Monday April 28 2008

We'd been looking forward to Berlin. The capital city of one of the world's great economic powers is an interesting place to kill an hour or two.

The sheer size of the station was the first thing that struck us. Brodos was visibly impressed by how clean and posh it was. We found the main entrance and gasped again at the size - both of the structure we had just left and of the city sprawling out in front of us. Then we headed off towards some more large buildings before parking ourselves on the lawn in front of the Reichstag. We didn't know it was the Reichstag at that point - I looked it up later - but whatever it was, it was massive. Everything in Berlin was massive.

We set off again after a few minutes. Heading under the Brandenburg gate, we trundled down an incredibly expensive looking street, were put in our place by a sneer from a haughty hotel doorman - I wish I'd paid attention at school so I could have become a doorman - and barely stifled our sheer delight at spotting the ostentatious looking Russian embassy. We wondered if they might let us stay there.

I haven't mentioned just how much we had been speaking in bad Russian accents. This had started in Finland with an offhand reference to a long-standing Internet joke about Russia, which runs along the lines of "In Soviet Russia, car drive you," or, "In Soviet Russia, hat wear you," or, "In Soviet Russia, book read you," and can be applied to almost any activity, providing an endless stream of entertainment until somebody involved starts to find it annoying. It says something about the simplicity of the minds of Brodos and me that this same joke had sustained us for 10 days.

This joke had developed, quite swiftly, into simply speaking with a poor Russian accent. Iscaria had tolerated this during our stay in Finland - his approach to most of what we did was best described as tolerance - while in Sweden, it was dismissed with a weary sign by Morani whenever it occurred.

Sadly, this running joke began to fizzle out in Germany. For we were travelling deeper into lands where a terrible impression of a Russian had some chance of being construed as a terrible impression of a local. So we never tried to pass ourselves off as Russians at the Russian embassy in Berlin and thus never discovered whether our accents were proficient enough to convince actual Russians.

We wouldn't have been able to spend the night there anyway. In Soviet Russia, of course, embassy sleep in you.

With our train due in just over half an hour or so, we started heading back to the station. We hadn't reached Brodos' desired destination of Checkpoint Charlie - which is unsurprising given that his plan for locating it involved little more than simply expecting it to appear in front of us - but we saw some military action nonetheless as we shambled past the American embassy. Abandoned terraced houses beside it looked to be straight out of World War Two and it was guarded on all corners by armed policemen.

We're not used to guns in Britain, so spying people with weaponry automatically makes us feel like we're in a film.

The US flag was clear to see, but I asked a bunch of policemen what the building was just to check. I wondered if they might think I was a terrorist - such things tend to flash through your mind when approaching men with guns - but the collective expression on their faces revealed that they just thought I was an idiot. The friendliest one told me the embassy would be moving very soon and joked that we might like to buy the current building. Jokes generally leave all their merits dangling on the fence when they cross the language barrier, but I chuckled pleasantly nonetheless. Before detonating my suicide belt.

We continued in the direction of the station - pausing to indulge in some forbidden photography of the embassy, with pathetic results - and reached the platform on time. Dumped our bags on the ground, we funnelled some money into a snack machine in the interests of international confectionery research and awaited the train to Vienna.

Next week: Bro and Pix fall for an angry lady train guard.

Read from the start:
A Geek Adventure

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