Berlin to Prague (Thursday 7th September 2017)

No sleeping in today. Keeping the window open made sure of that. The traffic build up woke us before the 7:00ma alarm. The raspberries, blackberries and orange we bought last night did for breakfast. Handing in our room key we headed to Torstrasse at the the top of our street to get the tram to Berlin Hauptbahnhof. A young Dutch chap gave up his seat for me (do I kook that old?!) and helped me buy the correct tickets, which was great because I had no idea. Even he said that ti had taken him a while to master the obscure tram ticket system. He works in IT for a large company that develops SatNav software. I couldn’t quite catch which one. By the way, the tram tickets set us back EUR 1.70 each.

Anyway, we arrived at Berlin Hbf with about 2.5hrs up our sleeves. The train didn’t leave until 11:04. The helpful lady at the information desk confirmed that our train left from Platform 1 and pointed us in the direction of the Service Centre where we could book a seat for the trip. The seats only cost EUR 4.50 each. Seat reservation is not mandatory.

After a coffee we headed down to the platform and jumped on the EC379 to Prague. The journey took about 4.5 hrs with a few short stops along the way. The landscape for many, many miles south-east of Berlin is a flat as a tack. Lots of wind-power being generated all along the way. Hills eventually appeared as as did the Elbe river carving its way through them. The train very much followed the river all the way to Dresden. The steep, forested hill-sides, which fell all the way to the river, afforded a precarious place upon which to build houses but build them they have. The hill-tops are dotted with much larger houses and small mansions with the occasional ruined castle here and there. By the time we’d reached Dresden we were feeling a little peckish so we found our way to the dining car for lunch. I had a pork schnitzel with little roast potatoes and Kerry had a pork sandwich which she didn’t enjoy, so I ate that too. Well, I did give up more than half of my potatoes!

After a cup of tea we returned to our six-person compartment as we crossed over to the Vltava river valley and made our way up it to Prague. The first job once we reach Prague was to get some local currency – Koruna. Currently AUD 1.00 buys you about KOR 15.00. Language is going to be interesting for the next few days. I could “wing it” pretty well in Berlin but Prague may be a very different story. Ah! It’s what traveling is all about! I was thinking yesterday, traveling in foreign cities and countries would only be half as much fun if you were conversant in the lingo.

Anyway we walked about 1200m to our accommodation for the next four nights at the Axa Hotel on Na Porici, on the edge of the old town. We did some much needed clothes washing in the bathroom sink, ducked out for a quick bite at a local restaurant and then headed in for an early night.