night in each country we visit.

We made our way to the Magnet Club easily enough, I only had vague directions but the announcements on the Berlin tram system are so good that we had no problem getting off at the right stop.

We got to the club about 8:15 to find a queue outside. Luckily we moved along quickly and we got inside, because we hadn't bought our hats gloves or scarves out. Brrrr! It was a great little club with two rooms, each with a bar, one for DJs like a chill-out room, and one for live bands. We had a drink in the chill-out room, whilst listening to Rod Stewart - strange but true - before heading in to watch the first band at 9:20.

Martin pointed out that all European indie kids looked exactly the same. Really, without hearing people talk, you could have been in any indie club anywhere. There was something quite comforting about fitting into a place, even thought you don't speak the language or know anyone. We just felt comfortable because it is what we do. Our friends look like them, and the places we go look like Magnet. I enjoyed that feeling of being part of things for a few hours.

The beer was cheap, and the bar staff even understood my rudimentary German. We only saw two of the four bands on the bill, because we didn't want to stay out too late as we had an early start the next day - we stayed there from around 8pm to 11pm.

Claire must have been looking particularly Germanic that night because people just wouldn't stop talking to her. First on the tram, and later as we left the club she got interogated by someone who wanted to know if it was cool in their.

A girl watching the band asked me something, and when I said I didn't speak German she started chatting in English. What a sweet girl, and to take the time to battle through with her English.

The funniest though was a girl inside the venue. She had started speaking to Claire whilst I was away at the bar. After a while she came over to sepak to Claire again - this time attempting to rescue her from the guy hitting on her - i.e. me. "Do you know him?" - "Yes, he's my husband" :-)

If you are interested in reading a review of the gig itself then I've reactivated my old collective currybet account and posted a review there, but suffice to say we weren't overly impressed with either of the bands that we saw - they were pleasant and harmelss and lots of benign adjectives like that, but hardly exciting.

Frozen Potsdam, and a Greek meal

So we learnt a valuable lesson on Friday the 13th in not putting things off until tomorrow. On our first full day in Berlin the skys had been a beautiful clear blue, but we decided not to go up The Alex, Berlin's massive television tower, until later in the week. At the appointed hour on Friday morning the cloud cover was so low that from the ground you couldn't even see the viewing platform! So we had to give it a miss, as I didn't fancy shelling out a handful of Euro to look at some clouds out of a window, although I guess the experience might have been quite freaky.

Instead we set out for our destination - Potsdam. We felt we had covered most of what we had wanted to see in Berlin and so extended our reach out into the suburbs. The transport is very cheap in Berlin, a day ticket covering all 3 zones is only €6, and the trains are very fast and regular. It was only around 45 minutes to reach Potsdam via the S-Bahn routes.

So to Potsdam, the train went through Berlin, then suddenly we were out of town and going through a forest blanketed in snow. It was lovely, and it was just nice to be out of the city for a while. A break from looking at buildings. It is a times like these that you really see the wonder of the world. The fact that we were in the middle of a desert less than a week ago, and now we were in a snow covered landscape, with different food, different language, different religion, and all only a few hours apart by plane.

It was easily the coldest day of our stay in Berlin, and Potsdam didn't endear itself to us at the start. We left the station, walked through a beautiful frozen park, but then found that everything on the main stretch of raod between the station and town was shut. We had got past the point of having painfully freezing extremities, and were on the verge of turning back for the station when we at last came across a couple of coffee shops that were open. We then both endured a thoroughly insipid cup of coffee accompanied by excrutiating music - a live CD by a German artist that included an overblown unltra-theatrical rendition of "Nights in White Satin". As I said to Claire, there is a reason that middle-of-the-road german rock music is feared throughout the continent.

The shopping centre the cafe was in also had some really strange animal figures.

After that Potsdam seemed perfectly charming, with lots of little shops to explore, and some fairy-tale castle-like gates and arches. However when we were on the train we had passed through a small place called Babelsberg, which looked really nice, so we decided to go there for lunch.

We hopped back on the S-Bahn for one stop, and got off at Babelsburg, and walked down what seemed to be the main road, parallel to the train tracks. Of the places we had seen from the train sadly the pub which we had both fancied eating and drinking in was closed, so in the end we settled for a Greek restaurant - Paros. Although we were only really looking for a snack Claire ended up with a massive Mousaka, and I had a grill that featered two different types of kebab, and a minted lamb burger alongside a delicious lamb cutlet. We weren't going to need much dinner in the evening! It was kind of funny ordering from a menu that only had German and Greek on it, and Claire even got to try out a little bit of her Greek on our host.

We had a great meal - what value for money. The portions were huge, and we each got a free side salad and free ouzo. Yuck...but free! It was exciting to think that this journey is all in aid of reaching our final destination, Greece, and we were enjoying the flavours and sounds of Greece in the middle of Germany.

I think as a day it really typified the amount of freedom we have allowed ourselves in what we want to do - if you'd said to us in the morning that we would be having a Greek lunch in Babelsberg we would have both said "Where the hell is Babelsberg?".