All White in Berlin

It's snowing outside the window of the internet cafe as I'm typing this. It's snowing a lot.

We're in Berlin, and this is a rare occasion where I'm planning to bring you sweet readers up to date, to the very second. By the time you finish reading this entry, we will be in-synch. You and I. The reason? Tomorrow, Day 18, we head for Russia. The big unknown. We'll be out of our comfortable western safety net at last, and who knows what we can expect to find? I certainly have no idea if the Russias have developed such a wacky concept as an 'internet cafe', so I'm aiming to make the most of this luxury whilst it's available to me. That, and the fact that this cafe is warm, and outside it's f###ing cold, so I'd like to stay inside here for as long as possible. So take your seats, my friends. Is everyone sitting comfortably? Let's get re-acquainted..

It's Friday today, Day 17. On Monday, we left the Hostel Elf in Prague, wondering how on earth Berlin could top such a great city. Has it? Maybe. It's hard to say. For me, I'll remember these past five days as the time The Hugless Stone came so far out of his shell it'd be nigh-on impossible to even call him a tortoise.

At the train station in Prague, I was munching down on a 'bramborak', which is a potato-pancake filled with a slab of chicken. It was far from fresh and far from appetising, a fact which I loudly made known to the world at large and undoubtedly to The Stone who was sitting next to me as I ate. Eventually, the combination of the stench and the voracious assult on my taste buds forced me to admit defeat to the Czech-speciality breakfast snack. "Does anyone want the rest of this thing?" I asked, holding it up with my fingers in a pincer, my face contorting with disgust as I saw pools of grease wobbling within it's fragile breadcrumb skin. "Yeah, I'll have it", a voice said. It was our friend The Stone. He grabbed it, and munched down his first bite. "That's horrible.." he said, with a grimace, before folding it up like a Pizza Calzone and stuffing the whole package in his mouth. Excrutiating. He finished chewing, licked his lips and stood up with his rucksack already on his back. We followed him to the platform, and before we knew it we were on the train to Berlin.

Train rides are interesting things for us on this trip. As you'll likely know if you're a regular reader of this blog, me and the gang are travelling by train all the way from London to Shanghai. At some points during our trip, we'll be on the train for up to four days at a time without getting off. So it'd be a natural assumption that we all enjoy travelling by train, and we do. The train ride from Vienna to Prague was great for me, as I watched the world speed by with music blasting in my ears. The journey from Prague to Berlin was less interesting, however. Maybe it was the cumulative result of our late-nights/early-mornings rountine in Prague, but for whatever reason I was tired like I'd rarely been tired before. So, when we got on the train, I borrowed some headphones, fired up the iPod and drifted happily into the land of nod whilst listening to Fiona Apple singing her little heart out.

I woke up nearly an hour later with the bizarre feeling that my ears were dancing. My eyes remained closed, but the sensation was un-mistakable. Twitch. Twitch. It was as if these little flaps of skin on the sides of my head had a life of their own, so forceful and definite were their rhythmic movements. Twitch. Twitch. I opened my eyes. Twitch. Twitch. As my vision gained clarity, I realised that towering over me was a grandiose figure, the very same figure responsible for my dancing ears. It was The Hugless Stone, and he was trying his hardest not to wake me as he delicately yanked the headphones I'd borrowed from him from me.

It was just as well he had woken me though, because moments later a German Polezei flanked by two Czech border guards entered the cabin demanding to see passports. Ours were all in order, no problems, but a Czech man sitting ahead of us was scrutinized with a brute force. Where was the receipt for his camera?, they wanted to know. How many cigarettes was he bringing into the country? The blonde Aussie girls sitting behind us recieved far kinder treatment, naturally. "Oh, you're sisters?", the policeman asked with a smirk. "You're very pretty, no?"

What a classy gent.

Then there was the overweight German frau sitting nearby, who snapped at The Marmott in a furious outburst when she heard him "shuffling his cards too loudly". She cheered up pretty soon, however, as she first tried to make friends with every ticket inspector who passed through the train, then eventually resorted to complimenting The Marmott on his delightful accent in the hopes of scoring a new companion with whom she could pass the time. Companionship was not forthcoming.

When we finally arrived in Berlin, tired and hungry, we were over the moon to discover the cheapest, nicest pizza place in the entire world, situated right next to our hostel. Giant pizzas of every flavour you could imagine, each for a cool 2 euros and delivered piping hot to your table within minutes. This place would become our regular eatery for the remainer of our time here, with each of us chowing down 2 pizzas each in quick succession there every evening. The place wasn't without character, either. The hopeful owner found difficulty in believing anyone wouldn't want a drink with their meal. "Trink?", he asked The Stone, who replied, "Nein, bitte". Maybe he misheard or maybe he was just really relucant to let go the sale, but either way the owner pressed the issue, asking him if he'd just asked for "Ein bier?"

Maybe a drink would have done him well, however, as (post-meal) back at the hostel we engaged in a gigantic table-football tournament which The Stone got very, very into. Little plastic men and their minature balls were flying everywhere, to a soundtrack of grunts that would make Serena Williams proud. Sadly, despite the impressive show of effort, The Stone lost the tournament.

His embarrassment was not over yet, I'd hasten to add. That evening we were in our bunk-beds when suddenly one of them started to shake furiously. The Stone had passed a mighty wind, and having let rip was suddenly, frantically struggling to get out of his sleeping bag. Task accomplished, he raced to the bathroom and slammed the door. I'll save you the horror of reading specifics about the noises that came afterwards, but let's say they weren't pleasant and they weren't pretty.

The next day, Day 14, after buying a tasty kebab from an Indian man who looked uncannily like Alan Partridge, we went to Berlin's famed 'Checkpoint Charlie', and the museam that accompanied it. It was an amazing place to visit and I found myself sucked right into the history of it all. Sadly, that doesn't take away from the fact that the museam was boring as hell. We'd gone through it separately at our own pace. The Stone and I were out first, and were of a similar opinion about it. However we were certain that The Marmott, the resident culture-vulture, would not only have enjoyed it immensely because it was a museam and he likes museams, but also would not fail to describe said enjoyment with a supporting expletive. We were therefore delighted when he came out at long last and told us in no uncertain terms that it had been "f###ing incredible".

Back at the youth hostel, The Stone was less than delighted when a group of young teenage girls gathered around our pool table and whispered about us in hushed voices, pointing and giggling. I approached him at a moment when he was looking his most awkward, and asked him if he was enjoying himself. "Can we leave yet?!" he gasped, with pleading desperation in his eyes.

He seemed much more in his element the following day, when we discovered a lake that had frozen over in the city centre. We proceeded to break up the ice and had a contest to throw chunks the furthest across the lake. When that had grown tiresome, The Stone took upon a new idea. He wangled up a huge slab of ice that most likely weighed more than me, and raised it above his head before sending it slamming down into the lake with glee. His joy quickly faded away, however, when the proverbial smoke cleared, revealing that his attack had left the ice with barely a scratch, and certainly not the gaping hole he'd been hoping for. Now he was burning with a furious passion, and slab after slab of ice was dug up and slammed into the surface of the lake until at last a tiny hole appeared through which a dribble of water seeped upwards. He was elated, although that also didn't last for long.. we went to leave only to be cornered by two police officers who'd been watching our work from the other side of the lake. However, that crisis was also averted when it turned out they simply wanted to warn us that pickpockets and teen thugs frequented the area, so we should be careful. "You can keep playing your games though!", one of them said to us as they left. Cheeky sod.

I've just realised that pretty much everything that happened in Berlin revolved around The Hugless Stone. Of course, I haven't told you every single little thing that's happened to us these past few days, just the things of note. But of those things, he seems to have been instrumental in their orchestration and enactment, the silly bugger. I promise that next time I'll have more stories about the gang as a whole though, and that said stories will be generally better than the ones in this entry. I've missed out quite a lot of things from our Berlin time, I realise, but right now I'm getting sick of this internet cafe and I want to go out and enjoy the snow. It's still falling thick and fast, and I'm warm enough right now to know that I can get a good ten minutes out there before my balls freeze off once again. So I'll love you and leave you, dear readers. Stay funky-fresh 'til next time..