Cesky Krumlov

Cesky Krumlov is a small city mainly known for its castle (guarded by bears) and its old buildings and streets. we were lucky enough to spend 2 nights here but could have gladly stayed 5 nights. our first day we arrived just before lunch time in the pouring rain.

A street in Cesky Krumlov

we got out our rain coats and set off to explore the town, we walked around the streets and got some fresh potato chips from a market.

Ewen with the chips they were pretty good, a little soggy from the rain though. and you kind of felt like you had drunk half a bottle of oil

we went up to have a look around the castle, as you walk up to it there are too large pits i suppose (but they are humongous) on either side of the bridge. in each one was a bear! a real live brown grizzly bear! one was sitting in a corner eating his lunch not doing much else. the other one was a bit more lively running around and going for a swim in a pond and fighting with a stick. we got a pretty good video of it wrestling with this stick.

Bear Number 1

Bear Number 2

After spending a bit of time watching the bears the rain started to get heavier so we headed back to the hostel to get our washing. we spent the next hour or so playing games in a laundromat.

Rain in Cesky Krumlov

We had dinner at the pub next to our hostel which turned out to be some of the best (and cheapest) meals we have had in a long time. It was kind of like the food you might get from the Boundry in Bendigo. We ended up eating basically all of our meals here during our stay.
After dinner we went for another walk through the town because the rain had finally stopped. this time we walked up into the castle (the free parts) and got some nice photos of the view over Cesky Krumlov.

Our second day we had a sleep in and then went on a rafting pub crawl. Yep 7 of you hop in a raft and then float down the river stopping at bars. It was pretty fun! Luckily the weather was much nicer than the first day with the sky blue and the sun shining. The hostel dropped about 20 of us 15km from town and we hopped into three rafts. our raft had me and Ewen, an Irish guy, two English guys (one from Macclesfield in England) and two other Aussie guys. We were supposed to stop at three bars before floating back into town but some how we missed the second two. Once we floated into town we stopped at two more bars and then floated back down the river to the base of the hostel. It was about 6 hours all up i think. In the photo above you can see the spillway which is like a little mini rapid, we had to go down about 5 of these in the rafts which was a lot of fun, especially because no one on our boat seemed to know how to steer so often we were still facing backwards or sideways only seconds before righting ourselves to go down. We don't have any digital photos from this day as i am way to precious about my camera to take it on a raft, we took our disposable water proof camera so hopefully some of the photos we took work out.
Our last morning Busabout didn't pick us up until 11.30 so we went for a last walk around the town and then had a delicious breakfast at yep you guessed it, the pub near our hostel.
We are in Vienna at the moment, just arrived an hour or so ago. luckily we found our hostel easily, for once Google instructions payed off!
Missing you all
xoxxoxo

Praha

We spent three nights in Prague exploring the town. Our first day we arrived at the drop off point and got a metro to our hostel which turned out to be right in the center of Prague which was awesome! Our hostel was a converted apartment room. It had been converted into three rooms and a shared bathroom. our room had a single bed downstairs, two sofa chairs, a desk, a table and a large cabinet and then there was a loft with a ladder up to it which is where our bed was. Our first night we had dinner at the pub across the street because you got two free beers for staying at our hostel.

Masses of tourists on Charles bridge

The next day we went to Charles bridge and Prague castle. We then walked around the town a bit and had dinner at an Irish restaurant (the meal cost us more than double what our meal cost the first night).

Us on a different bridge with Charles bridge in the background

Charles bridge was nice but there were about 10,000 tourists on it along with us. The bridge was built in the 15th century and used to be the only way to cross the river so was considered very important. these days there are numerous bridges so the Charles bridge is purely for pedestrian traffic. Lining the sides of the bridge are 30 statues of different things. A couple have been rubbed by so many tourists they are now gold in places. We rubbed them too but not really sure of the significance behind that.
Also lining the bridge during day light are numerous jewelry stands, people selling artwork and people doing caricatures of tourists.

Prague Castle

Next up was Prague castle, after a bit of an unintentional detour (a very long detour... in other words we got very lost) we made it just in time to watch a changing on the guard. We got some photos of the view from the top of the hill over looking all of Prague

Ewen got his photo taken with one of the guards
Me with the castle in the background, it is actually the cathedral you can see though, the castle wasn't all that great, the cathedral was probably the best thing about it
Spot the nun
The outside of the cathedral, this is the only building we went inside in the castle complex, you had to pay to get inside the rest of the buildings and as there were about 20 tour groups wandering around we decided to just look around the outside.
Outside the castle trying to warm up by sitting on the warm concrete
Town of Prague with about one million tourists
We went for a bit more of a walk around the shops and had a look at some more of
the town, we ended up at the Astronomical clock which had a ton of tourists out the front
of it all snapping photos, we couldn't tell what the clock was telling us, what i could tell was
that it had the different star sign around it.

A square in Prague

Our second day in Prague was a bit of a lazy one.

A statue near our hostel
We went out for lunch and had a quick look around the shops then it started raining pretty heavily so we went home to watch some movies. We went out again a few hours later and headed back to the Astronomical clock, this time we climbed the tower to get some views of Prague.

Views from the top of the clock tower
Climbing back down the stairs
Buildings in a square in Prague

Playing "Where's Wally" can you see me?

We went to see Charlies Bridge at night thinking there would be less tourists around, sadly no luck with this, if anything there were probably more tourists around than there was during the day. We wanted to take lots of photos but our camera (or possibly us) is a bit of a spaz and freaks out in difficult lighting no matter what setting you seem to put it on.

We did get this one though, the bridge is on the left hand side and straight ahead is Prague castle

This is meant to be the biggest collection of keys in the world... it didn't seem very big to me

And that was pretty much Prague, we had a fairly relaxing two days with a bit of sightseeing thrown in. From here we are off to Cesky Krumlov

Berlin

We had two full days in Berlin. Our first day we had planned to do a free waking tour with NewBerlin tours but missed it. we had looked at the map the night before and thought the meeting point was only around the corner but it turned out to be nearly 3km away.
Instead we headed to Brandenburg Gate, this is probably Berlins most iconic monument, it features on just about every souviner you can buy.
The Berlin Wall used to run right in front of this gate and you can still see where the wall used to sit. When the wall was torn down they replaced it with two rows of sunken in bricks so you can still see today exactly where the wall used to be.
After this we had a look at the Reichstag Parliament building. The building had a glass dome added to the top of it in 1999 so that the public can look down and watch parliament meetings.
This is supposed to be a gesture that these days politicians have nothing to hide. From the dome you have views all over Berlin. we had planned to climb up here but when we arrived the line was phenomenalaly (and it was only 9am!) long.
After this we headed to Bebelplatz square which is where the first book burning was held by the Nazis in 1933 where over 20,000 books were burned.
Today they have a memorial built in under the ground. It is a room under the square and standing in the square you can look down through a glass window in the ground into a room lined with empty bookshelves. Also their is a plaque on the ground that says "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" which in English translates to: "Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people"
Then it was time for some breakfast of juice, coffee and croissiants. this has become our staple breakfast in europe because it so dam cheap!
After breakfast we walked across the street to see the Holocaust Memorial. The memorial consists of nearly 5 acres of rows and rows of concrete slabs.
They are placed in a way to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.
An interesting fact about this is that they have coated all of the concrete slabs (2711 of them) with anti-graffitti paint. this paint was supplied by the same company who used to supply the Nazis with gas for their gas chambers.
Underneath this memorial is a free information centre, we spent at least two hours down here reading personal stories from people who were in concentration camps, reading quotes from letters and postcards and diaries. we listened to recordings of people telling stories from their time in the camps and what happened after they were released. they also had one room full of displays about different families explaining who was captured when and why they were captured and who survived the camps.
Next stop was Checkpoint Charlie... this was the best known Berlin Wall crossing point between East and West Germany during the Cold War.
There is a large photo of a soviet soldier facing in one direction and an american soldier facing in the other direction. the guards you can see are actors employed to have their photos taken with tourists. Sadly right next to the checkpoint now stands a large McDonalds.
We had lunch at a beach bar (these are all over Berlin for some reason)

This is what the checkpoint used to look like, now the street
is full of fast food stores and clothing stores.

After this we walked across to the Topography of Terror. This is a free gallery that is housed where the former SS and Gestapo headquaters used to stand. Running parallel to the gallery building is a section of the wall that still remains as it did during the war.
Inside the gallery they had many displays, the first one concentrated on SS and police in the "Third Reich" as well as the crimes they perpetrated throughout Europe. Another display focused mainly on the Jewish Ghetto in Berlin. Another one focused on war criminals, they had 3D displays of what Berlin looked like back then and also what the SS headquaters looked like. The room that really affected me was the room about the Jewish Ghetto. They had one display that told you about a man who had been chosed to be the spokesperson for the Jews in the ghetto. he was told that 25,000 people must be killed and he had to choose who these people would be. he chose all children under 10, the sick and the elderly. It was horrific to read this. The room also had a lot of photos of children playing, some in make shift kindergartens, some of toddlers in creches. They also had photos of many sick people, people walking in no shoes and very little clothing.
This radio tower (or Berliner Funkturm) is another famous icon in Berlin featuring on many souviners. You can climb to the top and i think they have a revolving resturant up there.

Here is a fountain at the base of the radio tower

Our last stop of the day was at the DDR museum. The exchibitions showed the daily life in East Germany in a hands on way. They had a lounge room set up you could sit in and flick channels on the tv, listen to the phone, etc. They had a bathroom you could explore and a kitchen where you could flick through old cook books and have a look at the food packaging they had. You have the opportunity to drive a Trabi car (it doesnt move but the engine starts and you get to simulate a drive on the tv).

Ewen driving the Trabi car
Me cooking up a storm at the museum

These bears are dotted all over Berlin, all painted in a different way. It kind of reminds us of Shepparton with all their cows :-)

Our second day in Berlin we hit up the East Side Gallery which is the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall.


We took over 100 photos of all of the different art works displayed on the wall, here are some of my favourites. the very first photo up the top is my favourite one!

After walking up and down the length of the wall we stopped in at a beach bar for a drink

After this we went to the Jewish Museum where we only planned to spend an hour or two but ended up staying about 4 hours i think. it was huge and pretty interesting. it was not neccesarily only about Jewish life during the war but about life in general for Jewish people throughout the years.

This statue was out the front of the museum....

I have down graded my backpack

Me as a little Jewish child

This is where we had dinner, you got to sit in swinging cane chairs! It was pretty cool until the food came and you had to time your swimgs with getting the food into your mouth!!!