Travel, Technology, Thoughts
On the morning that I was due to leave Berlin I decided to stay an extra day. Although I had been in Berlin for three nights, I had only spent one afternoon in Berlin proper as I had been ill almost all the rest of my time there.
I began the day by meeting up with a friend. We went for a walk along the runway of Tempelhof Feld – an airport that has now been turned into parkland – and the surrounding suburbs.
Read moreI’ve wanted to travel to Wittenberg since traveling past it on my previous visit to Germany. I wanted to know how a man from such a small town could have such a large impact on world and church history and beliefs.
I was immediately lost on arrival at Wittenberg train station as the train station is not in the centre of the town like I had expected it to be. To ensure that I was even more lost there was no signage or map at the station showing the way to the centre of town.
Read moreMy visit to Berlin was filled with unneeded drama. Upon arrival from Dresden I decided to drop my bags at my hotel before spending the afternoon exploring Mitte. To get to my hotel I needed to catch an S-Bahn from Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof to Hackescher Markt. As I stepped off the escalator onto the S-Bahn platform I just missed a train, and then the next one pulled into the station so crush loaded that you couldn’t get a suitcase onboard. After waiting a very long time for a third train I made it to my hotel.
Read moreThe Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr (Bundeswehr Military History Museum) in Dresden contains a large number of military exhibits covering the modern history of Germany and has free admittance on Monday nights. I was fortunate enough to be visiting Dresden on a Monday, so after spending the day exploring Dresden’s old city and New Green Vault my friend and I caught a tram the few kilometers to the museum.
Read moreAfter a week exploring Vienna, Bratislava, and Prague it was time to return to Germany. The train pulled out of Prague just as the sun was setting on a Sunday evening. To get to Dresden the train runs alongside the Vltava and the Elbe Rivers which was a very picturesque until it became too dark to see outside. Darkness completely descended around an hour north of Prague as we pulled into the Czech city of Ústí nad Labem. Despite the darkness this city looked fascinating to visit and is somewhere I would love to return to.
Read moreI began my final day in Prague by walking from the hotel I was staying in near Wenceslas Square to Prague’s Jewish Quarter, Josefov. After getting quite lost trying to navigate the narrow streets of Prague’s Old City I found the ticket shop for the Jewish Museum.
I bought my ticket for the museum but, quite confusingly, I wasn’t able to figure out how to get from the ticket shop into the museum. When I went back to the ticket counter to ask, I was quickly told that the museum was in fact a series of buildings around Josefov that the ticket would get me into. Now in possession of a map showing a path I should take around the neighbourhood I headed off to the first building, the Maisel Synagogue.
Read moreI started my second day in Prague quite early so that I could (as my guidebook suggested) get to Prague Castle before all crowds. My friend (for reasons still unknown) decided that he didn’t want to go to Prague’s primary tourist attraction and instead went for a long walk along the river.
To get to Pražský hrad I caught the metro from Můstek Station to Malostranská station. Finding the entrance to Můstek Station was easy, however, finding the platforms and working the ticket machine was a whole different story. I’m sure that on any other day it would be simple, but on a sleepy Saturday morning it was one of the most difficult things I did on my entire trip. When I got to Malostranská station I was also a little lost, as I had assumed that the metro would have gotten me to the top of the hill that the castle was on, not the bottom.
Read moreI spent the second weekend of my Central Europe Adventure visiting Prague. Prague was on my to see list because I’ve had friends visit it before and loved it. I did not know what to expect, I knew nothing about the city, other than it was old and they didn’t speak German and I’ve never met anyone who was Czech before.
The train from Vienna to Prague took four hours and I used this time to write up some of my trip notes and read a guide book on Prague. I was still in culture shock from my visit to Bratislava the day before and instead of being excited I had built up a little bit of anxiety about the unknown language and culture.
Read moreBratislava, the capital of Slovakia is an hour from Vienna and an easy day trip from the Austrian capital. Arriving at the main train station in Bratislava is like stepping into a completely different decade or era.
The train station is extremely small and you get between platforms by literally walking across the tracks. When we arrived we managed to accidentally walk around the main station building instead of through it, so we headed back inside to try and find a tourist information booth which was hidden down a long corridor.
Read moreWondering “where am I?” and “how do I get to my next point of interest” became a recurring theme in the few days I spent in Vienna.
After getting lost trying to find my way back to the Vienna Hauptbahnhof following a day exploring the city surrounds, I met up with my friend who had just arrived from Berlin. Our first task was to get back across the city to check into our hotel. We travelled on the U-Bahn to Schottenring station which has exits on either side of the Donau Canal. Naturally, we exited on the wrong side and were unable to find the exit for the other side of the canal. After ten or so minutes of looking like muppets trying to figure a way across, and after deciding that swimming across wasn’t a great idea, we jumped on a tram that went over a nearby bridge.
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