Another long driving day today as we headed from Prague to Berlin. We stopped off at Dresden after crossing the Czech/German border around 10:30am. We then had around 2hrs 30mins to explore the town and get lunch!
Dresden is supposedly a thousand year old town that was almost completely destroyed by allied bombing during WWII cos that’s where many of the supply factories for the Nazis were. Today many of the original buildings have been rebuilt almost to original form. We had cursory looks at the opera house and towering cathedrals before heading towards a restaurant/café area. We walked around the block once and after being tempted by dirty Chinese, settled on a reasonable looking Vietnamese restaurant. We were wary cos the whole area was kinda quiet (being around 11am on a Sunday morning) and it looked like the equivalent of Darling Harbour’s eating areas or King Street wharf minus the water. Lunch turned out to be rather good though! We had pho beef noodles and crispy chicken rice which were both decent sized and reasonable value for money.
Re-energised we spent the hour we had left in Dresden walking along the riverside and checking out the inside of one of the large cathedrals there. Notably, there was a statue of Martin Luther outside one of the cathedrals so perhaps he was from this town?!
At 1pm it was back on the bus as we continued on to Berlin. We rolled into the German capital around 4pm and had a bus tour of the city! Jaz provided commentary and pointed out the city’s famous sites including the Brandenburg Gate, museum island, checkpoint Charlie, the Jewish war memorial, the city’s tower, and its parliamentary building the Reichstag. She described how the city was divided into East and West Berlin after WWII and the differences between the two sides of the city. We had a photostop at the East Side Gallery where a 1.3km remains of the Berlin wall still stood. Then it was on to our hotel!
Our 3 star hotel was rather good I must say! All the essentials including tv, fridge, and radiator heater to dry our washing! No wireless internet but the owner downstairs was super nice and let us use his main reception computer! We had about 90mins till dinner at 7pm and most of the group was using the Laundromat at the corner of the street so we decided to look for a supermarket instead. We found a small one in the underground station and picked up some sweet strawberries, popcorn and coke!
At 7pm we met in the lobby and Matt drove us to near the Berlin zoo where we were having dinner. We ate at a place called Joe’s and it was huge! It was kinda like a big beer garden with plenty of locals! Dinner was tomato soup for entrée with brautwurst with sauerkraut and mashed potato for mains. Dessert was icecream! Tried a Diesel drink which is half beer half coke! Sounds wrong but it was quite good, especially seeing as I’m not a seasoned beer drinker yet!
After dinner Matt drove us back to the hotel and we managed to do a load of washing at the Laundromat. The dryer didn’t work that well and some people were using it 3-4 times to get their clothes dry but it was already closing time after one run so we’ve hung up our clothes around our hotel room to dry! Nite!
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