Vienna and Berlin

We have been cut off from the internet for what seems like days now... but here is our first set of catch-up posts. We finally have free wireless in our room again so we should be fully caught up before we leave here (Brussels). Enjoy!

Wednesday morning we woke up early to avoid the bathroom fiasco from the day before – the same family that hacked away on Tuesday was still there. It actually made for a relaxing morning, however, as we had a few hours to pack our belongings, clean the room, and eat breakfast before catching the train to Vienna.

The train ride was relatively uneventful. It was one of our shorter trips at only four hours, and was direct making for a peaceful journey. When we arrived in Vienna, after getting off the tram that dropped us off close to our hostel, it began to pour. We took shelter at some benches and didn't wait long until the weather cleared and we made our way to check in at the hostel. It was late afternoon by this time, so after dropping our bags off at the room, we went to the grocery store and bought bratwurst and pasta for dinner. That evening we ate our food and did much needed laundry with the hostel's facilities before going to sleep.

We woke up Thursday morning set with a full agenda of sightseeing. We paid to eat breakfast at the hostel and filled ourselves with ham and cheese sandwiches, juice, and cereal. The milk for the cereal was the room-temperature, dehydrated variety but Nick decided to go ahead and eat it anyway – our standards have lowered after 5 weeks in Europe. With full stomaches and surprisingly sunny weather outside (the forecast called for showers all day), we took the metro to Vienna's inner district and started the day.

First, Laura was interested in watching the morning exercises of the stallions at the prestigious and world-renowned Spanish Riding School of Vienna. We were able to pay a small admission and watch the horses train and exercise to music with their riders in full gear and traditional outfits. The arena was awesome. It is set in a wing of the Hofburg Palace of downtown Vienna, and is like a palace ballroom complete with marble statues, ornate engravings, huge chandeliers, and a dirt riding floor in the center. This is where the shows also take place. It was a cool experience, and we couldn't miss the opportunity to see it.

We left the riding school a little before noon and went to find the Ankeruhr, Vienna's famous clock tower. We are definitely getting a good tour of Europe's premiere clocks. This one was built in 1914 and each hour, a different figure from Marcus Aurelius to Maria Theresa (from guidebook) rotate past accompanied by a tune from their time, but at noon all the figures rotate and you get the complete show. We were sure to be there. When it finally began rotating at around 12:04, it wasn't as spectacular as we hoped, but there was still a whole crowd of tourists standing by with their camcorders and digital cameras nonetheless. They must have read the same sightseeing books.

After the clock tower, we walked down a few blocks to St. Stephan's (not quite Stephens, but close enough) cathedral and looked around there. It was another very old cathedral and as neat as any we had seen before. This time, however, inside the cathedral and outside in the square, throngs of Polish and Austrian soccer fans crowded the area. They were in town for that night's big matchup between the two countries in the 2008 Euro Cup. Vienna is one of the two host cities for the the Euro Cup this year, and it is absolutely huge. We can only compare it to what it must be like having a Super Bowl in your city, but with the extreme fanaticism of the most rabid US sports enthusiasts, meeting nationalistic pride, and mixed with some beer. Herds of Polish fans wearing their country's flag as skirts marched through the town chanting, singing their songs, and blowing airhorns. It was quite a scene! Soccer is clearly the biggest sport here, no competition.

After visiting the cathedral, we were ready for lunch and had read about a restaurant called Oh Pot, Oh Pot in our guidebook that sounded delicious. We hadn't ever used one of the eating recommendations from the book before, but since we had a metro day pass, we decided to take this one up. They served pots of vegetable, beef, and potato stew and was going to be great. After taking the metro and walking down to the address it specified, we finally arrived but the restaurant wasn't there – it was an old hotel! After a little investigating, we still could not find the restaurant, and so after using up close to an hour of our afternoon, we were forced to settle eating at the closest known food establishment available – McDonald's. We hadn't been to one in over a week and we hadn't tried to eat there, so we felt justified this time. Thank goodness for American food!

The next hour after eating, we walked around the city and took some pictures of the cool buildings, palaces, and architecture of Vienna. The city itself is very clean and walker friendly, and since the weather had turned out in our favor it was a pleasant afternoon.

Following our picture tour, we had read about a cool museum called the Haus de Musik and decided to visit. It ended up being a really unique and fun place. We spent close to four hours there. It started with an exhibit of the Vienna Philharmonic (interesting but not that interesting), but then quickly moved into its high-tech exhibits. There were countless interactive exhibits where we learned and did just about anything you can imagine with digital music and sound synthesis. We made recordings of our voice and morphed them with sounds ranging from a hive of bees to farting noises to Beethoven's symphonies. We were able to create strange noises by waving our hands in between two “magical” bars, and we were even able to conduct the Vienna philharmonic with an electronic baton. We also learned about some of Vienna's famous composers including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Overall it was different than anything we'd ever been to and lots of fun.

It was now early evening so we returned to our hostel, made dinner, and used the internet to check e-mail and prepare for Friday's long travel day to Berlin.

The next morning (Friday), we woke early an quickly packed our bags. Our four Australian roommates were up and about at the same time, so there was no time for showers this morning. We checked out of the hostel and then walked down the street toward the Westbanhoff train station and stopped at a supermarket on the way to buy some food for the trains. It would be a long day of travel – about 9 hours to Berlin.

The first train we were on was to Nurenburg, where we would then catch a connecting train to Berlin. Everything was going smoothly the first 4 of our 5 hour ride to Nurenburg, when suddenly at one of the stops and older man who had just boarded informed us that we were in his seat. Unfortunately, Austria's and Germany's rail ticket system doesn't work very well. For people with EURail Passes (such as us) or others with frequent travel passes, all trains in Germany are non-reservation trains. We simply show up at the station, board the train, and sit wherever we choose. Usually this works at first, but a dual system is at work for people without passes. When you buy individual tickets, you are assigned a car and seat number. So it frequently happens that as the train passes through the various cities and picks up more passengers, many of the new passengers have reserved seats, but we with our passes do not and cannot get the reservations, so we have to move our stuff around and find a new seat whenever someone comes aboard with a reservation where you are sitting. Sometimes you can get lucky, but this time we were not.

The man was very grumpy, and even though we pleaded for him to take a single seat that was available several rows in front of us, he wanted his seat. And only his seat would do. Grudgingly, and disappointed, we moved from the seats and searched the surrounding cars for a pair of seats we could move to. But it was Friday, and the train was crowded and of course we could not find any. When we tried to ask the train attendants for some help, they offered none. So we, with a number of other refugees who had also been displaced from their seats, spent the rest of the ride sitting on the floor between two cars outside of the bathroom. We eventually made it to Nurenburg, and found two seats on the connecting train to Berlin.

Once we arrived, the train stopped at the city's brand new train station, the Berlin Hauptbanhoff, just completed in 2006 for when they hosted the World Cup. It is an awesome station framed in arches of glass and with trains crisscrossing on several levels. The station was a sight in itself and we definitely took some pictures. We then took the S-Bahn connection to an outer part of Berlin where our hostel was located. A block away from our hostel were two supermarkets right night to each other, which was perfect as we were hungry by then. The first one we checked was serving rotisserie chicken and we bought a whole chicken at the discounted price of just 2 Euro – very good! (who says we aren't eating well??)

Saturday morning we ate breakfast included with the hostel. We then made our way to the city center and stopped at Unter Den Linden, Berlin's most famous street before the city was unified. From there we immediately came upon the Brandenburger Tor, a gate / monument that is Berlin's most recognizable sight. This is where Napoleon rode through hundreds of years ago, then was damaged and reconstructed during bombings in WWII, then became a central site of the division between East and West in the Cold War – it is even the backdrop where JFK spoke and Ronald Reagan famously told the Soviets to tear down the wall. Now the area has been totally revamped and is quite a tourist site, as well as hosts the Russian, US, and British embassies. Overall, a pretty cool site.

Not far from the Brandenburger Tor was the Reichstag, the newly rebuilt home to Germany's federal government. It is an old building, but has recently completed renovation with a very modern glass dome in the center that tourists can climb for good views of the city. We went to stand in line for a few minutes to do this, but the line was very long and moving slowly as it was a Saturday, so we decided to come back and see it if we had the time.

After seeing the Reichstag, we headed down Unter den Linden to continue seeing most of the “must-see” sights. Some of these included the campus of Berlin University, a memorial to Holocaust victims, and on the side a little market selling old books (in German, unfortunately). We then went to the Berliner Dom (Berlin's Protestant Cathedral). It was really cool and different than most of the Catholic ones we've seen thus far. The dome of the cathedral was destroyed during WWII but reconstruction just finished recently so it is open to tourists and is very nice. They had museums upstairs, and we were able to walk up to the top of the dome and walk around a railed platform outside for awesome city views. We decided that since this dome was still in the center of the city and was just as high up, it made up for missing out on the Reichstag tour. Then we visited the basement of the cathedral, which is a large crypt holding the remains of about 100 Hohenzollerns, the Kaisers and ruling family of Prussia for the last several centuries. Good little history lesson.

After the Berliner Dom, the skies were becoming overcast and rain looked imminent, plus we were starving, so using our guidebook we decided to eat at Delores, a burrito place. We hoped they would be as big and delicious as the ones from Moes or Chipotle at home – and they were! Mexican food has been few and far between over here, so we enjoyed our chicken burritos.

Following lunch, we took the metro to the Dokumentationszentrum Berliner Mauer on Bernauer Strasse. Here is one of the few remaining spots where two large concrete barriers from the Berlin Wall still stand. There was also a small museum and memorials that documented the history of the wall and its impact on the city. After this, we made our way to the Tiergarten, one of the city's parks and walked through there on our way back to a metro station that could take us back to the hostel. At the metro, there were delays due to a “technical breakdown” and after we waited for quite some time while specific information blared over the speakers in German, we decided to walk to Potsdamer Platz which seemed to be where we might have some luck. Eventually, and with a little bit of confusion, we did make it back. But for having the proclaimed best public transportation system in Europe, the Deutsche Bahn has had the most problems – maybe we are just bad luck! Once back in the hostel area, we bought the same chicken dinner we had the night before from the supermarket and enjoyed the good food and plentiful meat.

On Sunday, since we had seen most of the major sights we had wanted to in Berlin, we had to decide whether to take a daytrip to see the palaces of Potsdam or go to Berlin's world-renowned zoo. Because of the cost and since we had already seen plenty of castles, we decided to check out the zoo. Plus the zoo is home to the most famous polar bear in Germany- Knut (pronounced 'kuh-noot'). Born in 2006, Knut was the first polar bear cub to survive childhood at the Berlin Zoo in more than 30 years. However, he was abandoned by his mother and was instead raised by a zoo keeper, which resulted in a great deal of controversy as it left Knut unable to ever be kept with fellow polar bears. Nearly two years later, Knut is still quite the celebrity and has been solely responsible for greatly increasing admission to the zoo. Not to miss out, we jumped on the S-bahn and headed to the zoo to check this guy out ourselves.

The Berlin Zoo is quite large, and encompasses the entire west end of the Tiergarten we had walked through the day before. As with the Prague Zoo, there was an incredible variety of exhibits, including a separate aquarium within the zoo. The most impressive set of exhibits were all of the primates- there were at least 20 different species, all of which had their own naturalistic indoor and outdoor exhibits. The collection included the standard orangs, chimps, and gorillas, but also included a diverse group of small monkeys. A few species had 20+ individuals in family groups, so it was cool to see how individuals within the groups interact.

After visiting with the monkeys we walked through the the hoofstock exhibits, the aquarium, the cat house, and yes... even the nocturnal animals. Although it took a bit of coaxing from Laura, Nick agreed to once again venture into the nocturnal world- with a strict agreement that we would leave immediately if anything was not properly contained. Fortunately, all of the bats were contained behind glass walls so thick you couldn't even here the flutter of their wings. After the nocturnal area we continued to slowly make our way through the remainder of the zoo. Eventually we had seen nearly everyone except the famous Knut- who we discovered was not housed with the polar bears, but instead was in an enclosure adjacent to the black bears. After a bit of searching we finally found him... a small, incredibly dirty bear, curled up in the back of his exhibit sound asleep. Nick was visibly disappointed as he had been talking about seeing Knut all day. After taking a few obligatory pictures, we glanced up at the darkening sky and decided to end our zoo visit. We hurried out of the zoo and towards the train station as we saw the first few flashes of lightening. As soon as we stepped under the canopy of the train station, the sky opened up and there was a torrential downpour for the next 30 minutes or so.

True to our continual luck with the weather, we stepped out of the train station by our hostel just as the rain stopped and the sky cleared. All hyped up for yet another dinner of value rotisserie chicken we headed happily towards the grocery store, only to be snapped back to reality when we realized it was Sunday and all three grocery stores were closed. We slowly turned back and realized what we had to do... McDonald's stood there glaring at us with its large golden arches.

After our __th meal of McD's (who's counting anyway), we went back to our hostel to pick up our computer and took the train back to the Sony Center where the guidebook had promised us free wi-fi. Although the Sony Center's wi-fi was not all that it could be (as in it didn't work at all), what it did provide was a really nice movie theater complete with original version American movies. After briefly considering our financial situation, we decided to splurge and take in the experience of a German movie theater- complete with popcorn that Nick has been craving for weeks now. The theater was one of if not the most impressive either of us has been to. The seats were huge and plush and the screen was enormous. We watched the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie, The Happening. The movie itself was pretty good, but the best part was watching something entirely in English. After the movie we headed back to our hostel and went straight to bed to rest up before our 6 hour train ride to Amsterdam.