Email - Prague-Krakow-Berlin

So it's been a while since I've sent out a group email. Sorry about that. We've been a little busy travelling about and having adventures. The last time I wrote I think was from Vienna. Since then we have spent a bit of time in Prague, went up to Poland for almost a week, back to Prague for a couple of days, and then to Berlin. We have been in Berlin for 8 days now and we leave to go to Amsterdam on Wednesday. We had to stay here a bit longer becausr there are some good bands playing here soon that we didn't want to miss. The Ladybug Transistor is playing tomorrow (Sunday) night, and Adam Green on Tuesday night. We then have booked 5 nights in Amsterdam in a pretty dodgey sounding place (everything else was booked) and then we head either to London to find a job, or maybe to Scotland if we haven't gone through too much money.

We found Prague a little boring, but we stayed there for a while. The highlight was probably when we went to vist the bone church at Kutna Hora. That was pretty amazing. If you're not on facebook and want to see the photos then let me know and I'll send you the link. We wandered around a lot and visited the castle and the astronomical clock and Charles Bridge. Charles Bridge would have been nice if it wasn't packed with tourists and people selling stuff to tourists. There was usually an entertaining band playing there though. Everything was old and pretty but I got over it after a couple of days.It was ok but not too exciting. We didn't go out much at night because we always were a bit tired. Towards the end of our time there we went out a little bit but didn't do anything to exciting. The people in Prague weren't as nice as the people in Vienna and they often tried to overcharge us at restaurants. It got quite annoying after a while. We have a lot of photos though. Oh and we managed to find the library which was nice.

We caught the overnight train to Krakow (after Liz dealt with very annoying, rude, unhelpful staff at the train station). We couldn't really read our tickets, and didn't know what we were doing, but we somehow managed to find our way to the right train. I woke up as we were approaching Krakow (and about 4 or 5 times in the hours before that) and loved Poland straight away. It was freezing cold, it was about 7am, and we were walking with heavy backpacks not really sure where we were going, but we found our hostel thanks to Liz's detailed directions she had written and then went to explore. The people in Krakow were much nicer than in Prague, and the hostel we stayed at was one of the best so far. We met a couple of English guys (from Doncaster) and went out with them a couple of times. We looked at the castle and wandered around the city looking for food and toilets. We went to Auschwitz which was an interesting experience (and the reason I wanted to go to Krakow in the first place) and I took lots of great photos but I haven't been able to upload them. I learnt a lot that I didn't already know from movies, and I can't believe that there are people that survived staying there at all. I also can't get my head around how it ever happened at all... I didn't know that 80-90% of every train load of people that arrived there were sent to the showers as soon as they arrived. It's also unbelievable when you see how big it is... Anyway, we also went to the salt mines which was quite interesting. I got some good photos there as well. It goes down a couple of hundred metres and there was a restaurant at the bottom which was a big room that had been carved out of the salt. I ate some food there and later was very sick because of it. I have a feeling it had been sitting there a while before they served it to me, it wasn't very nice. We also went to the archaeology museum which was interesting. Liz loves looking at stone tools, and we went to see a movie (Vantage Point) which wasn't too bad, it was nice to hear some english being spoken for a change.

After Krakow we went back to Prague for 2 days and then we went to Berlin. Berlin has been great. We originally only booked 4 nights but we're now up to 8 and staying for a few more. There is so much to do here, and we've finally been staying up late and actually going out at night. We met a couple of guys at the first hostel we stayed at who run the alternative berlin tour. We went on that and it was fairly interesting. We saw a lot of stuff that we would never have known about. They take you to the places that tourists don't know about, and probably wouldn't know about without this tour. They took us to a market, to an art gallery which was really good, and we looked at the closed off side of the berlin wall. We had to climb under a gate to get out. They sometimes go places that you're not exactly allowed to go. They also had a lot of interesting stories to tell about the city of Berlin. The next night we went on a pub crawl which was ok. We went to 5 places and got home at about 5am. We did a proper Berlin tour as well and it was great (and free!) All the places we have been recommended to go out to at night are for music that we don't like with thumping techno music or whatever but we managed to find a nice place that plays great music called Bang Bang Club. We went there the other night to see some UK bands and it was great. After not seeing live music in so long it was great to hear some really good loud music. We had a really fun night. It's a bit strange over here though because places don't open till about 10pm and the first band (of 3!) doesn't even start playing till 11:30!! So it ended up being a late night. But a very fun night. Last night we went and saw a movie called the Savages which was a bit depressing and we didn't really feel like going out after. It was after 10 when the movie finished but Bang Bang didn't open till 11pm last night so we just went home and read for a bit and then slept. We're staying at a terrible hostel at the moment (we had to change hostels when we extended our stay), you'd think it would be a great hostel since it is situated directly between a library and a record store but it's not. It really is a terrible place. It's very big, and full of big groups of kids who are annoying, loud, play terrible music, and always running between each others rooms. We're not there much though so I guess it's not that bad.

We've been missing a lot of the news these days as well. We're not sure what's really going on in the world. If there's anything interesting happening please let us know. Everything that happens over here happens in German. We stumbled accross a protest of some sort today with a lot of people waving Chinese flags about and chanting things but we weren't really sure what was going on. It seemed to be an opposite of a free tibet thing, very strange. We always seem to be in the right place at the right time in Berlin, everyday we find something happening. We find markets and events and various things happening with big crowds of people. There's always something happening. Beer is very cheap here. 1 euro gets you one bottle of becks.

I guess I better end this email. I can't think of what else we've done but I'm sure there's more. Hopefully it won't take me as long to write another email to you all. Hope everyone is doing great and hope to hear from you all soon. I'm not to homesick yet but I do sometimes miss working at the library, and I miss watching a dvd (or anything in english) I also miss just being able to walk up to people and speak English and know they understand me.

Please forward this to anyone I've missed or anyone else that's interested. I've only sent this to a few of you at the library so please forward it on.

Glenn