Every single one of these blog posts feels like it’s surely the last one, now. When I started writing it, I was quite convinced it would follow the pattern of every other writing project I’ve ever attempted. A burst of early enthusiasm might produce one or two good pieces of writing, but sooner or later one would prove difficult. The words wouldn’t come, I’d start finding other things to do instead, putting it off until the next day, then the next day, then the day after until eventually having to concede that I wasn’t going to finish what I started.
I was pretty careful to foreshadow that I wouldn’t keep it up – I thought that getting out of France without throwing in the towel would be a good result – but a couple of things happened. For one, far more people are reading this than I ever expected to be interested in what one friend described as the “nerdiest, soberest Contiki tour ever”. I honestly assumed it would be read by about half a dozen people, but some posts are getting ten times as many views, which is an excellent incentive to keep writing, and injects a hint of conspicuousness to any failure to finish, too.
If I might get away with a note of self-congratulations, I think I had a good run of form that followed me from Paris to perhaps as far as Rome, though it’s been patchy at best since. And writing is much easier when you’re bursting with things to say, whereas this second half of the trip has been more uneventful. It’s not that I actively *want* to get caught up in bus chases or wind up in hospital again, but both were much better blog fodder than anything I’ve had lately. I’m not giving myself too many opportunities, admittedly: my activity level at this late stage isn’t exactly high.
Finishing has become important, though, and not only for fear of that conspicuous failure. I’ve somehow gotten into the last quarter of this holiday without stopping writing, and I don’t want to be George R.R. Martin: HBO isn’t going to swoop in with a TV show to pick up the story where I left off, so I’m on my own. More importantly, I want to finish for the sake of having finished, even if I end up falling over the line. So I’m going to cheat: what might have been two ‘chapters’ – good lord, what was I thinking when I called the first one a chapter? As if a travel blog isn’t self-indulgent enough – will instead be one. Just like Game of Thrones, sub-plots will be dropped, characters written out and dialogue slashed in the interests of just getting the damn thing over and done with. Maybe the one after this will be better, or maybe not, but at least there’s a chance it’ll be written if I can finish this one first.
*
From Berlin I headed south to Nuremberg. It was – kinda – the imperial capital of the old Holy Roman Empire and, unlike most of Germany it – sorta/kinda – still has its historic city centre. Nuremberg got carpet-bombed just like every other major German city during the war, but they painstakingly rebuilt all the most important buildings:
I’d considered not heading out to Nuremberg’s most famous ‘attraction’, the remnants of the Nazi rally grounds, at all. I haven’t been to all that many other Nazi sites, just Auschwitz and the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin, and both are essentially monuments to victims. Nuremberg, by contrast, is where the Nazis went to celebrate, and to go there felt slightly different, an act of remembrance not for the Holocaust but for its perpetrators. They came to Nuremberg for their annual party conventions, enormous rallies for hundreds of thousands of people that stretched out for eight days, filled with war games, parades and appearances by party leaders. It all looked a little bit like this:
Nevertheless, curiosity got the better of me, and it was a jarring moment when I first saw the Kongresshalle, the largest surviving Nazi-era building anywhere in Germany:
It was intended to house the Nazi Party congress meetings, and like the rest of the precinct it was never finished: it was to be double the height it had reached before construction ground to a halt, and it’s already so big that the finished product would have looked ridiculous, frankly. After the war it sat empty for decades, with the Nuremberg city council having bigger issues to worry about than what to do with the Nazi cuckoo in its nest. The parade grounds were left to rot until the 1970s, when the West German government placed them under heritage protection for the purpose of “democratic appropriation”. One wing of the Kongresshalle is now a museum, and another houses the Nuremberg symphony orchestra. The rest of the building is used for storage by the council. The ‘Great Road’, which was intended for processions, is now a car park. The foundations for another planned building started to fill with water, so they turned them into a lake. The Zeppelinfield, where the main rallies were staged, is a rugby pitch. It’s a better approach than tearing everything down, I think: take buildings that were supposed to be home to something extraordinary, and make them ordinary. The more mundane the fate, the better.
There’s one spot that still feels very much out of the ordinary, though. The podium at the Zeppelinfield from which speeches were given is still standing, albeit much damaged. It’s fenced off, but there’s a hole in the fence and so I climbed up, standing at the very spot where Adolf Hitler stood and spewed his hatred. Remember those ‘close to history’ moments I described in the Roman Forum, and in Lenin’s old office? I had another one, but this was disorienting, uncomfortable. Those aren’t footsteps I wanted to be standing in. There were some kids there too, playing rap music, and although I don’t like rap I was glad of their presence, playing what would have been banned as ‘degenerate’ music. They were, probably unwittingly, engaging in a little bit of ‘democratic appropriation’ of their own.
I had my – hopefully – last encounter with the Nazi legacy a couple of days later at the Munich Zoo. It’s a gorgeous zoo, but it’s probably the only major one in the world where the most interesting species are… well… horses and cows. The zoo’s director during the 1930s, Heinz Heck and his brother, who ran Berlin Zoo, had a pet project to ‘recreate’ the aurochs, the extinct wild ancestor of domestic cattle, and the tarpan, the extinct ancestor of the horse. Their idea was to ‘breed back’, pairing animals to try to develop breeds that had the same physical features of the extinct species, and Munich still has a small herd of each, as a sort of living historical curiosity.
It was a crackpot idea, and deeply infected by Nazi ideology. Both Heck brothers were committed Nazis, and the aurochs and tarpans were intended to become part of the Third Reich’s fairy tale ‘restoration’ of a pre-modern Germany, with pure Aryan Germans to be joined by pure German horses and pure German cows. The Daily Mail calls them ‘Nazi animals’, which is a touch unfair: as far as I know Munich’s horses and cows have no political views whatsoever.
I got what will probably be my last little burst of hot weather whilst in Munich. The zoo is right beside the river, it was a public holiday and it was 30 degrees – heat wave territory in sun-deprived Europe – so the river banks were choked with people making the most of the closest thing they have to a beach within 500km. Not so bad, as far as beach-replacement therapies go, but the river is fairly sedate and surfing is out of the question. No matter, there’s always the Englischer Garten instead:
There were about ten of them, and there was only space for one to surf at any one time, so the rest had to climb up on the concrete edge of the channel and wait their turn. They seemed to last an average of about five seconds each, so the wait wasn’t all that long. I’ve always wondered why Europeans get into such raptures about Australian beaches. Now I’ve seen people riding surfboards in a stormwater drain, and I understand it just a little.
I didn’t quite warm to Munich, despite it being an objectively wonderful city. I spent almost an entire day in the Deutsches Museum, which is dedicated to industry and technology, covering everything from paper-making to power generation to programming. It’s like a five-storey guide to how stuff works, aimed at children and humanities students alike (I was both, at various times), and I enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing the point of being in Munich a little. I didn’t go into any of the beer halls, because I don’t like beer, I only drink alcohol socially and I was in Munich on my own. More than anywhere else I’ve been so far, it might be somewhere that you need to experience with other people, and I guess I’ll have to come back to find out.
If I do ever get out on the town in Munich I’ll have to do my best to conceal my nationality, as an aside. I met a man from Munich last year in Tokyo (can it possibly have been only last year?), from whom I learned two things. One was that German newspapers referred to Tony Abbott as “the Berlusconi of the South”, and the other is that Australians have a reputation in Munich for being the least able of all tourists to hold their booze. Apparently they do their best during Oktoberfest to channel all the Aussies towards the same tent, which the locals then avoid like the plague. Square that with our national self-image as best you can.
From Munich I headed northwest, hopping from Stuttgart (hotel room with bath!) to Frankfurt and on to Düsseldorf for the purpose of zoo stopovers (Germany does zoos like Melbourne does coffee: very seriously and very prolifically). As I flitted from city to city one of the few constants were election campaign corflutes. They’re treated with about as much respect as ours:
That second one, with the bespoke swastika. Has anybody checked whether Michaelia Cash has dual German citizenship? Asking for a friend. Meanwhile, the (neo-Nazi) Alternative for Germany party want it known, lest you were wondering, that they prefer (‘stand for’) bikinis over burqas. That’s good to know, fellas. Now piss off.
Düsseldorf was intended to be a base for a week of zoo-going – if Germany is to zoos as Melbourne is to coffee, then the Ruhr area is Lygon Street – though I ultimately only went to three. Luckily Düsseldorf is a great place to hang about listlessly for a few days. Relatively few tourists come here, but the old town is as full of bars and restaurants as Munich is, just priced for locals. Most of the food is not only cheap, but good, though I declined to try the cheddar cheese shit:
I even got a ‘we love Australians’ discount – my first, after 168 days! – in a pasta place. The bloke in charge had studied in Sydney for three years, and was thrilled – to the tune of 20% off – that an Aussie tourist had washed up in his restaurant. He hadn’t actually picked my accent, though, first guessing that I was English. Fewer and fewer people have recognised me as Australian, lately, and it’ll be interesting to see when I’m home whether people think my accent has changed at all.
I spent my last afternoon in Düsseldorf at the K21 contemporary art gallery. Not usually my thing, but a dorm mate had recommended it with some half-remembered description of having climbed on nets hanging from the roof, and I didn’t have anything better to do, so I went and climbed on mets hanging from the roof:
Apparently this contraption was inspired by a spider web, and by going and climbing on a spider web we would feel more empathy for spiders or something. I don’t know: there was a sign that explained what it was about but I got as far as the word ‘praxis’ and stopped reading. Once up there – I had to change into grippy shoes, which made sense, and overalls, which made no sense at all – I fumbled around for about ten minutes, trying not to look down at the 20 metre drop below and not at all enjoying myself, until I was allowed to climb down again. Not much one for spiderwebs.
I was now in a contemporary art gallery, which meant looking at contemporary art, and one more tussle with overly-officious German museum staff. Visitors to K21 are expected to wear those paper wrist bands you get at concerts and the like, lest they be over-run with people sneaking in without paying (this seems rather unlikely to me, but perhaps such lawlessness is rife among German contemporary art enthusiasts). I despise the things, which inevitably involve painful hair removal when taking them off, so I stuck it in my pocket instead, but this was more than Düsseldorf art officialdom could take. Twice I was bailed up by staff demanding not only to see my wristband but that I put it on, now, before I go anywhere near the esoteric installation in their custody. Fortunately for my stubborn streak the thing had gotten ripped in my pocket, and couldn’t be made to stay on my wrist, but that didn’t stop one bloke from arresting me for a full five minutes while he tried.
Once I was finally permitted to go, with an ‘I’m-watching-you-sonny’ glare, it was time to interpret myself some art. I have no idea about this one:
This one appears to be a work in progress:
But the meaning here is obvious enough. Gentrification has come to Düsseldorf, and goon of fortune is out: if you want to drink wine around the Hills Hoist you’ll need a glass.
I spent the rest of my last weekend in Germany doing more or less what I might have done that weekend in Melbourne: eating Vegemite on toast and watching several games of footy as the finals draw was being determined. There’s a month to go, and I’m still exploring, making as much of this opportunity as my energy levels allow. But I’ve got half an eye on home, too.
“Do you ever regret staying in hostels?” The question had come after I’d written about a particular poor night’s sleep ahead of a visit to the Hamburg zoo. My reflex answer was to say no. Hostels have been a practical necessity for a trip of this length: if I weren’t willing to share rooms with others I’d be back home and broke long ago by now. But they’ve expanded the journey in qualitative terms, not just length. I’ve shared dorms or cabins with people from 44 countries (yes, I’ve been counting) and made friends with people from across the world, and even a couple from Melbourne. It is a richer, fuller experience than if I’d spent the last five months sitting on my own in hotel rooms.
That’s not to say, though, that the trials of hostel life aren’t beginning to wear thin.
My first hint that the Hamburg hostel wasn’t going to be my favourite was the brothel housed in the basement. It didn’t get much more encouraging when I made it to reception – I was careful to ensure it was the right establishment’s reception – where the owner professed to have no knowledge of my booking and no beds available that matched what I’d booked? I’ve gotten pretty good at standing my ground in such situations, though, and I waited patiently as he peered quizzically at my booking confirmation – checking his computer once, twice, then a third time – and finally he gave me a key for a three, rather than five bed room.
My dorm mate – until a little after midnight there was only one – was Nicholas, and it was a big night for him. He’s a refugee from Nigeria who came to Italy by boat a decade ago, and his first daughter died in the crossing. What can one possibly say to that? We had rapidly bypassed the standard dorm room small talk, and I was out of my depth.
Nicholas had stayed in Italy, but came to Hamburg six months ago to find work (an electrician in Nigeria, he’s working in a kitchen, and understandably frustrated by it). And his wife and three younger children were on their way, tonight, to see him for the first time since he left Italy, so he was naturally a little worked up. He finally let me get to sleep at about 1AM, but then I woke at three o’clock to one end of a loud conversation: Nicholas’s wife had missed a bus or something, and would be late. I had to draw on some emergency reserves of patience as I pointed out it was a discussion best had outside.
The next night was a Saturday: the wrong time of the week to be staying in Hamburg’s red light district. A bucks party or similar had taken up residence in the building next to ours, and were alternating between belting out football chants and classic rock songs. Usually I’d be fine: I have an $80 pair of custom-moulded ear plugs that have paid for themselves several times over while sleeping in dorms, but I had an early train and couldn’t risk oversleeping an alarm. I shouted out into the void a couple of times, to predictable non-effect, and then noticed the loading bay to the building was open. So I went in, climbed the stairs and followed my ears to the inconsiderate sods on the top floor. The door I found appeared to be to a construction site, not an apartment, and I suspect they weren’t supposed to be there any more than I was. I knocked and shouted for a while, and I heard them try the door but fail to get it open. No matter: the message seemed to get across, they quietened down and I at least got a few hours sleep.
My Berlin hostel wasn’t in nearly so dubious a neighbourhood, though it had its moments too. I was to be here for ten nights, the longest I’ve been in one place since I moved out of my apartment in March. So when I was allocated a fourth floor room without an elevator, it was time to play the diabetes card again. “The fridge is on the ground floor, you see. I might need to get down to my insulin in a hurry.” Absolute twaddle. But we met in the middle: I moved to the second floor, cutting my climb up and down by half.
Next step: a shower. I’ve become something of a connoisseur of bad shower design over the past few months, and Berlin was the finest example yet. One or the worst types of hostel shower works like the taps in a public bathroom: you press a button and water flows for about 15 seconds or so, then cuts out until you press the button again. It’s an ingenious way of ruining a shower, which is perhaps the only self-indulgence available to a hostel guest.
Berlin had taken this low point and dug deeper. It didn’t have a button, it had a hand sensor. Wave your hand in front of the sensor and you’ll get water: icy, icy water that seems to fall from all parts of the ceiling at once. You can work the angles all you like but you won’t be able to reach that sensor without copping an Arctic deluge. You needed to somehow keep the water running so it might eventually reach at least room temperature, which meant waving your hand in front of the sensor at intervals of 15 seconds: leave it too late and the water will cut out, but because the sensor also works in reverse, go too soon and the water will cut out anyway. I was genuinely nostalgic for those terrible showers back in Romania.
Imagine my delight, then, when I was forced to go roaming the building to find an unoccupied shower half-way through my stay, and happened across one that had accidentally been left in a usable state. It had a proper shower head. Proper taps, for hot *and* cold. Give a man a shower and he will wash for a day. Give a man hot water and stable water pressure and he will wash like he hasn’t washed for a week.
At least I had good people to talk to here. After warning two Italian girls, Giorgia and Marianna, about the grim shower situation, we segued into discussing the good and bad aspects of hostel living. After five months of doing this I’ve reached grizzled (grizzling?) veteran status among the Hostelling fraternity, and I was raving about how great my one in Helsinki was. It even had a toaster, I said. I miss regular access to toasters.
“I’ve seen one!”, Marianna interjected.
Here?
“Yes... in the chicken!”
I hadn’t thought to look for a toaster in the chicken.
*
As mentioned, I had ten full days in Berlin. A week and a half stretched out ahead of me, and I imagined an idyllic, slow-paced stay.
Well, not so slow, there, Charlie. Ten days disappears pretty fast when you sit down and work out what you want to do. After ten minutes I had two enormous zoos, a parliament, a couple of parks and no fewer than 11 museums on my list. Suffice to say, I didn’t manage it all.
I didn’t get through much at all on day one, by the time I had sorted myself out at the hostel. A walk through the Tiergarten – Berlin’s rather overgrown Central Park – beckoned, but didn’t last long: I was chased out by mosquitoes. So instead I headed towards the Brandenburg Gate, in keeping with what’s become my habit of doing something cliched on my first day. Along the way, I found Berlin’s ‘Victory Column’:
Not particularly interesting in itself, but I thought it’s cute how Germany hasn’t let a high profile lack of recent victories deter them from having a victory column.
I made the obligatory stop at the Brandenburg Gate, which is now back to being a triumphal arch but was, when the Berlin Wall was still standing, literally a gate. The wall fell down – spontaneously crumbled, really - after conservative superhero Ronald Reagan stood there 30 years ago and requested, in that strict but loving grandfatherly way of his, that Mikhail Gorbachev tear it down. It took another two years, but it was absolutely Reagan saying ‘open sesame’ that led to its fall. Not the culmination of 40 years of courageous resistance by the people of Eastern Europe, who really had no agency in this story whatsoever.
There are bits of the wall still standing here and there – I’ll get to the most significant ones later – but where it has been removed entirely, such as around the Brandenburg Gate, it’s been replaced by a double row of cobblestones that trace its entire path:
I came across those cobblestones several times during the ten days, and every time they brought me up short. I’d look around, trying to imagine a concrete barrier ripping the two sides of the street in front of me into different spheres of influence. It’s a bizarre thought.
From the Brandenburg Gate I went to the German parliament building, the Bundestag. I’d had notions of going up into the dome on top of the building, which provides a wonderful (and free) view of the city. I didn’t know, though, that it required pre-booking, and when I got there it was booked out for the day. The fellow working there said you could only book up to two days in advance, so I filed it away as something to do later in the visit. I wish I had asked him to explain further.
It was time, on day two, to start trying to get some of these museums out of the way. Up first was the DDR Museum, dedicated to life in the former East Germany. This was my last shot at a satisfying museum of communism, and it finally delivered. Without papering over the regime’s crimes, it doesn’t dwell on them to the exclusion of all else, like Budapest, and nor does it go for the easy kitsch approach like Prague. It focuses most of its attention on the people themselves, and on daily life, and what most stuck with me was an elevator. I climbed in and the door rattled shut. The lights flickered, cut out, came back again. The floor shuddered, shifted, swayed under my feet. Did the lift get stuck? I wasn’t sure, but when the doors finally opened I was still on the same floor I’d boarded on. It was a simulation, as I’d suspected (and hoped), but I don’t think I’d have coped with that every day. I’d rather take the stairs.
Despite being a museum of communism this is very much a profit-driven enterprise, and you have to exit through the gift shop. I’m not buying souvenirs on this trip, at all, but I was sorely tempted:
I doubled down on totalitarianism by heading to the Typography of Terror, a museum built on the rubble of the former Gestapo headquarters and dedicated to reinforcing perhaps the single most important two words in all of democratic politics: ‘never again’. To be honest, I’m broadly familiar with Nazi history, and it didn’t have much that was new, though there were some photos of Auschwitz guards, laughing and smiling as they gathered together on a day off from mass murder, that got inside my head a bit. I was careful not to get too caught up in tracing the Nazi period – Berlin is so much more than that – but I think the Germans deserve an enormous amount of credit for how they don’t shrink away, as so many countries (including Australia) do, from the nadir of their history. Never again.
I finished the night back at the Bundestag, though again I didn’t go up in the dome. As if to reinforce the point I made above – in fact, it literally is intended to reinforce the point – all through this summer there’s a half hour projection show on the walls of one of the parliament office buildings, tracing German democracy from Weimar through to this year. It screens twice every night, for six months, and there were hundreds of people there. To watch a documentary about having a parliament. After a day spent with communism and Nazism, it was the perfect, faith-restoring nightcap.
I kept binging on museums over the next few days. Some of the most eagerly anticipated were on Museum Island. It is – as the name might reasonably lead you to believe – an island in the middle of the river with five major art museums, which are even World Heritage listed. I ignored the two that hold medieval and 19th century art, preferring to focus on the three that, together, make up one of the world’s greatest antiquities collections: the Altes (‘Old’), Neues (‘New’) and Pergamon Museums.
First, though, I had to get through security. The rather overly self-important fellow at the entrance wanted me to check my bag at the cloak room, but it had my insulin, testing kit and sugar supplies, so that was a firm no. I may have even quoted some made up sub-section of European Union law on the rights of people with disabilities (I’m sure one exists, but I can’t be bothered looking it up). Wanting to score a point before conceding defeat, however, he insisted I couldn’t enter with the water bottle in my hand. Happy to preserve his dignity, I promptly drank the water, but that wasn’t enough: he demanded I throw out the (empty) bottle too, least I use it to pour the water it didn’t contain over a sculpture. He dropped the ball, though: if he’d thought to look in the bag I refused to be parted from he would have found a contraband bottle of iced tea, and who *knows* what damage I could have done with that.
The Neues Museum is home to the famous bust of Nefertiti, which is much bigger than I imagined, and here too the guards were determined to obey rules to the letter, even whilst completely missing the point of them. You weren’t allowed to take a photo of the bust, so photos were prohibited in the entire room housing the bust. Photos were allowed in the next room ,however, so the doorway was completely jammed with people taking photos there instead, but at least the rules were being followed. Aside from the bust, the most interesting thing in the museum might be the building itself. It was destroyed during the war, and a conscious choice was made to incorporate the damage into the restoration. Bricks are exposed, frescoes are half-missing, there are pock marks in the walls.
The best of the Museums is, unfortunately, only half-open. The Pergamon Museum takes its name from the Pergamon Altar, a massive Classical Greek building that was picked up, holus-bolus, in Turkey and plonked inside a museum in Berlin. The Altar is in the part of the museum that’s being restored until 2019, so I missed out. The similarly monumental Ishtar Gate of Babylon is still on display though:
I admit to being very conflicted by the Pergamon. Just as the Parthenon Marbles belong back in Athens, the unseen Altar belongs in Pergamon, and the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. Pergamon is in Turkey and Babylon in Iraq, though, and the latter at least is no safe place for the Ishtar Gate to be. It’s not a quandary I have a satisfactory answer to.
The museum visits continued to pile up – the German Jewish Museum, German History Museum, Natural History Museum and Stasi Museum – until it was time to give my brain a break for a few days. There were zoo visits, of course: two, this time, because not even the local zoo could escape the Cold War. What was left of Berlin Zoo after the war – not much, it was so thoroughly destroyed that the few surviving keepers had to keep some of the few surviving animals in their bathrooms until their enclosures could be rebuilt – fell into the American zone. At that point East Berlin residents could still visit, but as far as the East Germans were concerned this simply would not do, so they built their own. And, as one might expect of a Stalinist status symbol, the new Berlin Tierpark was more than five times bigger. The two zoos competed with each other for the rest of the Cold War, each trying to have the most and the rarest species. It was the space race of the zoo world.
I also headed deep into East Berlin to check out the Eastside Gallery. It’s the longest chunk of the Berlin Wall left standing, and each slab has been turned into a canvas for street art, much of it revolving around the obvious themes of peace and freedom:
I actually came out here twice, because the first time the sun was in a crappy spot for taking photos, and both times I saw the same troop of what could politely be called ‘street performers’. It was one of those ‘ball in a cup’ games, where a man sits there rapidly moving the cups around and somebody guesses which one has a ball inside.
It cost €50 to bet that you could find the ball, and he had three dedicated, but curiously dispassionate players. One would make a bet, lose their money, but without any visible reaction to the loss. Instead they’d just hang around, and a minute or two later bet again, this time winning back their cash. It all gave the impression of an even contest, should somebody watching be tempted to play, but the same three €50 notes were simply cycling back and forth. My suspicion that it was a scam was confirmed when they heard sirens (for something else) and suddenly all had to be somewhere else very quickly.
My last encounter with the Berlin Wall was a visit to my namesake, Checkpoint Charlie. To be honest there’s very little to see: the guard station is still there (flanked by the museum on the West Berlin side of the road and, inevitably, a McDonald’s on the East side), and there’s a couple of guys dressed as American soldiers for the purpose of selling photos. The Museum is overwhelmingly wordy, with huge slabs of texts covering the walls, but it has a wonderful collection of daring escape tales.
One bloke made his own kayak and paddled all the way to Sweden. Another went a step further, using spare Trabi parts to build an ultralight aircraft: I’m not sure I’d want to trust Trabant engineering with my life. Two families one-upped him, in turn, with a hot air ballon. People stashed themselves inside suitcases, tyres, petrol drums and even a plastic cow to get out by car. A family’s West German relatives visited Czechoslovakia, then reported their car and passports stolen, having in reality given them to the East German half of the family to use at the border. I was horrified, however, by one bloke who used a similar trick to get his East German wife out: he romanced a West German woman who looked similar, visited the East with her and then used her passport to sneak his wife out, leaving his victim stranded in the East. Some people don’t deserve freedom, and he rightly lost his for awhile.
I also learned that soon after the Wall was built both sides had used loudspeakers to direct propaganda at the other side, but had cut it out shortly afterwards because it was all getting too loud. So they put up billboards with those news ticker scrolling messages to get the point across in a less disruptive manner. The world is completely bonkers.
Meanwhile, I’d kept putting off going to the Bundestag Dome, which I figured might make a nice finale to my stay in Berlin. That was until my dorm mate, Sherry (a Taiwanese woman with the most refined of upper-class British accents, courtesy of an English school teacher) broke the news to me that she had booked her tickets weeks in advance. But, I objected, the staff there had told me you could only book two days in advance! That only applied to walk-up tickets: pre-booked ones were long gone. I headed to the dome to try my luck, but was told I’d be lining up for two hours to secure a ticket for 8AM the next morning. Suffice to say, I preferred not to wait, and hence managed to spend ten days in Berlin without getting to its most iconic attraction. At least I have a good reason to go back.
*
Having established that chickens and kitchens are one and the same thing, I eagerly headed to the chicken the next morning to make some toast. Alas, I’d counted my toasters before they hatched: this chicken’s toaster was nowhere to be found.
Giorgia and Marianna had checked out by this time, and had been replaced by a trio of girls who must still have been in their teens, and who spent most of the night out on the town, sleeping through the day. We got along fine, despite not having a lot of common ground, and I was quite concerned when I overheard them discussing how to get into the Watergate. “Do you think we’ll need fake IDs?”, asked one.
Baffled, and slightly alarmed, I was on the point of interjecting – don’t these kids know what happened the last time people snuck into the Watergate using fake IDs? – when I twigged that the Watergate is a Berlin nightclub. I might just be getting a little old for this hostel caper.
I've probably complained too much already about the 90 day Schengen visa. Even moving relatively quickly, by the time I left Stockholm I had used up my entire 90 days. I hadn't been to Denmark, Germany, or the Netherlands - three of my more eagerly anticipated countries - and here I was, out of time. After due consideration, though, I decided the rules didn't apply to me, and ploughed ahead.
It all started as I was looking into a German working visa. I wasn't wanting to work - one of the points of this exercise is to not work - but if the process was free and relatively simple I thought it might give me just a little bit of flexibility as I tried to cram more than 90 days worth of things into 90 days. Instead I happened across an interesting little factoid.
The Schengen Agreement went into force in 1999, but Australians were obviously roaming about Europe, and Europeans around Australia, long before then. And visas were as much of a nuisance then as they are now, so way back in the 1950s the government negotiated a bunch of visa waiver agreements with European countries. It's not a coincidence, I'm sure, that the priority was on making it easier for relatively rich, mostly white people to visit each other's countries.
Australia and Germany had entered into one of these agreements. More importantly, they never got around to removing it, and because it's older than the Schengen Agreement, it overrides it. As far as Germany is concerned, then, the Schengen zone simply doesn’t apply to me. They'd start counting my 90 days only from when I turned up in Germany.
This seemed too good to be true, so I emailed the German Embassy to check. They sent a copy/paste email back: it was the exact same text that was on the website where I'd first stumbled upon this wonderful loophole. Ja, the Germans said, but I'd have to leave the Schengen zone and come back to Germany, and it *only* applied to Germany.
That simply wouldn't do. I wanted to travel only by surface transport, and there was nowhere that was outside the Schengen zone from which I could travel directly to Germany without a flight. So I began to negotiate, sending draft outlines of trip plans and asking them to confirm their illegality. And, happily, my diplomatic efforts led to a mutually satisfactory outcome: they told me my plans were legal as long as I could prove I hadn't been in Germany for more than 90 days at any point, and in return I finally left them alone.
With the German question resolved (and without the need for two world wars), I began looking for other holes in the Schengen border fence. Austria, Belgium and Greece told me I was dreaming, and the Greeks even went to the trouble of emailing a PDF of the order rescinding the old visa agreement. I think France has one, but it didn't work for me because Portugal and Spain apparently didn't: I couldn't simply skirt around France on my way out of Spain, so I left their embassy alone. The Netherlands made things easy: it’s written on the embassy website that the agreement is still in force.
The Scandinavian countries proved a little complicated, because the deal was between Australia and the five Nordic countries as a whole. Denmark recognises the old agreement, and counts your 90 days from the time you first entered a Nordic country. Sweden, annoyingly, only honours the deal if Sweden is the first Nordic country you visit: no good to me, because going from Tallinn to Stockholm, then to Helsinki and back through Sweden to Copenhagen, made very little sense.
Finland initially told me there was no such treaty. That wasn't what I wanted to hear, so I replied by sending a link to the Australian copy of the agreement and asked the consular official to confirm it had been rescinded. It took a few days while she checked with Helsinki, but she eventually replied and told me I was right. Because she had never heard of this thing, though, she doubted Finnish border officials would have either, and suggested I have the email handy just in case.
My girlfriend liked to imagine European consular officials gathering for Friday drinks in Canberra and complaining about this pain in the arse named Charlie.
I didn’t end up using my special loophole in Sweden or Finland, but I crossed into Denmark with about two hours to spare before my 90 Schengen days were up. If the train had been delayed past midnight I would have been in Sweden illegally, but the Swedes are reasonable people, so I figured they’d understand and besides, their trains tend to run on time. This is Scandinavia, not Australia. They know how to do things.
My time in Copenhagen took a while to get going. Unlike most cities, the ‘Copenhagen Welcome’ card – a pass you can buy that combines unlimited public transport with entry to major attractions – actually added up to being good value. I bought it, but it subtly changed the way I tried to use my time. For the most part I’ve accepted I need to take each day slowly, doing one or at most two things in a day, but suddenly I had this card that gave me unfettered access to 30 different things over three days. The temptation was there to rush about madly and try to do as much as possible, to extract maximum value from the pass.
For various reasons – a tardy start, a hopelessly confusing public transport network and bad weather – I only managed to use it for one thing, the aquarium, on the first day. The next morning I was in a hurry to try to make up for lost time, but kept getting waylaid: the clothes dryer needed more time before I left, then I got lost again, then my blood sugar was so low that I needed to rest twice before continuing to walk. I was increasingly frustrated, but realised I needed to change how I thought about the pass: it was how much I had paid for the places I always intended to visit, so as long as I made it to those it was good value. Anything else was a freebie.
One such freebie was the Danish Workers’ Museum. Set in a building that once served as Copenhagen’s equivalent of trades hall, it has the usual exhibits on (mostly manufacturing) labour history, as well as an imitation 1950s shopping street and the entire contents of a home donated by a working class family, right down to the wallpaper in the bedrooms. I didn’t quite unravel who owns or operates the place, but I assume it’s more or less part or the union movement. The ACTU should do something similar.
It was while I was at the museum, however, that I became convinced I am being followed. Everywhere I’ve gone in Europe I’ve seen the same stony-faced man staring at me:
Apparently this one was donated to the museum after a communist-aligned trade union wound up. An MP from the One Nation-esque Danish People’s Party tried to force them to either display the statue with a caption calling him an ‘executioner and murderer’ or have it removed. He was both of those things, but the museum quite rightly told her where she could stick her selectively-applied freedom of speech.
Later that day I was at the Copenhagen zoo, where I was approached by a market research interviewer. I’ve done a similar thankless task myself, so I obliged him happily enough, but as we were going I realised that my thoughts on the zoo – my 96th – might not be representative of the broader population of Copenhagen Zoo visitors. “I’m a bit of a zoo nerd”, I warned, by way of full and frank disclosure.
“Zoo… nerd?” My interviewer, whose name is Allan, asked me to explain. He’s a freelance journalist – the interviewing plugs gaps between commissions – and he sniffed a human interest story about grown adults who roam across continents looking at animals.
“There’s at least 30 or 40 of us”, I told Allan, by way of assurance that I’m not all *that* weird. My 96 is nothing, I insisted. I know people closing in on 400. Nevertheless, he was intrigued, and our interview extended well past the prepared questions as I strived to explain what I find fascinating about them. He took my email address in case he decides to follow up, though not being one for the limelight I’ll probably refer him on to someone else. I don’t want to have to deal with the inevitable paparazzi attention.
I didn’t really have much else that I wanted to do with the pass, but it kept coming in handy. It got me into the Tivoli Gardens – a vintage-style theme park and ‘pleasure garden’, like a less depressing Luna Park, with restaurants and concert halls – so I went in for a look around. I didn’t pay for any rides: if I want to scare myself half to death I can just lose my insulin again. And I made an impromptu free stop at the Danish Architecture Centre to use the toilet, where the woman scanning my pass seemed so happy to have a visitor that I was guilted into spending 20 minutes there, pretending to be interested in models of sustainable apartment buildings, before I felt able to make a dignified exit.
I finally went for a semi-aimless wander the next day. The basic plan was to keep heading north from my hostel until I got to the Little Mermaid statue, which I wasn’t really interested in at all, but everything else I wanted to go past was more or less on the way. And besides, going to Copenhagen and not seeing the Little Mermaid would be like going to Coffs Harbour and not seeing the Big Banana. They’re each about as impressive as the other (have you ever seen the Big Banana? It’s at best a Medium Sized Banana), and by the time I got there it was pouring with rain as well. Sometimes you have to focus on the journey, not the destination.
I first made my way towards Nyhavn, which is… a canal with some painted buildings. It’s one of the most picturesque spots Copenhagen has, which unfortunately isn’t saying a great deal. Where Stockholm is full of colour – perhaps trying to compensate for just how dark it is there for so much of the year – Copenhagen is all earth tones. It looks dour by comparison, but Nyhavn is a bright spot, or at least as bright as Copenhagen gets:
A more interesting part of the walk was the self-proclaimed ‘Free Town’ of Christiania. This little pocket of formerly military land seceded from Denmark in 1971, and now purports to be an independent commune. It even has its own flag:
And a cutting-edge education system:
The good citizens of Christiania have chosen a lovely spot to proclaim their independence – many of the houses are strung out around an enormous lake – and it’s a convenient five minute bike ride from the centre of Copenhagen, too. Something tells me, meanwhile, that the mains electricity wires I saw going into each property aren’t being maintained or powered by the local anarchist collective. I fear I might be a touch too cynical to live the Christiania dream.
My blood sugar was running low – again – so I stopped to buy a drink in the local store (Christiania still accepts Danish kroner as currency, despite its secession), and I dropped my sunglasses as I was juggling the drink and my camera. “Take care of your glasses”, came some unsolicited advice from somewhere to my (far, far) left.
I turned and tried to make light of my clumsiness. “It’s ok. They cost €5. I’m a forgetful klutz, I’m always either breaking or losing them.” I smiled.
“Ah, so you like to buy and then throw away,” my adviser accompanied this observation with a deep drag on his joint.
No, I’m just –
“Ah ha, I got you. Lose, throw away, it’s the same way. Don’t give a shit about it!”
Oh good. A self-righteous hippy: my favourite type of hippy. I left him to his moral high ground and moved on towards ‘Pusher Street’, Copenhagen’s go-to place to buy weed.
Christiania legalised marijuana long ago, and the Copenhagen authorities – no doubt fearing an outbreak of hostilities between the two countries – appear not to intervene (though apparently taking photos here is a no-no, just in case). Pusher Street is like a farmers’ market for hydroponic goods, with brand name outlets – such as ‘Your Ganga Man’ and ‘Moroccan Hash Café’ – each set up with a display stall for half a dozen different varieties. No free samples, but they have little boxes you can pick up and sniff as you mull over a purchase. I saw some mushrooms as well, but no harder drugs, and I saw a sign that suggests that’s a rule enforced by the locals. Organic produce only, it seems.
Day four was given over to having my mood soured by the Hawthorn Football Club. They’re the only team to beat us since I was in Vienna, by a goal each time, and it’s a terrible shame – a terrible, terrible shame – that we won’t meet again September. So disappointing that they won’t be joining us.
After the footy I had yet another train ride. I’ve started to take fast, reliable trains for granted – a rude shock awaits me when I get back home – but I was particularly looking forward to this one. A small corner of the Baltic Sea gets in the way of a direct train ride between Copenhagen and Hamburg, my next destination, and to go overland would add at least a couple of hours to the journey. Instead I would get a train part of the way, switch to a ferry to cross the strait and then another train.
Or not quite. It would be the same train, because it was coming too:
I would have liked to be present when it was decided that this was the most sensible way of getting people between Denmark and Germany. “So”, the minister might have asked the engineer. “We need a boat to get the train from one side to the other?”
Yes, I’m afraid. It’s a long detour to go by land. It’ll be annoying having to change trains, but these things can’t be helped…
“Of course they can. The boat will take the train.”
… sorry? I’m confused. The boat will… what? Boats can’t board trains, minister -
“No, the train will catch the boat. We’ll carry it across on the boat. Then we’ll only need one train!”
But… trains can’t board boats, either. You need tracks. Ferries don’t have train tracks...
“Then we’ll get a new boat. Put tracks in that.”
Right… that’ll be expensive, and –
“Worth it, though. A boat train – or maybe it’s a train boat? Anyway, it’s unique. Nothing like it in the world. People will come all the way from Australia to ride it and gently take the mickey out of the concept in their travel blogs!”
… I see. I’m just not sure this is practical, Minister. I mean, train tracks are narrow. You’ll need the boat to line up just perfectly with the tracks each time…
“Good. Then it’s decided. Hey, so this boat. It’ll start in Denmark, then to Germany, then return to Denmark, then to Germany, and just go back and forth forever?”
… I guess so. Nobody else is going to want a boat with a train station, so…
“Great. Then I know what we’re gonna call it”:
Who knew Germans had a sense of humour?
Like most trips to fresh starts in new countries, it started with a sea voyage.
I didn’t quite go straight from Saint Petersburg to Helsinki. There were two days – down from three thanks to the ghost bus in Poland - in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, in between. It’s a pleasant, charming but more or less uninteresting city, and I’m going to bypass writing about it rather than try to conjure entertaining anecdotes out of thin air.
At least I had people to talk to again, after two weeks in Russia where I felt isolated from fellow travellers. Now, in Tallinn, I was back on the backpacker circuit, and I was sharing the dorm with three young Dutch women, who were coming to the end of a swing through the Baltic states. And we had two Poles, Katarina and Lucasz. Katarina told me she was from Osweicim. “Perhaps you’ve heard of –“
“Yep. I’ve heard of it.”, I cut her off. I’ve been there. Osweicim is the Polish name for the town the Germans called Auschwitz. Turning to Lucasz, I noted that both were from Poland and asked if they were travelling together.
“NOOOOOOO!!!!”
Lucasz never got a chance to reply. Katarina made it very clear that they were NOT travelling together. Loudly and indignantly. The Dutch girls and I laughed uncomfortably. Poor Lucasz.
Once done with my pleasant, charming, but more or less uninteresting stay in Tallinn, it was time for a ferry to Helsinki. I can’t begin to quantify, much less explain, my love for ferries. The idea of a cruise ship holiday holds no appeal. I know many people who love them, but I want to be the author of my own travel plans, not have them packaged for me, no matter how nice the wrapping. But a no-frills, point to point ferry crossing is by far my favourite way to travel. They’re surprisingly easy to sleep on, and watching the sea go by is like watching Test cricket: mostly uneventful, borderline dull, at times, but somehow engrossing anyway. I could do it for days. Indeed, I’m suddenly so in love with Scandinavia that I was reading up on Norway – a country I’m bypassing this time – and discovered a ferry that runs from the south all the way up into the Arctic Circle. It takes five and a half days, and I’m up for it. Tallinn to Helsinki only takes two and a half hours, but I made the most of them, finding a seat out on the sun deck, listening to Eric Clapton and watching the Baltic Sea. Bliss.
Helsinki had almost too easy a time winning my affection. After a trying couple of weeks in Russia I was in Finland, where stuff just *works*. I found my way to the hostel, where the staff spoke English, where the kitchen had butter knives and a toaster, where the showers worked perfectly. The only problem was they had assigned me a top bunk. I hate top bunks. I’ve had enough of top bunks.
“Hmm”, I said, rattling the bed until it made just enough noise to suit my purposes. “Here’s the thing. Because I’m diabetic I have to wake up two or three times during the night to test,” – sometimes, though not routinely true – “and what I’ve found is that if I have a bottom bunk I disturb other people in the dorm far less often. Do you think you could find me a bottom bunk? I don’t mind either way, really, but it could make the other guests more comfortable…”
On balance I’d rather not have the diabetes card at all, but if it’s going to be in my hand I might as well play it.
After a short recharge in my bottom bunk, then, I set off to explore. I found a conveyor belt set into the wall of the nearest supermarket, with a number of buttons beside it. Befuddled, I asked a staff member what it was (everybody in Scandinavia speaks English, and I admittedly started taking it for granted very quickly). It’s a bottle recycling machine for those container deposit schemes like they have in South Australia. You take them to the supermarket, feed them into the wall – you can hear it crunching – and get a receipt to use as a discount against your purchases. Or you do, as long as you don’t do what I did and press the wrong button, so that my refund was donated to some unknown charity instead. I hope it’s a good one.
My delight with the bottle monster was as nothing compared to what I found upon entering a shopping centre. I don’t want to overstate my level of victimhood, but wrong-handed people don’t know how good they have it in a right-handed world. Scissors are designed for them. Computer keyboards are designed for them. Door handles, ATMs, microwaves and even our writing system, going from left to right, is designed for them. I can’t say I’ve ever felt massively disadvantaged when trying to use one of those touch screen maps in a shopping centre, but Finland has me covered anyway. The screen had a button in the corner that read ‘Left Handed?’ I pressed it, curiously, and the entire display moved from one side to the other, so I could reach all the buttons with my left hand. This was the future. It’s much colder and it has more cobblestones than I expected, but otherwise I was pretty happy with it.
My whimsical mood continued at the zoo that afternoon. It’s nothing particularly special, as far as European zoos go, apart from its setting: it takes up an entire island in the middle of Helsinki’s harbour. Getting there meant another ferry, and then I was just as interested in wandering around the edge of the island as I was in the animals. I found a wild red squirrel and played peek-a-boo around a tree trunk for a minute or so, before the squirrel cheated by climbing up into the higher branches. I found a play area with trampolines set into the ground, and gingerly tested if they’d take my weight: they did. I was the most relaxed I’d been since, I don’t know, maybe back in Croatia?
The next day was assigned to Helsinki’s biggest attraction, a fortress island (another ferry!) called Suomenlinna. But it was raining when I left the hostel so I visited the Finnish Design Museum while I waited for the weather to clear. It makes sense that Scandinavians are so good at design: when you’re cooped up inside for nine months of the year it’s understandable that you might want things to look nice. The museum was eager to point out that Finland is home to more than Nokia: they also take credit for Angry Birds, those egg-shaped chairs, and even the orange-handled scissors that are in every government office in every country in the world. Those scissors are only designed for right-handed people. At least they learned their lesson with the touch screens.
Suomenlinna is, as I said, a fortress island (or several inter-connected islands, rather) that lies at the mouth of Helsinki harbour. An information board said it’s one of the few island fortresses to have served as a base for three different countries (Sweden, Russia and Finland), which prompts me to question if it was really all that successful as a fortress. Now it’s Helsinki’s go-to public park, despite still having some off-limits military areas. There are signs saying where you can’t go, but no guards, much less guns. That’s just not how they do things in Scandinavia.
My afternoon at Suomenlinna was an echo of one of my favourite days in the US two years ago when, on a whim, I boarded a $2 ferry to something called ‘Governors Island’ in New York. It, too, was a former naval base, and despite being only a few hundred metres off Manhattan – and having great views of the Statue of Liberty – it felt like wandering about a small rural town. Suomenlinna wasn’t *quite* as magical as that day, only because I knew broadly what to expect. But I enjoyed it all the same, and spent hours scrabbling up and down rocks and creeping through tunnels. I even saw – but was unable to photograph – a poodle wearing sneakers.
Helsinki’s a small city and I’d already exhausted my to-do list on the first two days, so I roamed aimlessly on day three. As if to confirm that this really is a progressive utopia, I found a public toilet that was not only free – in Europe! – but also clean and, best of all, had a separate stall for the urinal, which was designed for use by either men or women. I’m regularly embarrassed by my privilege as I walk straight past a long line of women waiting to use toilet: Helsinki has it sorted. Don’t think it was designed for left-handers though.
Continuing my walk, I came across a man fishing with his terrier, who graciously allowed me to take a photo:
It’s hard not to love a city that dresses its poodles in sneakers and its terriers in life jackets.
My overnight ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm was the single most expensive journey of the entire trip: €118 for a four bunk cabin underneath the car deck, but I just had to shrug my shoulders and accept I was in Scandinavia. And I felt much better about the cost after receiving a free upgrade to my own cabin:
It had a bathroom. It had a TV. It had a window… no it didn’t. Behind those curtains is a solid wall. But it had curtains.
I woke up in time to be back out on the deck as we passed through the Stockholm Archipelago and into the city, where I saw a giraffe:
And later that day I saw a duck, too:
It’s hard not to love a city that dresses its cranes as giraffes and its boats as ducks.
Loving the hostel didn’t come quite so easily. I knew not to expect luxury - I was in Scandinavia in July, after all, and finding a decent place to stay meant flirting with bankruptcy – but I hadn’t expected a dungeon. The rooms at this place were all underground, with no windows. That would have been fine, except that I appeared to be in with permanent residents who were both agoraphobic – they never left – and photophobia, because the room was kept in perpetual darkness. Turning on the main light apparently wasn’t the done thing, and there were complaints if I used my reading light for more than a few minutes too.
I’ve been in rooms with inconsiderate people, loud people and smelly people, but these troglodytes were the worst, simply because the darkness was so all-enveloping. I tried to stay out of there as much as I could, which is a problem when your dorm room should be somewhere you feel comfortable. Mind you, while sitting in the common area I got stuck in a conversation with an elderly Trump voter, who claimed that Hillary Clinton had been in a secret lesbian relationship with her staffer, Huma Abedin for 40 years (Abedin is 41 years old). But that’s not all, Barack Obama is apparently secretly gay too, and a secret Muslim as well. Who keeps giving these people passports? Maybe I should have stayed in the dark.
The first order of business upon arriving in Stockholm was the footy: an anxious moment, as up until this point the Swans had only ever won matches when I was in formerly Communist countries. Sweden has at least partially broken the curse, but it was neutral during the Cold War, and we remain winless in the NATO countries: I may yet need to defect if anything is going to come of this bizarre season.
Finally, in the afternoon, I headed out into an unexpectedly wonderful city, pairing Sydney’s looks with Melbourne’s character:
All I need is for Stockholm to move about 1000km closer to the equator, so that it has a liveable climate for more than three months of the year, and an obscenely high-paying job so I can afford to eat and I’d move here in an instant. I’d even buy a bike.
I was heading for Djurgården, an island ten minutes walk from the city centre that has a bunch of museums including the Nordic Museum (which I skipped), a Sovereign Hill-style place called Skansen (also skipped), and the ABBA Museum (why why, would I ever want to go?). The one I did visit was the Vasa Museum. An ostensibly cutting-edge warship when it was built in 1628, the Vasa had barely gotten out of Stockholm harbour before it capsized and sank, 1300 metres into its maiden voyage. The wreck was dredged up more than 300 years later, pieced back together and now looks rather stunning given all it has been through:
The museum tells the ship’s story, of course, including an exhibit about an inquest into the tragedy. It was hastily concluded, without releasing its findings, when early evidence began to point directly to the king being at fault for demanding it carry too many cannons. Awkward.
I headed back to Djurgården the next day - a Sunday – for a walk. The island is long and slender – it stretches for more than three kilometres – and once you get past Skansen it turns into a more rugged, rural version of Central Park. But for the high rises being built across the channel I might have been way out in the Scandinavian forest:
I stayed out there for hours, getting lost, finding my way, then getting lost again: twice I thought I was on one side of the island, only to realise that South was actually North. Eventually I settled down beside the water to work on finishing my Saint Petersburg blog post, and headed back into town at dinner time. I’d planned to venture into the old city – Gamla Stan – where I hoped to wait out the crowds and take some photos during the night, when the streets would be almost deserted. I made the mistake of testing my blood sugar, though, and it was dangerously high despite having walked what must have been at least 15km. Back to the dungeon dorm, then. Just another day on the diabetic magical mystery tour.
I had to settle for wandering around Gamla Stan the next day. I checked out the Nobel (prize) Museum, but it was mostly oriented towards children, and I didn’t stay very long. I did learn how insulin was discovered, though: the magical mystery tour sucks, but it’s the better of two bad options. I might be biased, but I reckon they deserved their Nobel Prize.
And so I killed time by following blind alleys into more blind alleys and window shopping. I found a British snack food store that sold Bundaberg ginger beer: exciting not because I drink ginger beer (I don’t) but because if they thought Bundaberg was British they might have made the same mistake with Vegemite. I didn’t mention it in my Saint Petersburg post – it was self-pitying enough – but my last remaining Vegemite went missing there, and it’s the most upsetting loss since my insulin in Vienna. Alas, they only had Marmite, and I’d rather eat dry bread than accept an inferior (and English) substitute. I also poked my head into a vintage collectibles store. The usual sort of stuff: antique glassware, books, Nazi stamps, postcards...
Wait, what? Yeah:
There was a stunned German man taking photos, and I asked what he thought, but he was genuinely speechless. Are they souvenirs of evil, that ought simply to be destroyed? Or are they just stamps? I could be convinced either way.
Leaving that question unresolved, I headed back to the hostel to collect my bags, ready to board a train to Denmark. It was day 90 on my 90 day Schengen visa. Denmark, like Sweden, is a Schengen country. This could yet prove interesting.
