Day 267: Travelling to Berlin

Time to leave Slovakia, and central Europe! But first it's a long day of travel to get through. After our fairly average experience with the buses in Bratislava, we decided not to leave things to chance this time, so we packed up and caught an Uber from our apartment to the station. We really should have done more of that - the 20 minute ride cost 3 euros and the young guy driving spoke great English and was interesting to chat to with. He was very interested in our dog travels!

Arrived at the station at about 9:30, with around 30 minutes before the train was due (it was coming from Budapest). But when we looked at the sign boards, the train was running 20 minutes late! Yikes. Oh well. Over the next 30 minutes that gradually got extended until it was eventually 30 minutes late - but at least it finally showed up!

Managed to snag ourselves a compartment - one of those classic European train things where the corridor is on one side of the carriage and the seats are on the other, in compartments of six seats facing inwards. Since we basically had six seats to ourselves, we settled in and spread out, since it was going to be a long day on the train! We were travelling from Bratislava via Brno, Prague, Dresden and eventually Berlin around 7pm.

Unfortunately we didn't have any power points available in the compartment since it was an older Hungarian carriage, so it was basically just podcasts the whole way. Not a huge amount of scenery to look at, some plains, some hills, some fields, some farmlands. No mountains though.

Listened to a bunch of football podcasts, a Simpsons podcast, caught up on my main history podcast (Austrian foreign minister Metternich finally got his comeuppance!), and listened to several more episodes of the History of Rome.

An older Czech couple joined us in the compartment at Brno and stayed until Prague, where the train halted for around 20 minutes as they changed the locomotive. Shandos took the opportunity to hop off with Schnitzel and let him pee, but since we were worried they'd try and cut the stop short to make up for lost time, she wasn't gone for long and he didn't end up peeing. Oh well.

A German lady replaced the Czech couple in Prague and she stayed with us until Dresden, when a fussy German businessman took her seat. He spent 20 minutes deciding that a seat without power was a seat not worth living in, so moved pretty soon afterwards. On the last leg between Dresden and Berlin we took turns to visit the dining car, rather than leaving our bags and dog unattended (and I'm fairly sure he wouldn't be allowed in). Was an interesting experience sitting on the rolling restaurant! I had a beef stew which was OK and expensive for what it was.

Finally at 7:20pm we rolled into Berlin, about 15 minutes behind schedule. Almost literally jumped off the train since it was continuing on to Hamburg! Found a peeing tree outside the station for Schnitzel, then rode a couple of trams up north to Prenzlauer Berg and our apartment for the next few days. It's a ground floor place, quite large, though surprisingly empty of furniture. The bedroom is huge, but only has a small bed and a dresser - no couch or anything. But it'll be fine for the next few days.Read more