This article finishes the InterRail series and follows Interrail – Germany (again).

Already on our way back home, at 09:23 AM we left Munich to Mannheim where we would change trains to finally get to Paris. The trip was really fast and calm in the German high-speed trains and we arrived at Paris Est at around 5 PM and a new adventure begun…

Given the Catholic holidays thing that the German assistant had told us back in Munich’s train station, we still didn’t know if we would have a place in the night train to Irún which meant we’d have to spend the night in Paris without any room booked. More importantly, would there be any free seats or beds the next days? How difficult would it be for us to get to Spain!?

Bad news…

In that same Paris Est train station, we asked if there were any seats left in “our” train and got the bad news, the train was full! Still, with the typical hope we got in Portuguese hearts, we decided to go the Paris Austerlitz train station where our train would departure from and ask there… should we get different results…

We hurried to the subway to get to Paris Austerlitz train station and, once there, quickly headed to the ticket sales line. Since we needed delicate information and couldn’t risk it getting lost in our rusty French, we waited in the line for the only assistant, out or 4 that had the English flag above his window; and waited, and waited… and waited. Turns out the sales assistant and the girl he was assisting were flirting like characters out of a French romance… and they took their time so, meanwhile, I had to tell everybody in the line behind me “Je necessite l’Anglais…” when they asked me why I wouldn’t take my turn. Helena got tired of and tried her luck asking about the train to another sales assistant in French but the assistant was so rude Helena didn’t really understood if we had a place in the train or not.

On our way home!

Finally we saw another assistant, a bit far away, waving at us, asking us to go there. He didn’t have the little English flag on but we went and he told us, in perfect English, that though he spoke good English, he needed to be working for a while in the company and pass some exams before he got the “right” to have the flag on his window… The bureaucratic nonsense of big companies. Anyway, his name was Pierre and he saved our day! He looked for the train’s details in his computer and told us with great surprise: “Who told you the train was full!? There are plenty of beds available and if you want I can also book the tickets from Irún to Coruña from here, do you want me to do it?” YES WE DO!

At around 11 PM we got on the train and were all happy to be alone (and not with people partying or drinking or whatever like we had seen in other compartments) in the 6 bunker bed compartment until two German girls came in and I couldn’t complain either, even Helena told me in a low voice “Oh.. how lucky you are!”. Yes, everything was going just fine when another passenger came in, a French guy on his 40s, drunk and smelling like one. He came in, closed the window shade hitting Helena’s feet hard, then seated in his bed and took out a little knife… and with the knife he took about 30 seconds to rip the plastic bag where his pillow was in. What the..!?
Anyway, we were on the train and though he was drunk and snored, it could have been worse.

We arrived at Irún at around 7:30 AM, went to the sales assistant and he told us they had been expecting us in the station because the trains to Coruña were full but they knew two people had reserved their tickets in Paris and needed the tickets. Thank you again Pierre!

After another boring 11 hour trip, we finally got home, at the beautiful city of Coruña.

This article finishes the series of articles about our InterRail trip in the summer of 2010. It took me almost a year to write these articles but I could remember a good part of it with the help of tickets, maps, postcards, etc. Helena kept and also with the photos we took.
I hope I shared the enthusiasm of traveling around Europe by train and that readers who haven’t been on an InterRail consider to do so now.

Until the next trip!

This article is part of the InterRail series and follows Interrail (Part 6) – Czech Republic.

It must have been around 4PM when we arrived at München Hauptbahnhof and dropped our backpacks at the A&O Hotel. The Hotel was nothing fancy but it was really nice and cheap and with the particularity that the rooms were not in the same building as the reception but rather in the street to the side of it, resembling some motels I’ve seen in movies.

We were starving so we headed to the first kebab restaurant which, as we saw in Berlin, had very similar or lower prices than the city we live in, A Coruña. Nothing exciting here except the fact that Helena still has some Portuguese habits when paying the bill at cafes or shops. Let me explain, in Portugal virtually no-one has change for you so if the bill is like 12.25 € and you give them 15 €, the waiter always says something like: would you have 2.25 €? No? … 0.25 €? No?… Hmmm…
They never have change! So, Helena usually gathers every little coin and happily gives them to the waiters and they love it in Portugal… So she did the same to the, probably from Turkish origin, waiter in Munich but with even a better touch: she gathered the whole price in coins and told me with a smile, this way not only we’ll travel lighter but they will have change here in the restaurant.
The waiter came, checked the bill again, received the coins in his hand unaware and put an expression like if we had spit in his hand: “What is this!? What do I do with this? I am not a bank! I don’t need this!” and this was enough for us to give him a 10 € bill instead

(gotta love a statue of a wild boar)

We then had to go back to the train station to ask for the trains the next day. At this point we were already tired and didn’t want to risk staying more time this far from Spain and eventually let the InterRail tickets expire. Thus, our idea was to leave to Paris the next day after lunch but it seemed that many people were traveling that weekend “due to some Catholic holiday, you must know that” the assistant in the train station told us. This assistant spoke perfect English and was super nice to us; after we bought the tickets and mentioned that we were planning on leaving Paris also the next day, he checked the trains to Spain and told us that once we arrived in Paris we’d have to rush in and cross the whole city because we’d arrive at different train stations and had little time to change trains. We realized the best solution was to go in an earlier train the next morning and this meant that the assistant had to call his superior to revoke the tickets and start the whole sales process again and he did it without even a single look of annoyance in his face. Really nice guy!

(a relaxing walk by the river)

Realizing we had so little time to visit the city and the weather was rainy, we headed to the city center and then to the river. In this walk we could get a notion of how wealthy the city is. Everything seemed so neat and there were so many good cars (Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Porsche) that we did a little game: look for the worse, as in less classy, car we could find. The winner was: a shiny new Peugeot station wagon.
I wonder if when you go to live in Munich and register at the city hall they give you a Mercedez-Benz for free or something.

(we like street performers)

When it was getting dark we headed back to the center to have dinner. It was August 12, my birthday so we wanted something more classy than yet another kebab and went to the Augustiner Restaurant in Neuhauser Straße. This Bavarian restaurant had long wooden tables, waiters dressed in traditional Bavarian clothes, everything looked cool. It must have been expensive right? I had ordered a dish from the “specials” list and it was the most expensive of the two we ordered, the price: ~12 €! I love Germany!

With our bellies filled of Bavarian food and beer and having to get up early the next morning we said good-bye to the streets of München (gotta go back some day) and headed back to the hotel…

to be continued…

This article is part of the InterRail series and follows Interrail (Part 4) – Germany.

On August 10th we were waiting for the train to Prague from Berlin’s Haupbahnhof when, about 10 minutes before it arrived, we heard a warning in German and all the people waiting with us left the place. We wondered if it was possible that the train station folks would warn about a last minute change of platforms for an international train only in German… and that’s what happened. Fortunately someone confirmed it for us and we hurried for the new platform.

The train to Prague was really crowded, not crowded like those trains shown in videos of India but crowded like everybody standing in the aisle, outside the train compartments. Most of the passengers were young people like us, nobody moved for like 5 or 10 minutes and that’s too much if you’re feeling somebody’s breath on your face…
The thing is that in Germany you’re not forced to reserve a seat like it is in France, for example, and Prague is a very attractive place for young people. Still, everyone remained calm except for a German passenger, probably on his 40s, that started violently pushing everybody and screaming “I have reservation! I have reservation!”, like we were leaving the planet after the apocalypse, until he entered his compartment…
Finally we got out of that passenger car and entered the next one which was more humanly squeezable and found ourselves a seat.

It was about 5 PM when we got off the train in Prague. We exchanged some euros for Czech Korunas at the first currency exchange we found at the train station. After that, we passed by many other currency exchanges that would offer a better deal so if you go to Prague’s central train station, be sure you are patient and compare different currency exchanges before you buy your Korunas.
Outside the train station there was a park but we got a bit of a bad impression as it was full of drunk people and junkies lying in the benches.

(the photo is a bit blurred but this is inside the train station)

We were staying at Hotel Vitkov. This hotel was suggested by Tomeu Vizoso, a nice guy and great hacker who has been involved in interesting projects such as Sugar and PyGI. Tomeu had been kind enough to leave a comment to the blog post, where I announced I would be Interrailing through Europe, inviting me for a drink in Prague and I took the chance to ask him about hotels.
This 3 star hotel was a bit far from the center, 20 minutes by tram, but it was nice and very cheap: a double room for 31 € per night, with breakfast and all.

Getting to the hotel by tram was another little adventure because, even though we knew the tram number to get there, the ticket machines had several kinds of tickets and had a too vague English description in tiny letters. Since it only accepted coins, I went to a cafe to exchange the bills and had to ask someone in the tram to warn us when we passed by the hotel. Everybody was really nice and spoke good English.

“Ah, that’s because this is the worst street of Prague.”

When we finally got to the hotel, we made arrangements with Tomeu to go have dinner nearby. We went out following Google Maps’ indications and this was the second adventure. It was already night, the street was kind of dark we couldn’t see a soul outside apart from a group of drunk men walking down the street and a barechested old man screaming something at us from the other side of the street while clapping his hands. We felt like the guys from EuroTrip when they arrive at Bratislava and hurried to find the restaurant already thinking Tomeu was crazy.

We arrived a bit early at Restaurant Merenda so we sat, waiting for Tomeu to arrive. The waiter brought us the menus (that also were translated to English) but asked us what we wanted in Czech. I answer, in English, that we were waiting for our friend who was arriving very soon. He didn’t understand and just asked: “Two beers?”; “Not yet, we are waiting for a friend…”, I also pointed to my watch and to the empty third chair; “hmmm… one beer? two beers?” he replied, now getting more angrier; “Two beers, please!” I finally figured out.
When Tomeu arrived he explained us, and we would experiment it once again later, that the dynamics of someone serving you in there were different. He said that “it is like if the waiters are the school teachers and we are the pupils, they are a bit authoritarian and we need to respect them”. Indeed.
Anyway, Tomeu’s girlfriend joined us later and we had a nice, Portuguese spoken, dinner (they lived in Portugal for some years). Oh, and my goulash and beers were damned good!

After that, we went for a coffee in another place and I asked them about the scary street. He said something funny “Ah, that’s because this is the worst street of Prague.”, oh that explains it, thank you very much! “Is it as unsafe as it looks?” I asked and he replied it is not and that he didn’t know anyone who got mugged in there or anything but when he wanted confirmation from his girlfriend, she said “I’ve heard of some people who got robbed here, yes.”. After we said goodbye, with my spidey sense on full-alert, we walked back to the hotel.

The Prague of postcards

The next day, we went to the city center to do another trour with New Europe (see the Germany post to know what’s it about). This time we had a Scottish guide who kindly told us not to worry because he would do his best to be understood. Later in the trip he also mentioned that Prague was really safe and the crimes in there were basically petty crimes. On the other hand, he said it had also the highest number of deaths in crosswalks and I can imagine it, because people there drive like crazy; and I come from Portugal, I know what I am talking about.

It was a nice walk in the city center where he explained some of the most interesting things about the city. Kafka’s statues, the Old New Synagogue or the Astronomical Clock (one of the world’s most overrated tourist sights) were just some of the things the guide explained. We ended the tour near King Charles bridge. Now this is the Prague I had imagined. The most impressive part of the tour for me was when the guide talked about the Museum of Children’s Drawings which has drawings from Jewish children held in Nazi concentration camps in WW2. We couldn’t enter the museum because we didn’t feel like waiting in the long line but according to the tour guide, the drawings show pretty much the same things as today’s children’s drawings: trees, houses, families; they didn’t show destruction or chaos as it would be expected. I hope that some day I’ll be able to go back there and visit it.

(King Charles bridge)

After the trip, me and Helena crossed King Charles bridge to the other side, bought some souvenirs, visited a few things more and passed by the train station to ask for information on the trains to Munich. After about 30 minutes waiting in the line, we asked the assistant for the schedule and she said “How many tickets?”, “No, I have an InterRail pass, I just need to know the schedule.”, she made an angry face and pointed to her left and said “Information!”, “… but can’t you just tell me at what time the trains…”, “Information!”, “… but I…”, “Information!”. After confirming, with the right Information! assistant, that we would have a train to Munich, we headed to the hotel.

The dinner was in a restaurant close to the hotel. It was funny that the decoration of the restaurant and everything seemed pretty much like the average restaurants in Portugal 10 years ago.
This was the second time we experimented a waiter’s “school teacher’s kindness” when I waved to him when he was passing by (like, please come by when you can) and he pointed with his head to his hands, full of plates, and made an expression that said something like “stupid idiot tourists don’t you see I’m working here”. If after that the food had spit on it or not, I don’t know, but it was again really good.

Our conclusions to Prague is that it is a really nice place that surely deserves a second visit but we didn’t get as impressed as we think we would. Maybe our expectations were too high or we weren’t looking exactly for partying like everybody else seemed to. It was indeed a great place for drinking. When we were at the train station to leave Prague we heard a group of Spanish guys talking about how cheap it has been for them to drink and party all night.

On August 12th, at around 9 AM, we were getting on a train to our second German city of the trip.

to be continued…

That’s right, once again I could count on Igalia‘s kind support to be able to go to this great conference one more year.
Just like last year, I’m giving two presentations:
* Making the printed world accessible: A11y in OCRFeeder, in the Accessibility DevRoom on Saturday at 11:00;
* Grilo: Integration of Multimedia Contents in Applications Made Easy, in the CrossDesktop DevRoom on Sunday at 13:45.

This will be my fourth time attending FOSDEM and every year I love it more. In what other conference can you attend presentations about: GNOME, MeeGo, Django, Accessibility and much, much more. And let’s not forget about the Friday Beer Event, that allow us hackers to socialize while sipping on the finest beers on earth. And of course, to some of you, I don’t need to tell again how much I like Brussels, and Belgium in general.

By the way, this year there is a new, more Maemo-ish, FOSDEM Maemo app called Sojourner which will help you schedule the talks you wanna attend, so, be sure to install it in your N900. (I’ve contributed with a couple of patches last Friday, which are pending integration )

Other news from my part is that since last week I am a member of GNOME Foundation. It’s been a year since I started developing OCRFeeder under GNOME’s infrastructure and I finally decided to apply for membership. The process was really easy and I thank the folks involved. It’s good to be around such good hackers.

Hope to see you all FOSDEM next weekend!

This article is part of the InterRail series and follows Interrail (Part 3) – The Netherlands.

We left Amsterdam in the morning of August 8, all eager to get to Berlin. It’d be my first time to Germany.
We arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof at 3:20 PM and headed to our hotel nearby, it was Hotel Central Inn.

We were expecting the typical hotel building but what we found was a normal building with a big banner on one of the balconies with the hotel’s name, yes, the hotel was one of the building floors only. When we were paying the hotel, since we were saving our cash money (to avoid going to ATMs and paying bank taxes), I wanted to use my debit card everywhere I could but when I flashed the card, “with card, there is no discount!”, the receptionist told me with a very German accent. Our bill for two nights was 120 € and the discount would be 2.5 € but when I said “so, 117.5 € then, right”, she told me: “No, it is 120 €.”. “Okay, but with the discount?”, “With the discount 120 €, with no discount 122.5 €…”. Hmmm, I didn’t like that deal paid with cash.
Only later we realized that by discount, she meant that there is kind of a 2.5 € tax you pay when you pay by debit card. I was used to have these kind of taxes paid by seller, not the client.
Anyway, the hotel was humble, nothing fancy but it did its job, the free internet worked well for us to check the email (in our N900s), the place was clean and the staff, besides some trouble with the English and the initial misunderstanding with the payment, was nice.

Into the City

We then crossed the river and headed to the Reichstag and the beautiful Brandenburger Tor. After a few photos, we walked down the Unter Den Linden boulevard. We eventually left it and started to search for a place to have an early dinner since we were starving but we entered some financial area with everything but a place to eat.

(the beautiful park in front of the Reichstag)

Another weird stuff we found in our quest for food was that it seamed like the city was abandoned, no traffic, few people, silence… We speculated how it would change the next day guessing it could be because it was Sunday but the next day, the traffic and confusion we expected for a European capital never came, turns out Berlin is like that, pretty cool right? But going back to our quest for food, we finally found a sandwich restaurant, we were kinda disappointed because we wanted to eat something more German but our hunger won. We asked the guy for the food in English and after having eaten I risked asking for a coffee in German (I had been learning German by myself for a bit and wanted to try it): “Ich will ein Espresso bitte!”, the guy nodded affirmatively and I asked him in English if I had pronounced it the right way, he’s answer: “You want coffee?”, “Yes but did I say it right?”, “You don’t want coffee?”, “Yes, but did I pronounce it right, before?”, “You wanted coffee, right?”, I realized he didn’t really understand me so I just answered yes and we both laughed about the weird conversation.
Ironically, just walking a bit, now at dusk, we arrived at Bebelplatz, which we still didn’t know this was a famous square (more on this later), but there were a few places selling Currywurst (the kind of thing we wanted to eat in the first place), drinks and a band playing Cuban music. So we went and tried the Currywurst and liked it. The band however, wasn’t that good and there was just a few folks standing there watching them so we kept on our little walking tour. After a while, since it was already night and we were tired, we walked back to our hotel, watched German TV for a bit and went to sleep.

(Currywurst ist sehr gut!)

The tour

Ana (read the InterRail (Part 3) article to know who she is) had told us about NewEurope‘s tours. NewEurope offers free (among other paid options) walking tours in some European cities with a tour guide that describes things in a very informal way, they are the typical cool dudes and make the tours really interesting. Of course, why is it free? Because the guides advertise the paid trips, take you to a specific place to have a water and snack break (which might then pay NewEurope a commission) and work on a tips base so, you should give them a nice tip to your guide.
Having consulted their schedule, the tour started at 10 AM in front of Brandenbourger Tor, we headed there and had a nice breakfast at Dunkin’Donuts until the crowd started to arrive for the tours.

(Helena likes to take me pictures when I’m not aware of… instead of focusing on the Brandenburger Tor behind)

There were two languages for the tours, English and Spanish but we preferred to go with the former crew. Our guide was Chris, from England, and showed us around, starting by the Brandenbourger Tor until Berliner Dom, he showed us many important landmarks and particularities about the city — like the Holocaust Memorial, Checkpoint Charlie, the wall (obviously) or the overground pink sewer pipes and the soviet architecture. He also talked, of course, about the Nazis and the Soviets. This was when we learned that the Bebelplatz near which had been eating Currywurst the day before was where the Nazi students burned the books back in 1933.

(the pink sewer pipes and graffiti)

The tour was great and we learned a lot about this city full of history.

The awkward nice lunch

After the tour ended, Chris, the guide, told us that anyone could join him and have a schnitzel for lunch for only 9 €, the best schnitzel in town, he assured. I was a bit reluctant but Helena thought it was a good idea so we told him we’d join in. I readily regretted it when I realized that the lunch crew would be us, an American girl from Wisconsin, Chris and four Hungarian girls who had been flirting with him heavily during the tour… So, we felt like two too many. Also, to make things worst, the restaurant wasn’t nearby like I had assumed but we had to take the S-Bahn and the tram to get there. It was Al Hamra, in Raumerstraße and I told Helena, as a joke, that maybe the guy lived nearby and made us all go with him that far while he’d be at home. Turns out Chris lived 5 minutes away
Anyway, the lunch started by Chris telling us how he came to Berlin and how it was like to live in there. I was still feeling awkward in there until the Hungarian girls asked us about us and we told them about Portugal and Spain. I noticed they pronounced Budapest just like we pronounce it in Portuguese (sounds like Booda-pesht) and this led to a conversation about languages where Chris told us that he couldn’t still speak German after two years in Berlin and only now he was starting to distinguish the sounds… Before we realized we were all talking with each other but Chris, he was quietly sipping his Augustiner beer. When they realized I was a programmer, they mentioned one of the girls was also a programmer and I told them about my company, Igalia, how it differs from the other companies and about Free Software.
Oh, and about the schnitzel, I must confess I didn’t really know what it was, I was thinking of an elaborate thing or something and it turned out to be, well, a schnitzel, what we call a “bife panado” in Portugal and, while it was good, it wasn’t anything to be excited about, like our friend Chris was.
It turned out to be a good lunch after all.

The long walk

After lunch, Helena and I went to a second-hand clothes shop nearby just to check it out (we haven’t those where we come from) and decided to walk back to Alexanderplatz instead of taking the tram. It was a pleasant walk down the Prenzlaeur Allee where we could see a less cosmopolitan neighborhood. We even entered some local shops like this toys shop that had action figures of Einstein, Jesus and Mozart! How cool is that!? Made me wonder if Berlin’s thugs carry away their crime using water guns.

(Einstein action figure)

Arriving at Alexanderplatz, we wanted to go further south where Chris told us that’s where the alternative/second-hand shops were but I wanted to pass by Berlin Ostbahnhof to check schedules for the trains to Czech Republic and I assumed it was like 15 minutes away. I was wrong, it was farer that I had thought and took us a bit more than half an hour to get there.

At the train station we had another bit of German language training. We took the chance to finally send some postcards to our families and went into the post office inside the building where the attendant told me she couldn’t speak English but I managed to explain her I wanted stamps. Then, asking the Info desk for the schedule I was amazed that none of the assistants (one of them around my age) spoke English. They pointed us to the first floor and so we went but we entered the wrong office where they finally pointed us the right one which was on the side. I mean no mocking nor disrespect by stating here so many times that almost no-one could speak English, it is simply that I had this idea that in Germany most people could speak it. All the people in the train station were kind to us, the ones who couldn’t understand us made their best to be understood and finally at the right office, the assistants told us the info we wanted.

(nice painting on the side of a building)

After this little detour, we headed south for the neighborhoods with the alternative shops and even though we walked for a while, it was getting dark which meant that probably we’d find those shops closed. So, we stopped by a local supermarket to get provisions for the next day’s trip. It was a big walk since after lunch and we concluded we’re simply not used to those distances, Berlin is just huge and every mental calculation we did by looking at our tourist map should have been multiplied by 3 or something (no, our tourist maps never had a scale…). After this, we took the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz and dined at a kebab nearby.
Another thing we could verify was that the folks who had told us Berlin is a cheap city were right, even though we have lower salaries in Spain/Portugal, the prices of the supermarket goods and food (in kebab places) was not very different, even cheaper in many cases. For example, a kebab sandwich for 4.5 € or a real estate agency selling a 72m² flat (with 3 rooms) about 15 minutes walking from Brandenburger Tor for 180.000 € (way cheaper than Spain/Portugal).
After dinner, we took the S-Bahn to Hauptbahnof and went to our hotel for our last night in Berlin.

(just outside the Hauptbahnhof)

The following day we went to Hauptbahnhof again and, after an adventurous last-minute platform change that was communicated only in German, we left for Prague at around 12:36.

Berlin really surprised us and it was the city we liked most during the whole InterRail. It is indeed a very special city that we feel it might be a really good place to live.

to be continued…