Today I'm sleeping in with a cold for companion. Lying in the warmth of the doona and typing about my trip so far is an ideal way to spend this cold winters morning in Berlin after more than a week of non stop travel and exploration.
I flew into Hanover last Tuesday evening into the welcoming arms of Cati, my friend of 14 years. A friendship started, and continued, on the written word of letters, sometimes extending to 30 pages or more in length. These days we continue writing but also email and call. We met last year and spent a week together then when I had Vaughan as my companion. This time we spent our time as just us 2 friends. We visited a total of 4 different Christmas markets, drinking heiße schokolade (hot chocolate), eating gruenkhol and sweet pastries and enjoying the specifically cold Christmas atmosphere that remains a somewhat foreign experience to the Australian traveller.
It took a couple of days for my luggage to catch up to me so Cati leant me some of her clothes in the meantime. It arrived Thursday so we socialised with her friends and family, spending the days walking around her city admiring the sights of Germany's largest business and trade city. During the day we visited farmers markets and paid her grandmother a visit. She's an artist and only speaks German and Italian so Cati had to translate for me but she was a wonderful woman to meet. An artist, the rooms in her flat contained pieces of furniture painted with landscape scenes or intricate patterns, set against a timeless classic composition of furniture. Here I am in appreciation of the flat and the woman and Cati is visiting her grandmother for a chat. We also had the opportunity to visit her dad and brother in the old flat I wrote to for so many years. It was great to meet her father, who I hadn't met yet and catch up with her brother who had recently visited Costa Rica and is studying Biology. We had a good conversation over tea and cake. Afterwards we went to her mums flat, a few blocks away, for a dinner of gnocchi. We shared some more good conversation about her childhood in Italy and by the end of the night I was all conversation-ed out.
On Friday, armed with my fresh clothes, we caught a train to the Hartz, a mountainous region about an hour's train ride away. Here we caught a sky cable car to the top of the mountain, a previous medieval fortress and then went on a hike to a waterfall. It was fantastic to experience the true winter weather here in the mountains with the shifting cloud revealing a sharp ray of rich sunlight and then it disappears. The forest is completely different too, made up of almost entirely deciduous trees in this area. This results in skeletal mountains with soft padded ground, covered in leaves, making a lovely base for hiking.
We also stopped at Goslar, a typical German village with a brilliant little Christkindlmarkt, not huge crowds but busy enough.
The next day it was time to move on and catch a train to Hamburg, with a stop at Lüneberg to visit a friend of Cati's for a cuppa. He is at uni there and told us all about it and it sounds like an innovative progressive uni for Germany, even considering it is such a traditional little town built on the trade of salt in the 1600-1700s.
Sad goodbyes were had at Hamburg hauptbahnhof with promises of meeting again soon, then I was into the gracious host Sina's hometown, Hamburg.
