jules.com.au

I hear it has central heating, too. Handy in Berlin, though unnecessary when its 27 degrees :-)

Berlin is a rather impressive and substantial city. (That photo is of the Reichstag – parliament by the way) I arrived after 2 hours or so on the train (really not bad for 200+ km), dumped my bags in the hostel and spotted a group of English boys heading out to do the sightseeing thing so jumped on board. Did a hell of a lot of walking and photo snapping and moderately successful train navigation. So I’m already feeling pretty comfortable with getting around sans bike!

Speaking of the bike, it is apparently sitting in Sachsen (within cooee of the racetrack) and will be repaired tomorrow for 350 euro or so. Thank god for Olly once again saving the day with his masterful command of Deutch and negotiating skills.

I, however, am staying here and flying to London on Saturday. I’m pretty comfortable with that decision actually because, truth be told, I wasn’t much looking forward to that long ride across to London. It’ll be mostly autobahn and various slower highways and I can only assume that the traffic gets worse as one gets closer to the UK.

But, I now have the option of returning to pick up the bike in a couple of weeks and enjoying some more of the Swiss/Austrian alps which were all I was essentially interested in anyway. Not exactly sure of what I’m going to do, but I have a few options to evaluate. As long as I don’t crash it/get it stolen/have it break down again I ought to get some money back on it. We’ll see :-) Purple Jules – you’d be surprised (or not) at how difficult roadside repairs can be when you need a 230 euro part that you cannot name in the local tongue, or indeed find anyone who could nor have any means of transport. Nuff said.

Anyway I’m certainly in far higher spirits than I was 24 hours ago!

Actually that’s not strictly true. I had good fun last night when this group of around 10 Spanish boys rocked up at the hostel. You may notice I’ve been using the term ‘boys’ a lot. That is with some purpose, becuase just about every male I’ve met in these hotels has been a ripe old 18 or 19. Guess it doesn’t take long for the English to save up those 20 quid for a flight to Stockholm.

So back to the Spaniards. They all actually spoke remarkably good English. So we played some soccer and the guitars then came out. I really enjoyed hearing some authentic Spanish guitar playing, and was rather bemused when the Metallica, ACDC and Nirvana tunes came out. Hearing “Pennyroyal Tea” sung with a Spanish twang is definitely something to remember.

So some fun and an excellent night’s sleep last night has put me in good shape to try and keep up with these English beer guzzlers tonight. We’ll see.

Kudos to this hostel for running their internet terminals on Linux/X Windows. Although there’s no immediately apparent way to switch out of German keyboard mode which can be verz annozing! Oh and Lucas I think it might be KDE…

And finally thanks muchly to everyone who posts comments on here. I do love reading them even though I tend to not reply to them directly, but that’s only because I do a quick brain dump in here then log off to drink more beer. Or something.

Bye now.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2004 at 17:49 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.