Thursday 21st July - Seelze to Berlin
It appears that as it gets darker the train volumes increase. With the continuous train movements, humid hot weather and persistent mosquitoes, one of us didn’t get much sleep. While I packed up our possessions, Roger cleaned the motor home so we could return it by the deadline. However the local Council had other ideas and had almost completely locked the area down by putting road work blockades on just about every exit in town. We did make it back eventually with far more bags than we started and with lots of complaints to the motor home firm.
Instead of spending the next day trying to get back to Berlin by public transport we had previously arranged for a hire car to drive ourselves. Our drive included both small German towns and unfortunately some 130km an hour motorways, although they are far more tolerable in a car as opposed to a motor home. One of our many rest stops included Brandenburg which holds international rowing events. Although we could see the lake we couldn’t see any rowing, nor see the rowing facilities up close as unlike Karapiro and Poznan it is all behind locked gates.
To complete our history tour of the effects of Hitler and WWII, we caught the U-Bahn to an area of Berlin that has 4.7 acres of large concrete block structures that make up the Holocaust Memorial Maze. This commemorates the 3 million or more Jews who were murdered.
On our way back to the train station we stopped to watch ballroom dancing in the Berlin Mall and wandered past an extremely long queue which hadn’t seem to have got any smaller from when we saw it two hours earlier. We later found out the queue was youth waiting to go into the tech science university for open day; why so many for so long. Apparently not only did you get a look at what was on offer but also got a free drink; desperate teenagers!
No day would be complete without a food review of the local cuisine so we dined at our most upmarket restaurant this trip, a local Austrian place. Roger had the schnitzel (served with a cucumber laced potato salad) and, at twice the price of the last one, declared it wasn’t as good as our Golling experience. I had black pudding ravioli, I’m not sure what that has to do with Austria, but it was nice. We do have to give the waiter credit for not only conning us out of 7 euro for some water but also attempting to keep our change saying he thought we were giving him extra as a tip. He obviously gets paid commission because he was doing a good job of pulling the punters in. With nobody wanting to dine inside because of the heat, he kept bringing more and more tables outside clogging up the footpath.
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Berlin U-Bahn
Dancing in Berlin Mall
Holocaust Memorial, Berlin
A couple of rowers at Brandenberg