Exploring the continent of our people
Last year’s trip to Paris and Amsterdam had whetted our appetite for Europe, and we decided to have an extended trip this year. The great thing about Europe is that all cities are easily accessible by train and an overnight journey will get you almost anywhere. Our primary destination was Italy, but I reasoned that I might as well have a good look around some of the other great places that are nearby. My search for an inexpensive airline ticket to a major European city resulted in turning up Berlin at $328. Lufthansa was starting a new non-stop service to Berlin from Washington D.C. and offered this fare if I bought the ticket by Feb 28. It was Feb 27th. After a bit of dilly-dallying I took the plunge, and booked 2 tickets for June 13th, coming back on June 26th. With Berlin as the starting point, we started building our itinerary day by day, and when we finally had it ready – we was to visit Berlin, Salzburg, Rome, Pompeii, Florence and Pisa. So on June 13th, with Anasua and Apu I set off on my European sojourn. As usual, I have organised the travelogue day by day.
Day 1: Berlin
Everybody had expressed apprehensions about travelling for so long with a 7.5 month old son, but to his lifelong credit, Apu was a source of enjoyment throughout the trip and far from being a bother added to the charm of the vacation. He slept the whole 8 hours of the trip to Berlin and thus was a better traveller than either of us. Berlin, as all of Europe has an excellent public transportation system, and we took a bus to our hotel from the airport. I had booked a hotel in West Berlin for the start of the trip (Charlottenburg Hof, an excellent choice, as it turned out, both in quality and location-wise). After lunch we checked out the main sights of West Berlin, the Schloss Charlottenburg, Egyptian museum (with the famous bust of Nefertiti) and the bombed out Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial church, which served as a stark reminder of World War II. In the evening we took a stroll down Kurfur’damm which is the 5th Avenue of former West Berlin.