My bag is really heavy: September 2011

After leaving the safe lands of Denmark, we began our journey into Eastern Europe. First stop - Berlin.

Berlin is a fucking fantastic town, so well built, its just brimming with German efficiency. Its all rather modern too, more modern than any Australian city that's for sure, but we soon learned it was because of its checkered history, and the realisation that Berlin has only been the one city, for about 21 years.

We arrived in the afternoon, and spent a couple of hours just walking around exploring the areas around Alexanderplatz. That night we looked up a tour company that Mardys brother recommended called www.newberlintours.com and decided to do there free walking tour the next day.

The next morning we woke up and headed down to Brandenburg gate, got there early and took some funny photos with the costume people there (I don't know how else to describe them - you'll see the photos soon enough), before meeting our guide Zabi who was to show us around town. The walking tours are free, you just have to tip them if you like there service (not all are free, some of them are $10Euro), and we tipped the shit out of Zabi, he was a really a great guide, very passionate in his stories, and knowledgeable about everything. After showing us around for a few hours he sat us all down in the park on museum island, and told us the very moving story of how the Berlin wall fell, it was awesome. If your ever in Berlin, we strongly recommend Zabi with New Berlin tours.

The next day we woke and did another walking tour, this one was the 3rd Reich tour, this one was mainly focused on the Nazis there rise to power and there rule. This was a paid tour, that cost $10 Euro, and while it was good, it was definitely not as good as Zabis tour. There is so much history in Berlin that I can't even begin to tell you about all the different things there, its really a place you have to go and see for yourself. And I think it would be hard to fully appreciate it without a guide, as there are so many little things that you miss just walking the streets, like the building still littered with bullet holes from the war, the apartment building window that is surrounded by bullet hole marks, where a German soldier must have been hard to kill for the Soviets in the battle for Berlin and much more.

Also a fact that was surprising is that as much as everyone wants to believe that the Americans and British won the war, what with D-Day, Africa, and Italy and all that. It was really Russia, that bore the entire brunt of German military might for all those years until finally the Allies came into the fray. Something like 20 million Soviet soldiers died fighting the Germans.... 20 MILLION, that's about 4 times as many people that died in all the concentration camps combined. Its a number that you nearly can't feel any emotion for as its just to hard to believe that many people died. But as evil as the Soviet empire was, they are the victors of WW2.

Anyway, after we had our fill of history, we decided to do a pub crawl with this New Berlin tours company, they seemed like good people. We met down at the old post office at 8pm, got our wristbands and were told what free drinks we would get and where (2 of the last bars before the nightclub gave you a free jager shot with every drink you bought - should have realised that shit was gonna get messy at this point). After getting our first free beers at the first pub and sitting outside we got to see our first street hookers - excitement, at least we thought they were hookers, otherwise they were just very friendly girls that didn't wear very much. Soon our suspicions would be confirmed when we moved pubs, and the pub crawl leader guy said "some of you may have noticed that there are prostitutes on these streets (to much laughter), please do not take photos of them, as they will take your camera and destroy it", finding out prostitutes are apparently a violent species we briskly moved on to the next pub.

From here on we visited perhaps 2 or 3 more bars, and my memory is a little hazy of these events. However at the last bar before the final nightclub we were going to go to, we eventually noticed that the bar had gotten really quiet. Where the fuck did everyone go, it seemed to all of a sudden be just Katie, Saweege (our Japanese dorm mate that we dragged out), and Mardy. This was a problem, because along with our 'do not take pictures of hookers' instruction, we were also told it was 'very important we all leave the last bar together, as we have to catch a train to the nightclub, and then enter it together to get in for free' - fuck. So we bail, somehow find out off the bouncer where the nightclub is, head to the train station, by the time we got onto the train Katie is noticeably drunk, and made friends loudly with some guy from Luxembourg she nicked named the the "Chief Master", soon we would all be calling him the chief master. Next we arrived at our stop. Katie immediately falls over. Great. We eventually get to the nightclub, with Mardy rudely telling Katie 'no we are not going to that club over there that old mate sitting on the stairs recommended, we are going to find the rest of the pub crawl, leave the bum alone and lets go'. Katie can be rather chatty when drunk.

We eventually get to the club, and had to pay the cover to get in because we didn't enter with the rest of the group, unlucky. We find some of our earlier pub crawl friends, and the night descends into a haze.

The next day, we recoop, Katie has lost everything - her handbag with her money, credit cards, and her new cardie she brought. This was going to be a problem as she had somehow mailed home her other credit card by accident....... dot dot dot.................

We spent the next two days in Berlin trying to sort her cards out. Well Mardy wasn't much of a help, what was there he could do? He gave her some cash to get by, and spent the day skating around Berlin on his new cheap skateboard taking some snaps and exploring, while Katie tried to sort out Mastercard/Western Union - it proved to be a drama that did not get sorted until we got to Poland.

In that day skating around, Mardy visited the DDR museum, which is a cool hands-on museum where you can touch and see stuff from the Soviet days, which was rather cool, and also went to the JFK museum, which had the video of JFKs famous speech at the Brandenburg gate, and a bunch of his stuff and cool stories about him, which - as well as exploring the town, was an enjoyable way to spend the afternoon.

That was it for Berlin, we had train tickets to Krakow, and had to make tracks. Fixing Katies Mastercard problem would have to wait till we got there.

So we jumped on a train and headed for Krakow, and it was a mostly a boring train ride, with two douchebag aussie guys sitting behind us that we tried to dissociate ourselves from. But shit got real when, at one of the random stops on the way, where people pile out to stretch there legs and smoke cigarettes, we got out as well, seeing as we had watched other people do it at 2 stops before hand, it must be the norm. But as soon as we stepped off the train, we were approached by a sort of policeman looking guy who asked to see our papers. Mardy was like "What papers? You want to see my passport" and he's like "yeah yeah", so we show him our passports and train tickets, and then he starts asking us for "100", and Mardys like "100 what? And what for, we have visas and train tickets, what do we owe you money for?", however, even though we were arguing with him, we were rather worried as this crazy looking Polish dude was holding both our passports and our train tickets by now, and just starts yelling "100! 100!" at us, we knew he wanted a bribe, but fuck him. Just then some lady yells "guys get on the train", and we snatch our shit out of his hands and jump back on the train and hide in our seats. We think the train is about to leave, but it doesn't, and then we see old-mate -crazy-probably-not-a-real-cop get on the train and is looking around, probably for us. We hide in our seats, and thankfully the train starts to move, and we notice the wanker is back on the platform, left behind as we steam on. Hope you catch on fire and die in your hick Polish town you corrupt fuck.

After that we had a safe and uneventful journey to Krakow, and go and check into our hostel, and spend the evening exploring the old town. Which is very beautiful and picturesque and a nice place to explore. And here as we were checking out which bar to have a few evening beers at, we see some real Polish cops - professional, clean shaven, and nothing like old mate at the train station earlier. Our suspicions that he is not a real cop are nearly proved. Anyway, that's in the past now.

We retire to our hostel for the night, and the next morning book in a tour to Auschwitz, it was about a 6 hour tour, as its nearly 2 hours to get out there from Krakow and the same back, so you have a little over 2 hours there, which is all you need really.

We were blown away at the size of the place, and the realisation that it wasn't just one camp, but several large camps that spanned a massive area, it was very surreal, and not a place you go to to have fun at. But more so its something to see, to see the place were 1.1million people were systematically killed in the name of racial purity.

And unlike the Rwandan genocide, where the massacres took place in the streets, and it was neighbours killing neighbours, teachers killing there students, friends killing friends, which was just mass carnage everywhere, this was different, this was a camp purposely set up for the sole purpose of killing people, by either gas chamber, or death through labour. It was not carnage, it was systematic. It was also sickening. The same number of people who died in the whole Rwandan genocide, died in this one camp.

There is much much more to Auschwitz than what I've just run through, and I can't possibly go into all the detail of what you learn there, plus we both have read a book while we have been travelling about Auschwitz, which is even more eye opening into what went on there. But alas, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, and I'll move on, as this is going to be a long post and I've got to get through it eventually.

The next day, we did something a little less somber, and went to check out the salt mines. Krakow has these HUGE underground salt mines, some of the biggest in the world, and this one is disused now but you can still go down there. And what makes it so special is that over the hundreds and hundreds of years it was mined, the miners created great chapels and statues and monuments all the way down there, 100+ metres under the surface. It was a very cool place, and we walked around with our guide for a few hours, and got to a maximum depth of 135m underground, which is as far as the tour goes (the tour covers less than 1% of the mine, its that big, spanning hundreds of kilometres), but the actual mine used to go over 300m underground, to level 7, which flooded some years ago, and now the deepest accessible place for the staff is level 6, which is a touch under 300m underground. Alas, on the tour you "only go to 135m" underground, which is still freaking deep. And everything down there is salt, lick the walls, salt, touch the ground, salt - salt, salt, salt, the water down there totally saturated salt water that cannot absorb anymore salt. I don't think I've said the word 'salt' so many times in one day. And salt does all these cool things like makes wood not feel like wood, but like it has a layer of paint on it, and stuff. Anyway, the best part was a massive church thing they built down there, it is absolutely spectacular, and there is a light show that goes with it, that I have a video of. But photos will have to suffice for this blog, apparently you can get married there, and the Polish guide thought it was expensive, but when we did the exchange rate, we worked out that it was only like $1000 Aussie dollars to hire out (if we didn't mess up the exchange rate). Katie said she would settle for nothing less than this extravagant venue if she were ever to marry. Just so you know, any future suitors.

In our last day in Krakow, we decided to book a "Crazy Guides Tour", it sounded appealing. Spend the afternoon driving around in an old Soviet Trabant with a Polish guy, that shows you the old communist sector/suburb that Stalin himself took great interest in building, takes you to a 'milky bar', which is Polish subsidised eatery, that you can eat basic food at, really really cheap, if your a bum, a student or just earn no money - its a rememinant of the old communist system and was cool to go to and eat. They take you to an old communist apartment, feed you traditional vodka (followed by a gerkin to kill the taste - works a treat), then they take you to a restaurant and give you a few beers while he tells you about the history of the place (where a crazy Polish women came in and caused a scene), and then lets you drive the Trabant around some back streets - AFTER they've got you drinking. I love the Eastern Bloc.

Our guides name was Pete, and he was a cool cat, if we lived in the same country, we would all probably be mates. He was 23, and his life has been hard, his dads an alcoholic, and he had to walk his "two stupid dogs everyday, because his dad doesn't want to take care of them anymore", but he takes it all in his stride and is doing well for himself, working this crazy guides job and going to university to get a degree so he doesn't end up poor.

He said a couple of things that really hit home for us. The biggest one being, that his grandfather was killed in Auschwitz, he apparently worked on the water board and spoke out against the Nazis to some of his friends, his "friends" must have then ratted on him to the Nazis, and he ended up in Auschwitz. When you meet someone who has lost a family member from something like that it really hits home. A few other things he said were that, when the Nazis came, they were mean, but if you were white and fit in with the Nazi view of how the new race should be, they weren't overly bad, IF you followed there rules. However when the Soviets came, they were like animals, burning towns, raping women, and just acting like "wild animals" to quote Pete. Also, before WW2, his family owned quite a lot of property outside of Warsaw, but when the Soviets came they burned the house to the ground, and after the war was over, and Poland became a country again, they couldn't prove the land was there's because there was no house on it. So his family lost everything.

The crazy guides tour was definitely awesome, and we recommend it if you go to Krakow, ask for Pete!

We then jumped on a night train and headed to Prague. The idea of catching a night train was to sleep on the train and spend the next day awake and exploring the sights and sounds in Prague, thus saving a day, by not travelling during the daytime. This theory proved to be rubbish, ever tried sleeping on a train? Its garbage. You'll see in the photos how much room we had to sleep, and the the train makes its stupid choo choo noises and stops and starts all the time and the conductor blows his whistle and just shut the fuck up I'm trying to sleep here.

Consequently, when we got to Prague, we had a kip and lost the day anyway. But we decided to go on a pub crawl that we saw on a flyer that we found at our hostel bar, this could prove messy.

We left our hostel, after some warm up beers and headed out. It was a big pub crawl probably over 100 people, and I don't remember to much of this pub crawl. I do remember being told that Prague has a noise curfew and if you make to much noise on the streets after 10pm, the Czech police can come and arrest you. I know we bar hopped for a bit, got really drunk, and then ended up at the famous 5 story nightclub near the Charles Bridge, supposedly the biggest nightclub in Europe, or central Europe, depending on who your talking to. And to be honest, it was only mediocre, they played the same sort of music styles on most of the levels. But I do remember that I (Mardy) fell down the stairs at one point when I was really hammered and hurt my back and shoulder which is still tender to this day.

We went home and slept off our hangovers, the next night, we figured we lost the day to sleeping, we may as well head out and find some clubs on our own. This proved to be a much more difficult task than we originally predicted. Because we were drunk before, and seemed to be going endlessly from bars to clubs, we thought they would be littered everywhere if we just went out exploring. Wrong. This isn't the Valley. You are not in Kansas anymore. Shit is hard to find, its all hidden down weird little alleys and clubs are all underground and shit really throws you off, we found a few bars at the start of the night, and didn't find a real club until about 1am. In which it was like walking into Alice in Wonderland, everyone was dressed as elves, one guy had a fake donkey strapped to the front of him. Turns out we had stumbled upon a British stag night, but we hung around and watched the craziness of it all. A rather funny night, and we then went home.

We ended up sleeping most of the day again, and lost the day, unable to go sightseeing, this was becoming a viscous cycle, one that I blame on the night train for screwing up my body clock. And this night we stayed at our hostel, which we both really liked (The clown and bard - Prague, highly recommend), it was a cosy little pub and we knew all the bar staff by now, and sat around drinking, getting drunker and drunker, and we met some Aussie guys from Sydney, who in the end convinced us to go out AGAIN, 3 nights in a row on the turps, thats crazy talk. So our quiet night at the hostel, ended up being going to bed at about 730am. Outrageous. Our train was the next day and we had seen none of the city. This would not fly.

I convinced Katie to come out and do a walking tour, as unexcited as she was about it, we had some red bulls and soldiered on through, it was only for 1.5 hours, and it was well worth it, we saw the Charles Bridge (and not just the nightclub next to it), and another famous bit of Prague that I can't remember what is called, and then we walked up to the massive cathedral that dominates the skyline, that apparently took 1000 years to build! Crazy.

We are now off to Innsbruck, Austria, as it made more sense to see the Austrian Alps on the way to Zurich, than to see the Swiss Alps in the south of Switzerland, and then double back to Zurich.

Catch you next time

Mardy and Katie
(Longest blog post ever!)

Kev drinking a Berliner Pilsner

This thing reminded me of the Daily Planet that superman worked for, it spun around and shit

The costume people I was talking about

The costume people again, the tourist we asked to take this photo for us was an old lady and didn't manage to take one good photo out of all the ones she took. Don't trust old people.

Kev at the Brandenburg gate

Zabi on our walking tour

Zabi again at the Holocaust memorial

Kev at the Berlin Wall

Checkpoint Charlie

A photo of the tank stand-off that happened at Checkpoint Charlie

The bunker where Hitler shot himself is underneath this carpark which is in the middle of Berlin, they refuse to build a memorial for him. So it stays a carpark.

One of the buildings on Museum Island

The largest indoor aquarium, found this while I was skating around town. Its part of a hotel, and the elevator goes through the middle of the tank.

You saw it here first

Krakow!!

The entrance gate at Auschwitz I, it was hard to take a photo of it, but it said in German, "Work will set you Free", which was sadistic, as no one was ever set free. You were worked till death, if you were lucky enough to work and not go straight to the gas chambers.

Two tonnes of human hair. This is just some they saved, they used the hair to make more uniforms for the prisoners.

The wall of death, this is where they shot people that were to be made an example of

Here you can see the fence, the outer wall, the guard tower, and a stop/halt, sign

Inside the gas chambers, this is where they pumped in the deadly Zyklon B gas

Inside the gas chambers

This is the next room over from the gas chambers, its the furnaces where they burned the dead bodies, they ran all day long

The end of the line, where the trains came through the gate they would stop here, and unload there overcrowded mostly Jewish passengers

One of the old cattle wagons, they would fit up to 70 people inside one

To the right of the unloading point from the trains, this 1km path took you to the gas chambers 5 and 6

Destroyed furnace/gas chamber 3 (I think), the Nazis tried to destroy them when they knew the Soviets were coming. Baffles me how they thought they could get away with what they did here.