breakfast at curry24 - spicy currywurst, chips and a coke
second breakfast at… the place.
Had a little bit of a wander around Dresden’s old town again. It’s very pretty, but there’s definitely places where you get an overwhelming stench of sewerage.
The Cholera fountain has some cool details
Inside the church is pretty.
Total Tankstelle - a petrol station which has more booze than most BWS’en in Australia. Pretty spectacular for a service station, they barely even sold what we’d consider essentials like bread.
Hertz in Dresden central rail station, what a mess. We tried following Google maps and it took us to the bus stop down the street. We had to call them - they gave vague directions about parking on wilhelmstrasse (turns out you want the “city parking”) After that, wandered up into the train station and after about ten minutes walking around and googling, I found a yelp review saying there’d be a tiny sign at one of the DB ticket desks. Spoke to someone at one of the help/ticket places, they redirected me inside
Looking for the Hertz desk at Dresden central train station?
Park in ** - there’s two car parks on the first level Go up into the main hall Look for the DB ticket office inside the main hall Get two “queueing” tickets - one for each type - just to save time Wait about 45 minutes Spend two minutes handing in the keys and signing that you did
What an absolute clusterfart.
#TODO
Having deposited the keys for the hire car, we walked to platform 4 for our train - only to find a group of excited police blocking off the stairs - it seems someone had left a bag behind. They quickly reassigned the train to platform 17 and we were again off to find our place.
I was a little worried about having to drag the bags up the stairs, but suddenly a wild conveyor belt appeared!
Coke bottles in Germany are weird. They’re just boring! Ours have lumps and bumps, but German ones are just flat and round.
They do have one thing though, their caps are designed so the little snappy bit what keeps it sealed just snaps into two little wings instead of leaving a plastic ring behind to choke turtles.
The train (EC379 “Porta Bohemia”) is nice. Leather seats which airplanes should aspire to, and USB/230V power underneath. We had two single seats facing each other on the south side of the train, I’d definitely suggest getting two on the North side because the view (at least as far as Drivi) is much nicer. Also it’s less sunny when done after lunch.
The train has lovely features for seating - there’s little screens above every single seat which show details about whether it’s booked and what route so you know you’re in the right spot - or noone else is going to be. There’s a little bin on the bottom of every seat too, which has to keep the rubbish down.
Arrived at the train station, taxis tried to charge 500CZK for a 3.5km drive. RMB asked about metered fares after looking up what it should cost, got told to go beat sand. So we did - walking up to the bus stop and finding a slightly dodgier “private taxi” for 400CZK around the corner. $25 to save us dragging our bags 1.4KM across the old town, or messing with buses? Sounds good to me.
The Grand Hotel Praha, situated directly on the old town square, is right across from the Prague Astronomical Clock. It’s a fancy old thing, where literally hundreds of people will stand and watch it ring, every hour of the day. It’s been up there (mosly) since 1410, and had been taken down in January for its first restoration since the second world war.
Thankfully it was returned to service about two weeks ago, otherwise we’d have missed out! :) The original mechanism is still in place, which is a truly spectacular achivement, I’d say.
After lazing about in the room for a bit, we ventured out for some food. I found Restaurace Mlejnice Kožná on TripAdvisor, and I’m seriously glad I did. It’s tucked down in a slightly dingy (and currently full of construction mess) alley way, but the adventure just adds to the charm - once you get to the door you can hear lots of happy people inside and the service was great.
When we went in, RMB asked for a table for two and we were put into a little alcove in the back, on a long table which could seat about ten, with a Russian (or similar language?) family of Mom/Dad/Daughter at the other end of the table. It was awkward at first and then just fun after that. Once they’d gotten their food and disappeared a mother and daughter pair from Italy turned up and RMB used her photography skills to take a great photo of the nice young lady. Her mum took a hilariously bad flash photo with her low end Canon DSLR. :)
Dinner was…
entree
pickled home made sausage, cold but spicy and great camembert and berry sauce with bread
mains I had beef goulash in a bread bowl RMB had blueberry duck breast, which was a very strange colour of purple-blue and was nice enough. way too much sauce Potatoes and cheese and garlic - advertised as blue cheese but all we could taste was the garlic
a couple of pints of cider
Apple strudel and fresh cream, tasty enough, but a small portion.
Meals were spectacularly large portions - which is funny because everything on the menu shows its weight. This seems to be at least a Prague thing, because it’s on other menus I’ve looked at.
After dinner wandered around the square; so many touristic souvenir shops and people hawking chotckies. I got some patches, for the lols.