I am at a “free internet” station at our Prague hostel with the stickiest keyboard of all time, so I can’t write too much. Prague was, as everybody has said, charming and beautiful…but swarming to the gills with tourists. After setting up in the hostel yesterday we went on a massive walk through old town and across the river and up to Prague Castle, then back down to the Jewish district and then back out to the “newer” districts (I didn’t think they looked too new, and the guide book confirmed that they were built in the 1300’s or something).

Our hostel was full of nice people. After getting lost on our way back and walking forever and ever (my feet are a little beat up) we spent the evening on the patio chatting with a group of British kids who just came from Krakow. Their accents weren’t too bad, but I don’t know how much longer American and British Englishes will be mutually comprehensible — some other British girls at the train station yesterday morning were having trouble coming up with words I could understand (and I’ve had a lot of practice over the last month with communicating via gesture, grunt, etc).

So the people here are nice, but my bed was a little hard and a big loud train passed over head every 10 minutes or so. Still, it was the first night in a while where I didn’t wake up to an alarm, so it was refreshing in that regard. Today we are moving on to Olomouc, which is supposed to be as old and beautiful as Prague but without the throngs of people. That will be nice. It was difficult for me to get a picture of the astronomical clock without the top ends of tour group leaders’ tassly wire things (they raise them up to herd the group into once place) ending up in the frame. One neon green hand was especially bad — I think it might be in all my pictures.

I woke up early this morning, took breakfast at the hostel, and headed for the post office. I decided to just send the suitcase back to Oregon. I knew that as soon as I did this Lea would find somebody in Cologne for me to send it to (which, I just now learned, she did), but I wanted the thing out of my hair. I really didn’t want to be worrying about it tomorrow morning and risk nearly missing yet another train (we’re heading to Prague tomorrow). It was a little expensive, but I can’t tell you how good it feels to be able to heft all my possessions onto my back. Also, I kept my computer here with me.

The lady at the post office was very nice, but she didn’t speak a word of English. Luckily the sheets I had to fill out had both German and French captions, and I could understand the basic German words she said (things like numbers). So we figured it out. Keep an eye out over there in Astoria for a little red suitcase…

Today was all full of museums. We started at the German Hygiene Museum, which originated as a justification for Nazi eugenics, but has since developed into a more politically correct (and less terrifying) showcase for topics in human health: health, food, sex, birth, death, etc. The temporary exhibit on sleeping and dreaming was thorough and fascinating.

We assembled another lunch from the grocery store and then headed for the Armory and the New Green Vault. Both displays, but especially the vault, were absolutely stuffed with absurdly dazzling treasures. By the end of the tour I was passing over whole rows of finely carved ivory chalices enameled in gold and studded with jewels…they began to seem terribly mundane.

The Frauenkirsche was not open today, but it opens at 10am tomorrow, so we’re going to leave our bags at the train station and take a quick tour before our 11:10 train. I was worried that this 2-day-in-each-place schedule would be taxing, but it isn’t so bad.

Dresden is beautiful, but I am getting pretty anxious to ditch the suitcase. Wheels do not get along very well with cobblestones.

I woke up early and showered and washed the sheets and towels and apartment, but Brendan and I were still very nearly late for the train. Actually, we were late by 2 minutes, but so was the train. So we made it here by the early afternoon.

Our hostel is nice and we have a private room (yay for locks on the door) on the third floor. We are in a hip, young area in the northern ‘new’ part of the city. After settling in we walked through the old town and took pictures of all the beautiful reconstructed buildings. They are a patchwork of light and dark bricks, an unsettling pieced-together kind of beautiful. The bulk of the tourists (of which there are crowds) are elderly German couples. It is strange to think about how much this city has changed within their lifetimes.

Everything here is much pricier than Berlin, but we had a delicious lunch (after a lot of hard walking) of bread and cheese and meat that we bought and sandwiched ourselves. Tomorrow will be a big touristy museum-filled day. All the attractions seem pretty interesting, so I am looking forward to it.

The past few days were full of touristing, eating, and planning. Brendan and I have (penny pinchers that we are) committed to spending the next few weeks traveling together. Our itinerary so far goes something like:

Dresden, Germany (June 27 – 28)
Prague, Czech Republic (June 29)
Olomouc, Czech Republic (June 30 – July 1)
Bratislava, Slovakia (July 2)
Dubrovnik, Croatia (July 3 – 4)
Hvar Island, Croatia (July 5 – 6)
Split, Croatia (July 7 – 9)
Ljubljana, Slovenia (July 10 – 11)
Lake Bled, Slovenia (July 12)
Graz, Austria (July 13)
Munich, Germany (July 14 – 15)
Cologne, Germany (July 16)

It’s going to be a LOT of moving around, but we really tried to keep the long travel days to a minimum. Most of the destinations are only a couple hours apart, except for Bratislava -> Dubrovnik, which we are flying, and Split -> Ljubljana, where we will take an overnight train (I’m also flying from Munich to Cologne, without Brendan, to make my flight home).

As for a recap of the past few days…

Saturday

We headed down for Kreuzberg Saturday night to poke around and grab dinner. We managed to stumble right into the middle of the Christopher Street Day celebrations, which included mobs of people, a stage for music, a bunch of loud drums, beer stands in the street, and more mobs of people. Many of these people were wearing absurd outfits, silly wigs, etc.

While eating some funny crunchy pizza, Charmaine called to tell us she was headed for the parade grounds at 10pm. We finished at just about that time, so we headed one U-bahn stop up and stumbled right into her and a group of her friends. They were all so exceedingly friendly. One kid, Billy, was from the same part of the Bay Area as Brendan. Charmaine described Billy as “the archetypal American guy:” large, muscular, blond, and utterly lacking in social inhibition…running around, chatting, trying to remember everybody’s name (not really caring when he got them wrong, just assigning the person a new name), flirting with girls. Brendan and I found him pretty hilarious, although we were totally overwhelmed by so many chatty, hyper people. We had been pretty antisocial.

We headed back into the heart of the parade and danced to the drums for a bit. There was a band singing ska covers in German on the stage, which was great. After an hour or so Charmaine and her friends headed towards a club. Brendan and I were getting up early in the morning, so we demurred and headed to Prenzlauer Berg to grab some drinks on Kastanienallee before calling it a night.

Sunday

We woke up early and headed to Potsdam.

I decided I want my own palace. I’m not sure gold-gilt Rococo everything is my style, but I wouldn’t turn it down.

After donning floor-protective booties to shuffle through the palace, ladies’ wing, and kitchens, we grabbed some wurst and schnitzel and wandered around the gardens. Everything was lovely and decadent.

The city of Potsdam was really cute and featured another Brandenburger gate. The similarity between Brendan Berg and Brandenburger still hasn’t old…at least Brendan doesn’t think so…

We perused a long shopping street and ate Fanta and gummy bears and then headed home.

Monday

I do not relish the task of shopping, but I needed new hiking sandals to replace my old Nike ones that snapped. I headed over to the shopping district in Shoneberg and wandered around for what seemed like all morning. I tried on lots of shoes. I found some Campers and Mephistos that I liked, but the concept of expensive and pretentious hiking sandals seemed a little absurd so I settled for a pair of Timberlands. All the ladies models (of which there were far less variety than mens) seemed to feature leather of some sort, but these had the least of it. Still not ideal for swimming.

That task done, I met back up with Brendan to tour the Jewish Museum. Only a few floors covered the Holocaust, much of it was about the history of the Jewish community and culture in Germany. I thought it was a little odd that it would cover some of the same time periods and topics as the German History Museum in this segregated way. They extended the building’s modern architecture with “modern” approaches at displaying information…often featuring kooky interfaces like blowing on screens or pushing buttons. One installation in a massive vertical void in the building (the architecture encompassed a few such spaces) was lit only by windows in the ceiling. The floor was piled with big cast iron tokens that had faces punched out of them (eye, nose, mouth holes) and the whole room echoed with mournful clinking when you walked over them. Kind of eerie.

For dinner we had our first doner kebaps. Contrary to Brendan’s insistence that “the guide book never has the right restaurants right where you want them,” his Germany guide seemed to think the best doner in town was right at our U-bahn stop. Very convenient. We managed to pick up a (very weak) wireless signal from our table and made more reservations with greasy greasy fingers. It was quite delicious, I’m just hoping it digests.

Now

I’m still trying to figure out my options for mailing the suitcase, but if it’s going home it’s going today. My friend Lea from Vassar is from Germany, and he might have friends I can mail it to in Cologne. I’ll miss my little computer if it goes with, but lots of the hostels say they have computers available so I should be able to keep posting and checking my email, so keep in touch!

Brendan brought rain with him from Copenhagen, and it won’t go away. It was fine for today, since Thursday is free museum day. We spent the morning and most of the afternoon sifting through Germany’s version of its own history. There appear to have been a few wars and things. After German history we tried to hit up the science museum. It was closed, so we settled for the Pergamon.

We worked very hard at being tourists, so this evening we headed for the Internet bar for dinner and communications. On the way down the stairs from the U-bahn I heard a girl’s voice cry “Anna Henningsgaard!?” from the middle of the crowd. My name has this nice feature of being pretty unique, so I knew she must be talking to me. It was Charmaine (an ‘08 Vassar student who lived in Noyes with us), and she’s apparently been in Berlin for the whole month as well. What a funny coincidence. I made her promise to meet up with us for drinks or something this weekend.

Nobody came online during lunch, so you can’t give me a hard time for not trying. Now Brendan and I are going through all our guidebooks and trying to figure out the next few weeks. The harder it rains the nicer Croatian beaches sound. I still haven’t figured out what to do with my suitcase, but I’m seriously considering packing my extra things (a sweater, finished books, my *gulp* computer) up and mailing the whole thing home. It’d lighten the load, both physically and emotionally, as I wouldn’t have to worry about expensive things being secure as I trek through Eastern Europe. I’ll have to check out prices and options on that one.

We’ll probably head for Potsdam tomorrow, although the rainy weekend forecast is pretty bleak for our touristing prospects. Brendan hasn’t hit the Tiergarden or Zoo yet, so maybe we’ll spend the last of our sunshine on that. I also need to shop for a new pair of sandals (my flipflops simply do not function for anything requiring traction), a belt (I’ve walked off so many calories my pants are falling down), and a coin purse or wallet.