BERLIN 8th-13th September

Monday 8 September. Arrive at the hostel about 5pm. I had been promised a bed in a 10-bed dorm, but the man at the desk asks if I'd like a 2-bed room, no extra charge, (€24-50) including brekkie), and it has its own shower and toilet. They have an all-you-can-eat dinner for €6, and I am soon unashamedly pigging out on a massive plate of fresh salad, then an excellent thai-style curry and rice, two desserts, and lashings of Darjeeling tea. After this I deserve to be kept up half the night with tummy ache, but strangely enough there are no after-effects. You can use the washing machine and drier at the hostel, and just have to pay €5 for tokens for them. Do my washing, and then I think about bed. My room companion is a stocky little man from Barcelona, who explains to me with the aid of a map how he has circumnavigated through all the Scandinavian capitals in the last 10 days. He is returning home the next day, and gives me the comical news that the airport bus will be picking him up from the hostel at 4.30am. I suggest that we should both get some shuteye, but sleep is initially difficult, as uncontrolled schoolies week is also resident at the hostel, in the shape of a couple of hundred of unihibited teenagers (this is the last week of the the long summer holidays). There are dozens of them running around and shrieking outside the hostel, and intermittent shouting and door-slamming in the corridors until about 1am. This is a pattern throughout the week, but you soon adapt to going to sleep at 1am and waking up at 8.30am (in time to get to a late breakfast). My Iberian companion is soon away at 4.30, and I sleep like the dead till my alarm at 8.30.

The next two days I feel very lethargic, and fall into a routine of resting up, and most importantly, resting up the still-tender portions of my anatomy ; going to the 'Corroboree' Australian cafe in the Sony Centre and having latte's and things like 'Death by Chocolate' ; and hanging out at an internet cafe I stumbled on only a half a kilometre from the hostel, which only charges1€ an hour, and about 20 cents a minute to call Oz.

For Tuesday night my room is already booked, so I have to move to another 2-bed room without toilet, but this costs €29-50. When I mention that I would have thought it would be cheaper, the girl on the desk says that is the right price, and that I should have been charged €35 for the room I had the night before, which shuts me up. She says that a man from China is also booked into my room tonight, but I never see him. I hear him come home and get into the bunk above me at about 2-ish, but when I awake at 8.30 he is gone. I am left alone in the room in solitary splendour for the next two nights, dropping off about one-ish when it quietens down outside. Strangely enough, there is a guy on the desk on morning three, who only charges me €24-50, and a girl on the desk on morning four, and I get charged €29-50 again. Then on morning five (for Friday night) I am put in a 4-bed room for €24-50. One man is fast asleep and snoring when I get into bed at elevenish. Schoolies week seems to have left, and am soon asleep, but I hear two guys come in about two-ish.

Thursday I feel revived enough to tackle a little walking tour. Walk to the Brandenburg Gate, then right down to the end of Unter Den Linden, probably Berlin's most famous thoroughfare,
chokka's with cafes and souvenir shops. Coming back I take a street parallel but a couple of streets over from Unter Den Linden (Doratheenstrasse), incidently passing an STA (Student Travel Australia) office in a back street, and end up near the Reichstag. Have to queue up about half an hour to get in, and once you go up in a lift to the roof, you can then walk up on a spiralling walkway to the top, within the vast new glass dome, and you come back down via another spiralling walkway. Rising to the centre of the dome is a pillar covered in small mirrors. From the Reichstag you get an above-treetop level view of the Tiergarten, reputedly the largest urban park in the world, and I am soon wandering its paths. It is the sort of city park that I like most, a number of dissecting paths, but little development, except for the odd statue, so that there is lots of natural verdant 'bush'. It is bisected by '17 Juni Strasse' (named in honour of East Berlin workers who staged a strike against the GDR government in 1953), and is very popular with joggers and cyclists.

Walking back along '17 Juni' towards the Brandenburg Gate you come to the Soviet War Memorial. A largish stone memorial, it is flanked by 2 Soviet tanks, reputed to be the first two tanks to enter Berlin in April 1945. Apparently the whole memorial was constructed in a few months with marble rubble salvaged from the ruins of one of Hitler's more grandiose architectural schemes, and an inargural allied ceremony was held there on 11/11/1945.

The Holocaust Memorial nearby in Erbenstrasse is thought-provoking, a maze of hundreds of stone blocks of varying heights, which can be entered and exited from at any point on the periphery.

Ended up at the Hauptbahnhof, which I hadn't really noticed very much on my arrival. Apparently work went on 24/7 to complete it for the 2006 World Cup, and it is certainly the most impressive railway station I've seen, with a most comprehensive selection of American and British brand-name shops on several levels.

Friday (12 September), I first make an internet booking for a hostel in Krakow, and then check at the Hauptbahnhof regarding trains to there. It is a more than a 10 hour journey, and costs 52 euro. Then in the afternoon I decide on a trip to the Sachenhausen concentration camp, at Orienburg, about 20 minutes by train from central Berlin. It is an hourly service, and I had a half-hours wait, and then missed the train, because the platform was so long that the train only took up half of it - the other end to where I was sitting. Incomprehensibly, the camp is only 2 kilometres from the railway station at Orienburg, at the end of a suburban street. The camp was wrecked by the S.S. only hours ahead of the advancing Russians, and large parts of it demolished or filled in by the Russians immediately after WW2. But in the 50's the GDR Government decided it should be maintained as an anti-Fascist memorial, and it was more or less rebuilt to original specifications. As well as the actual camp itself there are many displays, photographs and details about camp life, atrocities, etc, and many, many individual stories about prisoners interned there, communists, homosexuals, Jewish. You can have read much about these things, but to actually be there, in the actual buildings, to see the gas chambers, ovens, 'pathology' laboratories etc, I personally found extremely harrowing, and couldn't bring myself to take as much as one photo, although many people there, tour groups etc, snapped away, albeit in a sombre atmosphere.

Back in central Berlin, I felt a change of pace was called for, and dropped in at the megaplex at the Sony Centre, and saw 'Momma Mia' (in English - not so much as a dubbed word or a subtitle). I saw the stage version in Melbourne, and thoroughly enjoyed the movie, and would certainly like to watch it again on DVD.

Saturday I get a late start, and start with a stroll around the streets to the south of the Tiergarten, where a lot of the foreign embassies are. Ring to home after lunch, and then walk to Marlene Dietrich Platz, (many more cafes, multiplex etc), and on through some back streets to Checkpoint Charlie. Very tourist-oriented, and I notice a lot of English-speaking tourists hanging about there. Then navigate through some more back streets to Bebel Platz and the site of the first 'burning of the books' circa 10th May 1933. It is just off Unter Den Linden, opposite Humbolt University.

Yesterday, appropriately enough, it suddenly turned a tad cold when I arrived at Sachenhausen
camp, and the cold spell has continued today, so much so that I now welcome (at 7.30pm) the chance to sit in the warm and have a look at 'der blog'.

I received a comment from David Kataque, a retired chemist with the F.D.A., of Sacramento in Northern California, who said he was enjoying the photos of my 'Grand Tour'. David has a philosophy that the time that you most live is when you touch the lives of others. That 'home' is not a physical place, but is in the heart - which I thought was a rather nice idea.

I also received another comment from Anonymous of Fleetwood Crescent, South Frankston. It is a comment on the photo that I posted of a 'Cash Converters' store in Dunkerque, where the store owner became concerned when he saw me photographing his store. Anonymous says, inter alia 'the shopkeeper obviously thought you were completely undesirable, and likely a potential thief. Why would he not keep a close eye on on a geriatric street-person who looked like he'd just spent the night in the local cemetery?' For anybody who is interested, Anonymous's house is by the second tree on the right-hand nature strip - the tree with the pile of stones under it.