Maastricht to Wien

Maastricht was great. There was so much neat architecture. The Romans and the Spanish have both been through the area, leaving walls, forts and huge churches. The owner of the small hotel we stayed at called Maastricht a big town where the Dutch come to get away from the Netherlands without leaving the country.

From Maastricht we took the train to Brussels. Brussels was okay, it did not seem like it had a lot of character. We did find a pub that had over 2000 different beer, the menu was as thick as a phone book. We took an early morning train from Brussels to Luxembourg before taking an overnight train to Berlin with a quick stopover in France. So we were in four countries in just over 12 hours. Luxembourg was good and we were glad we stopped there, but also glad we did not stay too long. It was a rainy day, so we only walked around town and then spent a few hours exploring the ruins of the original castle.

Berlin was pretty cool. We arrived Sunday morning, the day before the fall of the Berlin Wall anniversary, so things were very busy. We dropped our stuff off at the hostel and set out to wander around. There is so much to see. We walked down Unter den Linden (one of the main streets) towards the Brandenburg Gate, where things were already setup for Monday. Including Greenpeace, who were hanging a huge sign off the side of a building referring to the upcoming talks in Copenhagen (it was gone a few hours later).

Monday morning we went to check out the longest stretch (1.3km) of the original wall still left. It is called the East Side Gallery and has paintings on the wall from artists from around the world.

Then we picked up a pack full of beer and headed towards Brandenburg Gate with a couple of guys from the hostel.

Of course it started to rain. As we were kicking ourselves for deciding to leave the umbrella in Canada (yet again), we made our way to the beer tent. You could not see much over the umbrellas in the crowd anyways and all of the speeches were overdubbed in German (surprise surprise) so it worked out well. We met a group of people from Britain and we spent the rest of the night out with them.

The next day we went to Sachsenhausen, a former concentration camp located just north of Berlin. Most of the camp has been dismantled and the GDR government actually tried to make it look more like a park to suit their political agenda.

The next morning we took a train to Prague. We stayed for two nights. It was interesting. It is the first place we have been in that really felt like they were trying to suck every cent out of the tourists (and there were a lot of them here), yet some things (like beer and food) were very cheap.

It is a very nice looking city and it was the first sunny day we have had in what feels like a long time so we spent most of the time exploring the bridges, castle and squares around the old town.

We are currently in Wien (Vienna). We just spent the day at the “Summer” Palace, eating expensive famous chocolate cake (it was only okay) in a Wien coffee shop, checking out the Stephansdom (a big church) and sampling some Austrian wine.

Next stop a beer hall in Munich.