BERLIN-DRESDEN-BERLIN. 18th-21st September

(On train from Krakow to Berlin). A long time after, the (suspect) guy gets off the train, and the lady comes and talks to me again, voicing her suppositions as to where her money went, and I go through a pantomime of showing her how I think it happened. However, right from the beginning, a small part of me has been wondering if the whole thing (from when the guy picked up her purse from the floor), may be a set up to play on other people's sympathies and get a bit of cash. I reason that if she asks me for money by the end of the trip then that theory is right. Refreshingly though, I am wrong, and after we arrive at Berlin and I help her off the train, she farewells me like a long-lost relative.

Have a Macca's at the Hauptbahnhof, and to the hostel, where I fortuitously booked a 35 euro private room before I left on Monday. With this flu' I just want to be on my own for a couple of nights. I look at my e-mails at the one euro an hour internet cafe, and ring and book a private room at the youth hostel in Dresden for the following night. Returning to the hostel and feeling about as good as one usually does on the second day of the 'flu, I realise that I've left the 'euro' plug for my mobile phone still stuck in the wall of the dorm at Krakow. Then to finish off the evening, I drop my torch, (that I bought on the day I left, on the way to Tullamarine, and have grown very attached to), onto the floor, and it's no longer working.

Up early and off to the bus after a quick brekkie. Manage to mistake a big glass building near the Reichstag for the Hauptbahnhof, and get off two stops early. Uneventful trip to Dresden through some very attractive farming country. My Lonely Planet map shows a tourist information centre not far from the station, and decide to go there before walking to the hostel. Nearby is a '1 euro' shop, and I buy 3 pairs of 'comfort' socks for 3 euros, that is the ones with the loose tops, which all geriatric streetpersons wear. Also (what luck) another torch for 1 euro, which is only half the size (and weight) of the one I dropped. Regarding socks : despite my reasonably constant use of public transport to get to work, which always includes nearly two hours of walking, I wouldn't get a hole in a sock more than twice a year, at most. I brought what looked like 4 good pairs of socks with me on this trip, and have already got holes in 6 of the individual socks - hence the new additions to the sock supply. I can't imagine how long a $1-70 pair of socks will last, but who cares at that price? Anyway, I have a theory regarding the multiplicity of holes occurring. I blame it on all the ubiquitous cobblestone pavements in Europe. Unfortunately there is a big new development all around the railway station, and I only reach the hostel by a circuitous route, getting lost a couple of times, until a very unapproachable-looking guy that I ask takes matters in hand and goes out of his way to bring me there.

The hostel is run with teutonic efficiency, and I can't get access to the room till 4 o'clock. Also, I can't stay tomorrow night as they are booked out. I eat the second part of my breakfast (from the Berlin youth hostel), and ring another (non-international youth hostel) hostel, and book a room with a very disinterested-sounding lady for 38 euros. Leave my big backpack in the luggage room, and go for a stroll to look for a cheap internet shop. Find (what super-luck!) a mobile phone shop where the guy sells me another charger, plus a euro adapter for 20 euros (reduced from 26 euros -wink, wink, nudge, nudge). It is smaller and only half the weight of my old one. (the only place where I would be able to buy a euro adaptor for my Australian-plugged charger is in Australia). The internet shop is an unmanned coin-in-the-slot one, 5 euros an hour, and as you need to register and get a user name and password first, and all the instructions are in German, I give it a miss.

I stock up from a supermarket on the way back, and have one of my supermarket dinners : fruit, yoghurt, and loads of milk and orange juice (separately). Lights out at 8pm, with two doonas and my(plastic drink bottle) hot water bottles, as I am determined to try and sweat out my cold. It is as silent as the grave all night.

At breakfast I realise why it was so quiet. All the other breakfasters are teutonic, middle-aged, and silent as the grave, and no eye contact is made throughout the meal. I walk to the new place, which is probably about a twenty minute walk, but it takes me an hour after a couple of unscheduled detours (okay, I got lost). It is a great room, carpeted, and all the bed linen has been meticulously ironed - not one crease anywhere. And the most comfy feather pillows. But (for the first time ever on this trip), no hand-basin in the room, but a complete en-suite literally 6 inches from my door. This is now day 3 of my 'flu, and I just sit at the table and doze for over one and a half hours. Then I eat something, and venture out into Dresden (known pre-war as
'Florence on the Elbe').

I soon find myself in the Old Town, and pay 3 euros to go up, via two lifts, to a balcony at the top of the Rathaus, where you get sweeping views, and (I understand) are able to see the Saxon part of Switzerland on a fine day. Then to the Kreuezkirche (Church of the Holy Cross) only a few steps away, where another 3 euros got you to a similar balcony, by quite a number of steps this time, to see identical views. I was elated to notice that the climbing didn't affect my legs at all. In Paris, climbing the steps to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, (and also to the top of Sacre Coeur), caused agonising pains in my shins. Also viewed, from the outside, the Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady) built 1726-1743. It collapsed in the bombing raid of February 1945, and was left as an anti-war monument till the 1990's, but has been recently rebuilt to the original specifications, largely from donations from all over the world.

The Bruhlsche Terrasse was all that the guidebooks say, a terrace some 15 metres above the Elbe, long known as 'Europe's Balcony', and a very pretty walk, with views of the barges and paddle steamers stretching for miles. On to the opera house (Semperoper), with a magnificent
facade. It is reputedly the only opera house in the world to be named after it's architect. The Zwinger, 'Dresden's most famous architectural structure', is nearby, a grouping of large Baroque
buildings. There were a number of other classic buildings in the Old Town that I don't know the names of, and that was it for the day. If I hadn't caught the 'flu I could have visited more things, including the New Town. Another supermarket dinner (this time including a very nice egg/cheese/ham? salad), and lights out at nine, and another nocturnal sauna.

At breakfast, another crew of breakfasters that were a clone of the mob of the day before, except for an identical twin to Charlotte Rampling, (when aged about twenty). Basil himself would have approved of the breakfast : there were shortages of everything at one time or another, cups, plates, bowls, cutlery, and the kitchen seemed to have only one staff member, a very angry young blonde, who shouted at any of the guests who were foolish enough to ask for anything. There were no cereal bowls, and a few hardy souls, including myself, used cups instead. The closest edible cereal I could find was puffed wheat, and I raised a smile from Charlotte by pretending to drink it.

To the station for an eleven o'clock train, and the two hour trip back to Berlin. All the seats are reserved (nobody told me!) and I soon get edged out of my seat my two Asian girls who shyly show me their reservation. As I'm leaving, a teenage girl travelling with a family opens a rather effervescent can of Sprite and half the contents spray over her and around the carriage. I decide to camp out near the exit door, and am just decyphering a notice that says it is forbidden to ride there, when the father of the family offers me a lone seat that is covered in lemonade, which I gratefully accept, and then realise that it is the only non-reserved seat in the carriage. I doze most of the way, so that it feels as if the trip only takes about 15 minutes. Buy a ticket and reservation to Amsterdam at the Hauptbahnhof.

When I left the Berlin Youth Hostel 3 days ago I asked regarding accommodation on my return and was told that 300 odd schoolchildren were arriving on Sunday, and the only possibility was a 10 bed dorm. As schoolie's week is starting to wear a bit thin with me now, I don't book, and ring another youth hostel, where the disinterested man on the 'phone says they would have a bed in a six bed dorm, and to just turn up. I now enquire at the tourist information on how to get to this hostel, and find that I will have to take a train to one station, another train for 10 stations, and then a bus, so I ring my original hostel, and they have a bed in a 14 bed dorm 'all boys together,' which sounds a bit ominous. I get the bus, and there is a young Asian couple also on it, backpackers and looking lost, and I guess that they are on the way to the hostel, and it turns out they are from Thailand and only arrived in Europe yesterday. We walk to the hostel and they both have beds in Dorm One. I am in the dorm known as 'Berlin', and walk into after an old guy, and as soon as I say 'G'Day' he says 'Aha, another English speaker', and it turns out that he (Bob) is a Yank who married a Tassie girl, and has lived there for years.

Bob has given me the current copy of 'Time', and while I feel a lot better today, and think I may have turned the corner with my 'flu, I just want to do something decadently lethargic. So I make my way to the 'Corrobaree' (can't spell any more), the Australian cafe at the Sony Centre, and spend a delicious 2 hours eating the most delicious ice-creams and drinking schooner-size glasses of Assam tea, while devouring every article in 'Time'. It is amazing how much you miss reading English if you haven't had the chance for a while. Appropriately enough, it contains a review of Paul Theroux' latest book 'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star', which is an account of his re-visiting a trip that he made 30 years ago through Europe, Russia, Central Asia,India, Southeast Asia and Japan, by various modes of transport, but mainly by rail. The earlier book was 'The Great Railway Bazaar'. What made me smile was that the reviewer quoted the first sentence of the later book, which is : ''You might think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time". Which is a sentiment that has been occurring to me lately, and no more so than on this very lazy afternoon.