“We must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.” (Milan Kundera – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
This month’s blog post continues the story of my 1985 holiday, from the point when I and my travelling companion were about to leave East Germany. Once again my memory is being aided by my travelling companion’s notebook which I recently rediscovered.
Sunday 15th September 1985
After breakfast in the Hotel Metropol we took leave of our East German touring party and made our way to Friedrichstraße station where we caught the elevated S-Bahn out to the east of the city. We got off at Berlin Lichtenberg station where we were due to catch our train to Prague, having bought tickets and made reservations when we arrived in the country the previous Monday.
Our train, the Pannonia Express, departed promptly at 11:17am. As was common for European trains of that period different carriages were going to different destinations. The furthest that those starting in Berlin were going was to Sofia in Bulgaria, via Hungary and Romania, a journey which took nearly two days to complete. We were initially sharing our compartment with two other men – one an East German and the other from what was then Yugoslavia. The German man, while quite friendly to us, was openly hostile to the Yugoslav, who after a while left, presumably to find somewhere else to sit. Once he had gone, the East German let forth a tirade which, even with our limited knowledge of the German language, we could tell was a racist derogatory rant about Slavs in general. So much for socialist unity.
After a couple of hours the train reached Dresden where we had been earlier in the week, before moving on to cross the German – Czech border. There were two lengthy stops at Bad Schandau and Děčín on either side of the border, where there were thorough checks of our documents. Even though a forty minute wait was scheduled at Děčín, the delay there was considerably longer and we were running late as we continued to follow the Elbe on our journey into Czechoslovakia.
We eventually pulled into Prague’s main railway station (Praha hlavní nádraží) at 6:45pm, about 15 minutes late. We decided to walk from there to the hotel we had booked for the night, which took about half an hour. The Hotel Flora was an old-fashioned establishment, which had a certain charm. It no longer exists, having been demolished to make way for a new development. However, not long after the end of the Cold War, I watched a documentary on Channel 4, in which it was revealed that the hotel was the main meeting point in Prague for spies from East and West. It was apparently a hotbed of agents and double agents.
As it was late and we had not seen anywhere to eat near the hotel on our walk from the station, we chose to dine in the hotel. Here we were introduced to the Czech restaurant pricing model, which has largely died out now. A large plate of mixed starters was brought to our table, from which we helped ourselves to those that looked the most appetising. When we got our bill at the end of the meal, we were only charged for the starters we had taken. Similarly, the number of slices of bread we had left in the basket which had been brought with our meal was counted and we were charged for the exact number that we had consumed. After dinner, we moved on to the hotel bar, which unlike those in East Germany was not extortionate and served decent beer.
Monday 16th September 1985
Today was our main day for sightseeing in Prague. In 1985, Prague had a unique charm among the capitals of Europe. The city centre was old and every street had interesting architecture to examine, albeit that many of the buildings were slightly dilapidated. However, the great beauty was that there were not the hordes of tourists which have blighted the city in recent years.
I think it was on this morning that I realised that I had made a mistake when applying for our Czech visas. The East German visa application had all been handled by the Berolina travel agency, but for the Czech visas I had to apply separately for them from the Czech consulate in London once I had pre-booked our accommodation. As we would be staying in Czechoslovakia for five nights, I had applied for five-day visas for myself and my travelling companion. On entering the country a chitty was stapled into each of our passports, which had to be validated at each hotel we stayed in. It was only after our first night that I realised that the way the chitty was being annotated used up a day of its validity for each calendar day that we were in the country. So although we would be staying for five nights, we would be in the country on six calendar days, so in theory our visa would expire the day before we were due to leave. That morning we enquired at the Čedok tourist office, who told us that there was a process for changing a visa which cost money and involved a visit to government offices. As we envisaged this taking up a large chunk of our time in Prague, we decided not to bother and we chose to risk the consequences of overstaying our visa by a day.
We walked into the centre of Prague via the Powder Tower and into the Old Town Square. We were standing outside the Old Town Hall, with its famous astronomical clock, having established that unfortunately it was not open for tours that day, when a door by where we were standing opened and a Czech group who were waiting nearby were beckoned in. We tagged along behind them and got a free tour of the Town Hall, conducted entirely in Czech.
After leaving the Old Town Hall we went via the Jewish Quarter to the Hradčany castle area. We spent some time exploring the various parts of the castle, including the window from which the Defenestration of Prague occurred, which led to the Thirty Years War.
After lunch in the castle we made our way down the hill calling in at St Nicholas Church and the the church of Our Lady of Victory on route. Then across the Charles Bridge to visit Wencelas Square. Later in the day we went back to the railway station to book tickets for our remaining journeys in Czechoslovakia.
We spent another night in the Hotel Flora, where once again we had dinner and drinks.
Tuesday 17th September 1985
We got up fairly early to catch the 8:20am train from Prague to Bratislava, having first bought supplies in a local supermarket for lunch on the journey. Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia, which in 1985 was just a province within Czechoslovakia, rather than the independent country that it is now. The train we caught was the Balt-Orient Express which had through carriages from Berlin to Bucharest. The train left Prague on time but got progressively more late on its journey to Bratislava via the Moravian city of Brno. It eventually arrived in Bratislava at 2:55pm, an hour late.
One sometimes forgets how hard it was to find out information in the days before the Internet. Therefore, I was very pleased to have discovered in a second-hand bookshop, not long before departing on this holiday, a Bratislava tram map which I had brought with me. Armed with this tool, I was confident that I could navigate us to our hotel quickly. We boarded a tram which I thought would take us right there, but after a couple of stops it became obvious that the tram was not following the route on my map. We got off and crossed the road to get a tram to take us back to the station. When we got there and studied the tram information boards more closely it was apparent that the tram routes in Bratislava had been completely renumbered since the map that I had acquired had been published.
After eventually getting to our hotel, we set off to explore the city. We visited the town square, St Michael’s Gate, the Apothecaries Museum, St Martin’s Cathedral and finally Bratislava Castle. The castle is perched on a hill with a commanding view over the Danube. The picture below is taken from the same spot as the one I took 32 years later which is used as the header photo for this blog.
Not a great deal of the castle’s interior was accessible – I just recall a couple of rooms inside the main gate which had a re-creation of an alchemist’s workshop.
Wednesday 18th September 1985
We returned to Prague again on this day, again having bought lunch for the journey in a supermarket. Our train was the 9:22am Hungaria which conveyed carriages from Budapest to Berlin and from Belgrade to Prague. It was 35 minutes late departing from Bratislava and failed to make up any time on its journey, eventually arriving in Prague at 3:20pm, 45 minutes late.
This time for our second stay in Prague we were assigned the Hotel Olympik, a modern tower block a couple of stops on the metro from Prague’s main station. It was a fairly soulless place, without the character of the Hotel Flora where we had stayed earlier. I think we just decided to spend the rest of the day getting some exercise by going for a walk in a park near the hotel.
After dinner in the hotel, we went out to find a local pub for drinks. The beer in this establishment was considerably cheaper, and slightly weaker, than than that available in the hotel.
Thursday 19th September 1985
After doing a bit of shopping around Wencelas Square, we caught the 11:20am train to Pilsen. It arrived in Pilsen at 1:30pm, about 10 minutes late.
We spent the afternoon looking round Pilsen, which seemed much less lively than either Prague or Bratislava, finishing up visiting the Brewing Museum at the Pilsner Urquell brewery. It was not possible to look round the current brewery, but the museum gave a good description of the brewing process and the history of the brewery since it was founded in 1842. After we had finished at the museum we adjourned to a small pub next door and sampled the locally brewed Pilsner Urquell. I’m not sure if it is psychological, but beer in the brewery tap always seems to taste better than that consumed elsewhere.
We then checked in at the hotel we had been assigned for our stay in Pilsen. I had slight worries that since, as described above, our visas expired that day there may have been problems checking in for an overnight stay. I need not have worried, as by this stage the chitty that had been stapled in our passport on arrival in the country was by now an illegible mess of scribbles and stamps from the hotels that we stayed in previously. We had dinner and drinks in the hotel. After dinner we carried on drinking beer in the restaurant, but after a while a musical entertainment was begun. Bizarrely, once the music started they refused to serve any more beer, saying that only spirits were now available. The combination of the music and the lack of beer was enough to deprive them of our further custom.
Friday 20th September 1985
Prior to catching the 9:47am departure to Munich, my travelling companion spent the remaining Czech Crowns we had, as we were not allowed to take them out of the country. He bought a small porcelain cat for his young niece and a 1986 calendar with each month illustrated with a different vegetable.
Reflecting on our time in the two countries, communist Czechoslovakia was different in nature to East Germany. Although it too had an oppressive state security service, its presence was less obvious. The city centres seemed to have more character, maybe as a result of not being destroyed and rebuilt after the second world war. In general, shops seemed to be better stocked than they had been in East Germany.
The train we caught had a lengthy halt at the Czech – West German border. The stop here was not at a station, but in an area surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers which was patrolled by armed guards, some of whom had dogs. The searching of our compartment was the most thorough that I had experienced at any border crossing. After rummaging through our belongings, the border troops then started to dismantle the seats to check that there was nothing or nobody hidden in the cavity underneath. Despite the thoroughness of the searching, the border officials failed to notice that we were leaving the country a day after our visas had expired. The requirement to get the documentation stamped each night did not marry up with the space available, so it seemed rather self-defeating if the final document was almost completely unreadable.
We arrived in Munich at 3:50pm. We had pre-booked a hotel in Munich, as it was the opening night of the Oktoberfest and we expected the city to be busy. In the pre-Internet age this involved posting in advance an International Money Order, obtained from a Post Office in the UK, to the hotel.
After a wander around the Marienplatz and Englischer Garten, we had dinner in a city centre beer hall. After dinner we made our way to the Oktoberfest site, where further beer was consumed, while marvelling at the number of steins the servers could carry at one go.
Saturday 21st September 1985
After breakfast we made our way to the Hauptbahnhof to meet a mutual friend of ours who had travelled overnight from London. Once we had successfully rendezvoused, the three of us made our way to the Olympic Park to visit the site of the 1972 Olympic Games.
From there we went to the nearby BMW museum with its collection of cars that the company had made over the previous century.
We then travelled to the edge of the city to visit the Nymphemburg Palace, former home of the kings of Bavaria, situated in an extensive park.
Our friend who had joined us today was a bit of a Germanophile and said he knew of a good restaurant in Munich which he would takes us to for dinner that evening. When we got there, I discovered that it was the same restaurant that I had visited on my previous visit to Munich as part of my 1983 Interrail trip. I think I may even have had meatloaf to eat again.
After dinner we paid another visit to the Oktoberfest, visiting a different brewery’s tent to the one we had frequented the previous night. We could not stay there too long, as we had a train to catch. We said farewell to our friend who was just starting his holiday in Germany and made our way to the Hauptbahnhof to catch the 9:14pm departure to Ostend.
We had booked couchette spaces on this train. It was obvious that many of those boarding the train had spent much of the day at the Oktoberfest. The first stop, after about 40 minutes, was Augsburg, where many of the more inebriated passengers were due to get off, but I wondered how many were over-carried and to where?
Sunday 22nd September 1985
We arrived in Ostend at 9:35am – I don’t think I slept particularly well as the train had made frequent stops at stations throughout the night. We had decided to catch the Jetfoil service which left an hour later than the boat which met our train, but arrived in Dover 20 minutes earlier. This allowed time for us to have breakfast in Ostend.
As the Jetfoil was a little late in arriving in Dover, the time advantage over the boat was even less, but the connecting train waited and departed before the one meeting the boat. We arrived at London Victoria at 2:50pm, where I said farewell to my travelling companion. I made my way home with the knowledge that I needed to get ready to go to work the following day.
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