I’ve spent the past 10 days travelling round various parts of Germany and Switzerland.  Tom moved over to Freiburg in January with his girlfriend Hannah and when I found out that Rachel would be passing through Berlin on her epic overland adventure I thought it’d be a good excuse to get back into  travelling mode and see some more of Germany.

First off I met Tom in Frieburg for a couple of days, he gave me a tour of the city and I was introduced to Currywust (chips, German sausage and a curry/chilli sauce), I’ve had it four times now and it may well be my new favorite food.

We had a great night out in Freiburg which included a really cool (maybe gay) bar accoustic heavy metal and great nightclub deep under the streets of Freiburg.

Tom had been great and organised a couple of nights away.  The first was in Konstanz on lake Bondensee where we hired mountain bikes to get around and also went for a swim in the lake (Tom forgot his swimming shorts and really did have to do it in his pants).  The second night we spent in Zurich, Switzerland which was OK but didn’t really have the same charm that the German city’s have and to be honest I found it quite pretentious.

We had still had another day to fill in Freiburg so Tom suggested we catch a cable car up one of the nearby mountains, It took about 20 minutes to get to the top and not long after we did the heavens opened and we where treated to a wicked thunderstorm light show.  The treat of being hit by lightning meant that the cable cars got turned off and we thought that we’d be trapped up the mountain until the storm had passed.  After a couple of hours of sitting around in the cafe we found out that there was actually a bus that left every 30 minutes.

Later that evening I caught an overnight train up to Berlin and met up with Rachel and Becky (who where also on an overnight train from Paris) in the small hours of Thursday morning.  Hannah had (strongly) suggested  we visited the Tacheles which is a squat that has been used by artists to create and sell their artwork since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The place is covered in Graffiti and cool sculptures but it defiantly still fells (and smells) like a squat.  Rachel’s friend Claire arrived later in the afternoon and we all went out for Tapas and a few drinks back in the grounds of the Tacheles

The following day we did a few of the more touristy things like The Reichstag and the Brandonburg gate followd by the The memorial to murdered Jews and the museum below it which was heart wrenching.  It did a really good job of focusing on the individual stories, it’s hard to understand that something so horrendous could have happened realtivly not that long ago (and is still going on in various forms today).

We cheered our selves up by going on an Anti Pub-Crawl which was brilliant, we started off in a 60/70′s reggae/ska bar follows by a Goth Horror bar (which is owned by Rammenstien).  We where loaded onto a party bus which comes complete with it’s own bar and were driven around Berlin for over 2 hours before being dropped off at night club in a bombed out railway station. We got back to the hostel in the daylight around 5:30am.
The pervious nights partying meant that the next day was a right off and we spent the afternoon dozing in the local park. We did make it to Check Point Charlie in the evening and had a look round the museum there followed by organic kebabs (it’s OK to eat them here even if your sober) and an early night.