Despite last night’s Aperol incursion, we both managed to get up early enough to take satisfaction from getting our Airbnb host out of bed at 05:45 – there was no other way of giving the keys back – and then get the metro to the main station in plenty of time.
Just as the 06:32 Eurocity 172 Berliner to Berlin Hbf was due to arrive in the station, a platform change was announced, which made everyone very happy at 06:30. We boarded a comfortable train which was relatively empty – this is, in fact, why I chose to book it in preference to the 08:32 despite companion’s protestations – and which routinely has a proper restaurant car. So all was good.
And they brought coffee to our seats.
The four-hour journey from Prague to Berlin was not the fastest, but there was plenty to look at out of our window seats as the train worked its way north along the river – Elba, for the most part, I think – for what was a suitably scenic journey out of Czechia. Low-speed trains are the future.
Around 8:30 – somewhere near Bad Schandau – we finally relented and had our “American breakfast” – eggs, ham, many different types of bread, jam, cheese and coffee – in the restaurant car and watched the world as it went by. A friend in Berlin had told me that the route is pretty leaving Prague and then quite boring for the rest of the way, but in fact it’s sufficiently pretty for almost all of the journey – and the bits we saw from the restaurant car were even prettier still, probably because we saw them from a table with a proper cloth and huge comfortable seats.
When we got back to our seats, a German couple had installed themselves at the table-seat opposite and were entertaining two young children, who were incapable of not shouting, with a variety of noise-making activities that helped companion’s wine-flu tremendously. At one point, I asked Google translate to tell them that there was a play area for children at the other end of the train, but after inspection it was clearly deemed unacceptable as the offer to move was declined.
I shushed them loudly for the rest of the journey to Berlin.
We left our bags in a huge locker and spent a few hours walking around Berlin with a friend, who kindly met us at the station and agreed to be our tour guide for the morning. After some reviving drinks, we took the S-Bahn (included in our passes) a few stops, walked past the Holocaust-Mahnmal – which now has a security guard to ensure suitably demure behaviour – then on to the Brandenurger Tor for a quick finger-puppet selfie.
On the S-Bahn again, we headed out to the Berlin Nordbahnhof, a restored ghost station which between 13 August 1961 and 1 September 1990 was not used, apart from to serve as home to the armed soldiers who guarded it to make sure nobody from the west tried to get off. The walls are now covered with pictures and detailed histories of the ghost station era and enameled signs with that font whose name I don’t know, possibly Reichsbahn Schrift?
After a walk along the wall, we rode out east on the S-Bahn to see the TV Tower, then went back to the Hauptbahnhof to get the 14:34 Intercity 142 to Amsterdam Centraal. This left on time, and with the help of Vagonweb I’d put us in the quiet compartment next to the restaurant car. We had airline seats, rather than table, but that was OK. And it was quiet.
At Hannover we braved the restaurant car, which seemed to be full of commuters using it as an extension to their offices, making eating something of a challenge. Once we’d ordered at the counter, the woman agreed that moving someone was a good option, so we chose the table with the people who annoyed us the most, moved their bags for them, and waited for our lunch-cum-tea to arrive.
The locomotive change at Bad Bentheim gave companion time for a cigarette, where noticed the restaurant car emptying and the commuters getting off, so we’d have had an easier time eating later if we’d been able to hold off that long.
A lot of the journey was pretty, and I spent most of the time from Hengelo looking for traditional windmills. I hoped this would change our various games of I Spy – which essentially now boils down to church, mountain, river, or a combination of the three – but there were not as many as hoped. But the train was another open coach at the rear, so I got plenty of opportunities to stand at the back looking for pretty things. Including windmills.
At Amsterdam we changed for a Rotterdam train and arrived at 21:49, just in time for a swarm of Rotterdam fans to inform us that they’d won the football. Our friend met us at the back of the station, showed us around a little, then drove back to theirs.
