The journey across Germany had exhausted Amanda and I. Not so much from the amount of time driving, but rather from the boringness of the highways. I had been excited to try out the (in)famous autobahns but in the end they turned out to be much like any other highway in the world. Yes, there were sections that seemed to have no speed limit, but I wasn't too enthusiastic to go faster than the 130km/h found on every other highway in Europe. Besides which, with the 82 million people living in Germany it seemed that every hundred kilometres or so was inhibited by a half-hour traffic jam. More on that later.
We knew that we had plenty of time to spend in Berlin on Saturday morning, as the only other thing we'd planned was a tour of the Volkswagon factory in Dresden at 5pm. Dresden, according to our GPS, was only 2 hours away so we spent the morning wandering down to the old remains of the Berlin Wall. The walk was interesting, as there were any number of different memorials, statues and historical plaques that go into the technical and emotional details of Germany's involvement in the second World War. This wasn't a culture that was determined to sweep an ugly moment of their history under the table.
The first memorial that we saw was called the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe". We found it interesting, but we didn't really understand it. The slabs (called stelae), were of varying heights and sizes and all arrayed in rows. It was impressive, but it we couldn't figure out if it represented anything, or was symbolic of anything so it didn't really... touch us in any real way. Wikipedia tells us that the stelae were designed to "produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole scuplutre aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason." Well, I guess you could say that.
The next memorial was next to a section of the Berlin wall that is relatively untouched. Here, there is a step by step account of how the Nazi party rose to power. It was a very interesting read as it completely detailed the time from when Nazi meetings were banned and members arrested, to how they got their first few seats in parliment, to Hitler becoming Chancellor and the forthcoming war. It also went into the post war detail, regarding compensation, the horrors involved with the Berlin wall itself and its eventual fall. It was very sobering, and definitely put ourselves in an interesting light to head towards the Volkwagon factory in Dresden.
Unfortunately, the traffic caught up with us. We knew that it was going to be bad, so we left 5 hours to travel the 2 hour journey from Berlin to Dresden. It took us an hour to get out of Berlin alone, then we hit three different "stop-dead-and-get-out-of-your-car" traffic jams. In the end we missed the tour by half an hour so we had no choice but to keep going to our hotel in Prague.
Prague was nice, but by this stage Amanda and I were getting travel tired. Germany's never ending concrete had sapped us of all energy and it was difficult to look at another European city, even one as beautiful as Prague, with distracted attention. Still, we mustered up some enthusiasm and set out to do some exploring. The plan was to walk from our hotel to nearby Wenceslas Square, then meander our way through Prague's pretty streets until we reached the Old Town Square and the famous Charles Bridge (Karluv Most). Unfortunately, however, Prague's cobblestone footpaths got the best of Amanda and she managed to resprain her ankle just as we reached the Square. There was nothing we could do except make our way slowly back to our hotel.
This morning we decided to view the rest of Prague from the safety of our car and we drove through the streets for a while before setting off for our next destination, Bratislava in Slovakia. On the way there we decided to detour to check out a creepy church known as the Sedlec Ossuary or more commonly as The Bone Church. For reasons we still don't fully understand, the church somehow came to be decorated with human skeletal remains including an impressive chandelier that contains at least one of every bone in the human body. It was strange.
After the Church we recommenced our drive to Bratislava and and at some point along the way decided that we would save the Botel Marina for another time, and drove straight back to Máriapócs instead. The first thing that we discovered when we got home this evening was that we actually start work at 9am tomorrow morning, so it's a good thing we're back earlier than planned.- Daniel.
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