Early Morning
I woke at 4am, which was a relief, as while I’d made a good go at Saturday’s 500 photos, I had plenty more to edit, either to focus them in the centre or to edit them so that the wall and crowds didn’t distract from the main focus. I was in some kind of stained-glass heaven, given the content of all that we had seen!
I completed loading all of Saturdays and all of yesterday's photos to Flickr, by the time that Drew awoke, so we showered and dressed and went down for breakfast in the hotel.
Breakfast at the hotel
Now that, though yesterday’s walking we know exactly the way to and through the station it makes perfect sense to stay in the hotel until at least 9am before going to get the train at 9.48am.
Train
We caught the 9.48am train on platform 2 for what was supposed to be a 4 hour 15 minutes journey, providing good time to draft a blog post, something I’d not had chance to focus on while sort the pictures.
We were told that there was a technical problem on the train, which had been running slow, which led to an announcement that didn’t give much comfort:
We are trying to manually remedy the problem but it will cause a further delay
Truth is that with good wifi and plenty of other things to catch up with, so we are not complaining.
We stop for a longer time in Ahlen (Westf). The driver tells us he has to become a mechanic. It turns out that the solution is to remove one of the carriages and then do further tests! As this would take some time the doors were opened and people could go out onto the platform to get fresh air – we stayed with the air we had and I typed while Drew read his Kindle.
The train manager then announced
please feel free to stay on the platform or in the train as we will announce on the platform when the train will begin again. But we have to do a complete restart i.e. They are going to turn it off and then turn it back on again.
I feel a little like I’ve fallen into an episode of the IT Crowd, where this was a constant refrain.
Still, it worked, so again we can’t complain. 90 minutes later and with one less carriage than we originally had and subsequent moving for some people from that carriage into the others which were already full on this busy Monday trip. We got away. [Co-pilot's note: Which, dear readers was somewhat disappointing as it meant I couldn't continue to sing - we'll never leave Harlen alive]
Our first stop was Hannover, a city I’d previously taught in delivering MSc programmes in Marketing and Procurement to managers from Siemens. I remember a great night here when Octoberfest was on when Heather Skinner, God rest her Soul, and Kelly Page, now living in New York, and I were each teaching different groups of students at various levels of the course and were taken out to the beer festival.
We next went through Wolfsburg, an interesting city, built around the development of the VW Beetle – then called the KdF Wagen was initially called Stadt des KdF Wagens.
To be fair to Deutsche Bahn they came around with free coffee and water and also claim sheets so we can get a 25% refund as part of the Government policy on train delays of more than 1 hour. It is 50% for delays of more than 2 hours, but they managed to get us into Berlin Hauptbahnhof (HBF) i.e. Central Station with five minutes to spare. So, we arrived at 4.10pm rather than the 2.15pm we had expected.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, we will use the BVG app to travel in Berlin. We used the trains wifi as we entered the station to buy our tickets online – a simple process making use of the Google Pay data already on our devices, so not needing to enter a credit card number etc!
The app does a countdown before the ticket appears and then the ticket shows the time and how long it has to last. In this case 8 euro for 24 hours.
As ever in a new city there was the problem that Google Maps is not great at knowing what direction you are travelling until you have walked a bit. Not a problem in many cases, but when this huge station with 20+ platforms has exits on each of the four sides, on can know where the buses are on the map, but until you know where you are it can be confusing. Given the crowds we choose an exit and ended up having to walk around a quarter of the station to get to the side we actually wanted. Though as the weather was fine this wasn’t a problem. A large screen shows bus stop numbers, so we looked for our bus – the M85 and found it was at Bus Stop 2 – trial and error, spotting 3 and 4 helped us find 2 and we had an uneventful bus ride to Lulu Guldsmeden Hotel in 12 minutes. The bus stop is immediately opposite the hotel, so we walked to the junction, waited for the
Green Man to come on at the crossing (more of him in a minute) went in and checked in.
Lulu Guldsmeden
Why, I hear you ask, would we choose to stay in a Danish brand hotel in Germany? Well, last October, Drew took part in a half-marathon in Copenhagen, when we began to book hotels all those near the start of the race had been booked – I had been tasked (some might say politely asked) to find a location which had good travel links to the start, so that Drew could get there on the day of the race. I looked at a variety of options and came upon one which was near both the subway and the main railway station. In an area of town which was safe and clean (even Copenhagen has some seedy places, though not as many as other cities. The hotel was called the Axel Guldsmeden and was quirky and enjoyable. So much so that I’d made a note of where they were (5 in Denmark), one in France, one in Iceland, one in Norway, one in Bali and one in Berlin. Hence when we planned the holiday, this was the first hotel we booked, to keep the connection with our previous stays. We were so lucky, not only was it well connected (on a bus route with two buses each which run every 12 minutes in the daytime and even every 30 minutes overnight but also a lovely relaxed environment inside – oh and free sweets!!
We checked in and using the material I’d typed earlier, managed to finish the Brussels blog post by 5.50pm and posted it.
We began to look at where to go for dinner. It turns out that the area around the hotel have a selection of eating places, Dalmatian (the area not the dog), Filipino, a burger joint and a Vietnamese. We decided we would quite like a Vietnamese, so opted to go there.
The restaurant was called Cay Tre Quan and had five tables in quite a compact, but friendly place.
We shared three starters together. Lalot chien - Minced meat wrapped in lalot leaves - The crispy leaves wrapped the warm beef very well and the chilli and vinegar sauce brought real Vietnam flavours to the mouth. A reminder to us that it is 17 years since we were in Vietnam, where did the time go!
Nem Chien - Fried spring rolls filled with Nem Chay Vegetables - these were like Chinese Spring Rolls the world over, lightly fried they had no excess fat and lots of lovely vegatables.
Ampelmann
It was only 8:22pm when we had finished dinner, so we went for a walk and passed a memorial to one of the synagogues of the pre-war period, Synagogue Levetzowstrasse, which was destroyed during the Nazi regime – it was based in this part of the city for centuries.
We walked along the Landwehr Canal and came to the Geroge C. Marshall Bridge, that Marshall of Marshall Plan fame who did so much to restore Western Europe to economic well being after the second world war.
I mentioned earlier the little green (and red) men who allow you to cross the road, well here in Berlin these gentlemen have an additional air of sartorial elegance by wearing a hat. They are called Ampelmann, Drew was taken by their hat, hence the photos, and as you’ll see later this week, in a purchase he makes before we leave Berlin!
We return to Potsdamer Strasse, the street on which Lulu is based and get back to the hotel and to Bed by 9pm!
