A day in Berlin

We arrived in Berlin after a rather less than perfect day. We started off in Plzen with a train that started off a bit late and got worse! We had to get off a station early because of the problems with the train and catch a local one to Regensburg. That wasn't a problem because we had nearly two hours expected wait there.

When we got onto our (full) ICE from there to Berlin we sat next to two Swedish people, who basically took a lot of space and hardly spoke to us until we arrived. 

It was late when we got to our hotel and we were a little pessimistic about finding anywhere to eat. As it turns out Margie found a very nice place, a short walk from our hotel.


On Thursday morning we took the hop-on-hop-off bus nearest to our hotel, but there seem to be several companies serving Berlin. Our one had relatively frequent busses, but rather poor commentaries, so we had to listen to a lot of their muzak!

We saw a lot of police, and heard plenty of sirens all day. Not sure if these were part of some bigger protest.


All the tourist busses have to cover the wall....


... the Brandenburg gate...

... and Checkpoint Charlie!




Our sleeper heading for Stockholm announced...

To be sure not to run any risks of missing our sleeper home we took ourselves to Berlin Gesunderbrunn station early. It was cold and windy, and in what must be a bit of a rough part of the city, judging by some of the people hanging around the station.

Eventually our train was announced on platform 5, due at 18.37. 18.37 came and went, but no train. Then the announcement changed to platform 6, which was just the other side of the platform, so no problem. Then the announcement went away! I've been through this before, clearly others hadn't and were beginning to get nervous. It rolled in about 15 minutes late as the announcement reappeared.

We all piled on, and very soon we were moving on our way to Hamburg, Denmark and onto Stockholm.

Our guard was English (living in Germany) who detected our accents and so we had quite a chat. 

We managed to drop off to sleep in time for the Danish border, where everyone is woken up so that the Danish police can check our passports. Getting back to sleep again is somewhat harder of course.


On arrival in Stockholm we had to catch a crowded train back to Västerås, and there was our adventure over for this time.


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