Day Fortytwo - Jul 2, 2012
Lisbon, Portugal to Berlin, Germany
Daily Didactic
A travel day. We rose at an uncharacteristically early hour for a non-school day. We were packed and down the street at the main hostel by 7:00am for a cab ride to the airport. The metro will apparently go to the airport soon, but not soon enough. The twenty minute cab ride to the airport was a lesson in acceptance. We have never gone so fast down such narrow streets with such a seemingly unhappy cabbie. As an interesting aside, all of the cabs in Lisbon are Mercedes. Today we are trying EasyJet on for size after our initial trial of RyanAir. It was fundamentally the same inexpensive cattle car type experience. We actually enjoyed this flight a little more, except for a slightly unhinged flight attendant right at the end. We landed at Berlin SFX and (following some great instructions from our hostel) caught a train into Berlin proper and then a subway to our "platz" or place. Lots of platzs here. We checked into the absolutely spectacular Berlin Circus Hostel. Great staff, crazy colors, the most clever room of our trip, fairly cheap. We've learned that we want to get train reservations at least a few days early and have been doing that when we get to a town. In this case, coming into the airport, we needed to find Hauptbahnhof station. We took some excellent guidance and a mediocre map and marched in the wrong direction for quite a while. Eventually a couple came up to us with a map of their own (as we were standing and trying to understand why none of the streets were on ours). After a bit we realized we were heading in opposite wrong directions. We both turned around and headed in our respective right directions. We found our train station, got reservations for Prague in three days, and hit a pub for what our front desk told us was authentic German food. Authentic or not it was great and not pizza. It was meatballs.
Today's Photos
