The outside of the Pergamon Museum

The crew... waiting for the bus

Thu 6-Sep-2001 Got up, Corey did laundry, I caught up on my log, packed up, and we checked out. When we got to Zoo station, we placed our luggage in lockers and investigated travel to and accomodations in Prague. Our original plan was to get an overnight train to Prague, but it turned out that none existed. Additionally, we had difficulty contacting any of the hostels in there. We then went to the Pergamon Museum; a fine museum of mainly Classical and Islamic antiquities. It was a very nice museum, but the thing is that once you have seen the Louvre in Paris, nothing even compares. Then we ate a late lunch/early dinner at a pizza place called Die Zwölf Apostel. After discussing our plans, it seemed obvious that we wouldn't make it to Prague that night. So we visited the Topographie des Terrors; an open air exhibit documenting the horrors of the Third Reich, and then we found a hostel called "Lette'm sleep"(yes, that's the correct punctuation) to stay at that night.

The Topographie des Terrors	The last Kremlin flag

The outside of Lette'm sleep yep the place was a dump!

Departing from Berlin...

...and arrival at Prague

Fri 7-Sep-2001 Woke up early. much earlier than the others, packed up, and waited for the others. In the meantime, I spent the time watching German television and chatting with some of the people in the hostel. We then went down to Zoo station and at about 1:30pm, we boarded a train for Prague. Getting out into the countryside, I saw more of what I expected to see in East Berlin and the former East Germany: a sprinkling of ugly and run down concrete structures.

After an uneventful train ride, we arrived in Prague at about 7pm, and akmost immediately the differences between Prague and West European cities was apparent. While Prague is probably the most "West European" of East European cities (not counting cities in the former East Germany), you notice things that give away its former Warsaw Pact past. The first thing that happened was a woman came up to us literally right when we got off the train, offering us accomodations. Taking in tourists is apparently a cottage industry in Prague, and this repeated itself at least a dozen times. The signs in the train station were in four different languages, which is common in Europe. The catch was here that the three languages were Czech, English, German --- and Russian; the former lingua franca of the Warsaw Pact.

Another thing that caught my eye was that in the main hall, there was a very large plaque commemorating Woodrow Wilson, which makes sense because the first Czechoslovakian nation originally partly owed it's existence to his work. We couldn't find an ATM in the train station, just over commissioned exchange places. We eventually got a room at a place called the Hostel Jednota near the train station. The Hostel Jednota looked strikingly like a dorm hall, not out of place in an American university except for the fact that it was very run down and dusty. After that, we set out to find an ATM and dinner. Finding the ATM was pretty easy but finding the particular restaurant that Erik was insisting that we go to was much harder. Normally, I get quite grumpy and impatient when we spend tons of time seeking out a particular restaurant when there are restaurants all over the place, but not in Prague. Just walking around in Prague is amazing; Prague is one of the few cities in this area that escaped WWII relatively unscathed. Walking around any corner seems to uncover a breathtaking building. The depressing thing is that one thinks that if Europe was spared the scourge of the two world wars, all of Europe would look like Prague.

We eventually found the restaurant - a place called "U Rotta". I had the house specialty - the spicy pork sausage, which was probably the best food yet on this trip. After that, we were tired and we went to bed.

@ the Hostel Jednota	Huh Huh cool a band called Fecal Party!	I don't know why I took a picture of this Either way I am including here for completeness sake

Dinner at the U Rotta (why does every picture I have of Corey have him with a liter of beer?)