RE: Meshing Past and Present
October 17, 2012 at 8:33 pm
(This post was last modified: October 17, 2012 at 8:34 pm by festive1.)
The_Germans_are_coming Wrote: was it the "united" post 1990 Berlin? because it only became awsome after that. A lot of former GDR citizens simply left their houses and went to the west or to anywere else in the world, these houses were then bought by artists and others wich is why Berlin is currently such a amazing cultural hotspot.
I have been taking interrail trips since I was 17 and in total took 3. I think you probably took the 2 weeks ticket for a certain set of countries.
I remember how I always use to save up my money and then bought the "all of europe" ticket wich lasts a month and costs 400 euros.
You didn`t like Prag? I love Prag. I generaly love eastern europe.
Currently what has happened in Berlin during the past 20 years is happening in Poland and the Tschek Republic, Prag, Brün, Gdanzk, Krakau and Warsau are flurishing and building up a cultural diversity no one would have thought a eastern european country would ever achieve.
I left out Vienna... which we visited between Berlin and Prague.
I went in 2002, so Berlin was unified. The guy at the hotel we stayed at schooled me one morning over breakfast. They had a kind of corny thing of putting your national flag on your table during breakfast, as this was during the build up to the US's invasion of Iraq, I swapped our flag for a left over Canadian one. The guy kind of went off on me about having national pride, I tried to explain that it wasn't lack of national pride, rather it was embarrassment about what our country was doing. He shrugged it off, and made the point that even if what the leaders are doing was embarrassing, one should still have a sense of national pride. I can respect that.
Prague... we didn't really leave the city center and people were rude. We got a lot of the, "Fucking tourists" vibe. But it was gorgeous. Best thing about Prague was we visited before they went on the Euro, so a liter of beer was about $0.75. Lots of drinking ensued.
The train was the way to go. We did an overnight sleeper car between Prague and Zurich which was interesting. We don't really have a lot of rail travel here in the states.
I can't wait for our boys to get a wee bit older... There's too many places I want to visit and I worry there won't be enough time/money!
