An Der Opera – My even older Holiday Weblog

Day 5 (cont)

We settled in, licked the last of our whisky out of the bottle and set about the cheap vodka. Washed and changed, we were able to pop downstairs to one of the two Italian restaurants which share the building with the hotel. We were on Bismarkstraße which runs straight down towards the Brandenburg Gate and back towards what was West Germany.

Everything about the restaurant was strange. They employed THE most sarcastic waiters I have (had)¹ ever come across and they must have thought we dropped in there out of a banana tree. We asked if they had ‘this’ or ‘that’ in our best German² or French for one of the Italians who could not speak German. Yet, that waiter got cross because he ‘hadn’t come to Germany to speak French’, only German – and he wasn’t very good at it. AND, they only had Italian wines and got quite airy when asked if they had others (a nice German wine was what we were looking for, as we were in Germany). “What do you expect in an Italian Restaurant?” the head waiter asked and we were too polite to tell him that he and his staff had provided all the rudeness we expected – in buckets. Our main concern was to get some food inside Ben and to stop him tummy rumbling – he’d already been on the phone to his mum and told her that we were not feeding him (despite him not wanting anything to eat in Meissen). Stephen also took his time ordering, which got plenty of sarky stares and comments from the staff.

I had minestrone soup, the like of which I had never had before. It was described as a vegetable soup and that is what it was, nice but not exactly what I expected. Stephen had questioned one of the starters and been told “yes, the mozzarella is fried and garnished” – he ordered that. I asked him, innocently, when he was half way through, how the cheese was fried (as it didn’t look fried) and he said he didn’t know. So, he asked the head waiter who said “it isn’t, he forgot to fry it” and whisked the half-eaten plate away. They had already forgotten to leave us any bread, had presented the wrong cutlery and so – for them (and us) it wasn’t a good night. At an arm and a leg, it was too expensive for an Italian. We didn’t go there again and we didn’t leave a tip.

That night we were SO hot, we must have lost gallons of sweat. The weather was really heavy, hot and sultry. Stephen said it was like this in Bangkok, but three times worse. We could have rung our pillows out in the morning. But then, there was a short thunderstorm, a little rain and the heaviness passed for a while. Not for long though.

Day 6 (full day)

Breakfast here was wonderful. Lots of different breads (although a little restricted on the Sunday because the bakeries were closed) and lots of different meats; the selection changed each morning, with various cheeses, jams and juices plus tea or coffee – lovely. However, still not much luck with boiled eggs on this trip; overcooked the first day and re-heated the second.

We went and bought one of the dearer subway tickets and travelled back to Unter Den Linden before walking back through the Brandenburg Gate. The tickets are split-price, the cheaper one being for pre-1989 residents. We explored the immediate area. There is absolutely no sign that there was ever a wall, which we thought was quite remarkable. We walked then for the rest of the day, through the Tiergarten, over to the Soviet Memorial, back though the park, down and round by the Zoologischer Garten and on to the main ‘West’ Berlin thoroughfare, Kurfürstendamm and Kantstraße. We found lots of hotels, bars and people! Bands were playing, singers singing, and dancers dancing – the whole place was a hive of activity, and – you couldn’t walk two minutes without tripping over hotels and guest houses!

There was an English language version of the Berlin tourist guide in the foyer of the hotel and the front-page article was headed ‘Berlin beer! Swell or Swill?’. We can confirm that it is swill. Quite the most disgusting beer we have ever tasted. They have to put a wedge of lemon in it just to make the head stay a while. This is not true of Czech beer or any other German beers we had tasted hitherto. We learned to avoid the Berlin types. Today it was my turn to carry the full rucksack. It had thundered in the morning and showed signs of rain, so we had to be prepared. As it turned out, it just got hot again.

We went home to change and then went out just wandering aimlessly, looking for food that we fancied. We walked down the same area we had been in that afternoon and eventually found an acceptable, small restaurant down a side street. I had Berlin Potato Soup, which was very nice and then some pot-roast pork (I think) – with sauerkraut and potato dumplings. Ben had a thick, almost raw steak, which he devoured with some gusto. I cannot recall what Stephen had.

That morning, as we made our way to the Metro station we came across a market just behind the hotel. It was only one stall deep and surrounded the church there. The produce of sale was superb, with every conceivable type of lettuce, mushroom, tomatoes etc. Many better than we’ve seen on the markets in Provence. A good day altogether.

And that was Saturday (22nd July 1995).

1 – I cannot tolerate bad or supercilious service. I don’t put up with it anymore. They are ‘told’ or I leave.

2 – Ben had just finished his ‘A’ level German, Stephen had worked in Germany for a while and I had passed my Institute of Linguists preliminary German exam a few years prior to departure. We all spoke v. basic French too: Ben had ‘GCSE’ level and both Stephen and I have superb ‘kitchen’ French.

We got up early and set off for Berlin. Breakfasted and washed, we were off by 09:00am and called first at a small supermarket to buy food and drink for the day.

Day 5

It took us some time to get out of Prague and onto the open road north to Germany, but we made it. The countryside seems to be a little cluttered around here (with pylons, factories etc.) but I suppose that that is the result of years of neglect. The Czechs seem to be a hardworking people, so there’s hope for the future. We didn’t see many beggars here.

What we did see on our journey north, particularly as we neared Germany and drove up into the mountains were lines of ‘ladies’¹ plying their trade at the side of the road. Young and old alike, there were many groups of them waving at passing cars, trying to make them stop. I was almost tempted to stop and ask ‘how much?’ (purely for research reasons I must add), but they might never have let the car go again. They were certainly very colourful.

We also passed a very large brick-built structure which we thought at first must have been a military barracks, but as it was disused and as it seemed to go on and on, we began to wonder. Only when we got to the town centre and saw the tour buses and the enormous ‘Jewish Memorial’ did we realise that it was a concentration camp². The town was Terezin.

We drove up to the border at the mountaintop and had no rouble getting through. We bought lots of cheap vodka and a Magnum each before driving off into the beautiful ‘East’ German countryside.

I mentioned Magnum just now. Early in our tour, this became our official rate of exchange. When we could not tell how much things were (in Holland for example), we gauged it on the price of a Magnum. Stephen insisted that they were only 99p for three at the Mirfield Co-op, but that most vendors charged that amount for just one. So, the rate of exchange was 1 x Magnum = £1.00. Therefore, whatever the cost of a Magnum (or equivalent) abroad was directly convertible into English. Simple, see? The rates of this exchange from town to town and country to country varied enormously (as you can imagine), so thank goodness for international exchange rates, which we now believe are more reliable. (lol).

Having filled up in Germany, something we had sought to avoid as the fuel is much dearer, we set off towards Dresden. We had not been able to fill-up in Czech as the petrol station did not take visa and we didn’t have enough Zlotaks left. Dresden looks a beautiful city but the video camera had discharged itself and we were not able to take any shots as we passed. We definitely intended to make Berlin that day so we didn’t stop, preferring to get to Meissen, just up the road instead. We stopped at this old and famous (for porcelain) town for a late lunch. Because it was so hot, none of us wanted more than a cake from the shop and a cold drink. At the top of the town is a tower and a church. To get to these, you have to climb 200 steps (I don’t know who counted). The heat was almost unbearable by now and we were completely shagged when we got to the top. However, from up here, we could see for miles around. The red roofs of the town were all below us and it obvious that cheap loans are now available via ‘soli’³, in this ex-East German town for upkeep and repairs. They are obviously hoping to cash in on the tourist market and so they should, as the town is a pleasant place to visit. We did witness some ugliness though. As we walked back towards the car we passed along a street with Turkish or similarly owned businesses where the windows had been broken. This sort of thing is rife in Germany, where the Germans are afraid that cheaper Turks will take their jobs.

Our drive continued and we reached the autobahn. It must have been one of Hitler’s first and hadn’t been maintained since. In places the concrete carriageway was so uneven it was positively dangerous. In parts, one lane was 2”-3” higher than the next – tyre ripping stuff. It was good to finally reach Berlin. Although, for many miles you wouldn’t know that you were in one of the greatest capital cities of the world. We’d bought a map on the outskirts and headed towards Templehof Airport, which was roughly in the direction we wanted to go. Our aim was to find a hotel somewhere out of the centre but near a Metro station. We couldn’t have done this however, until we found out where we were on the map. This led to a frustrating hour trying to find out where that was exactly. We drove along a promising road signposted >>Centrum>> which was cobbled for about 12 miles. We saw no hotels.

We eventually found ourselves on the map and tried several promising looking areas but the whole time (perhaps another hour), we found only two. Hotels. One was £100 per night and the other looked a little shady. We then shot out of a road⁴ and found ourselves right next to the Brandenburger Tor and on Under Den Linden. This was fascinating, especially after the forty odd years that Berlin was split as it once was⁵.

Picture of Brelin wall with Brandenberg gate behind. People are stoo on the wall. — We popped out of the street at the opposite side of what we see here.

What we hadn’t realised until now, was the we were looking for hotels in what had been East Berlin, where of course, commerce had been subdued for the forty years following the war and had little need for the type of hotel we were looking for. By now it was late and we were tired and fed-up. I tried to phone a hotel out of town, but my money wouldn’t stay in the and I got nowhere.

We eventually found a hotel right opposite the Berlin Opera House, The Hotel An Der Opera, and although it was more expensive that we’d hoped, it was the only hotel we had seen – so we took it. On reflection, the price wasn’t that bad, bearing in mind what we had paid in Czech. The estimated conversion of the bill from deutschmarks was £204.10 for two nights (I paid by Visa and didn’t note the exact amount later). That’s three people B & B. Add the Czech bill of approximately £61.65 and divide by five night (although one was really just a morning lol) and it’s down to around £17.70 per person per night, which is roughly the cost of a room in France. So, seven nights at a rough conversion rate (not Magnum rate) cost us about £14.50 each per night, which isn’t that bad at all. The meals however, did cost a good bit more.

1 – The term used at that time was ‘mucky women’ lol.

2 – Looking at Google maps, it seems that the road to Germany had been diverted since our visit. We certainly drove around and through the town. It was eerie.

3 – Following the fall of the Berlin Wall the German government introduced a “solidarity surcharge,”, which is, even now apparently, still imposed. https://www.dw.com/en/taxpayers-demand-end-to-soli-tax-to-boost-eastern-german-economy/a-41315805

4 – That must have been Wilhelmstrasse.

5 – For all of our lives, none of us three had ever known anything other than a divided Berlin. To be so close to this poignant reminder of the wall that figuratively divided Europe, which was there until finally demolished just a few years before our arrival, was thought provoking.

Picture Credit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall#/media/File:West_and_East_Germans_at_the_Brandenburg_Gate_in_1989.jpg