I decided to transit at Belarus – it´s ok if you have to look on an Europe map where this country is – and Poland without sightseeing. My two days train journey will bring me directly to the German capital city Berlin.
At the train station in St. Petersburg I first time realized that Switzerland is coming closer! To my surprise the railway clocks are the same as we have back home.
I shared the train compartment with two Russians who were travelling to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, where the train was reassembled with carriages which arrived from Moscow. During the stop, women were selling berries and pre-cooked food (mainly potatoes) on the platform.
I was lucky once again with the weather during my journey, but the scenery in Belarus was quite boring. There were a lot of old factories from the old Soviet time along the railway track, which were looking really run down.
In Brest, the border city to Poland we had to change the railway boggies to the smaller Western Europe gauge. Even I had witness this process already at the China – Mongolia border some weeks back, it was still impressives.
Back at the railway station the passport control took place, what took an other hour. I got some serious trouble with the custom officier, who told me that there is no registration in the computer system with the tourist police from St. Petersburg, what means that my hotel didn´t register me. He wanted to bring me to the local police where I should pay a fine of 400 Euro. I was not worried as the officer gave me my passport back after it was stamped. Luckily the time was on my side and the officer had to leave the train as it started to roll off slowly. I guess he tried his luck on me to earn some extra pocket money.
While approaching Warzawa, endless agriculture land was passing by my train window. The train attendant asked me to close the cabin compartment with all three (!) locks on the door while being in Poland.
When I woked up the next morning, the train reached the German boarder. I thought great, only three more hours to Berlin. Unfortunately the German loco driver were on strike that morning and nothing was going any more. Without information we were waiting at the boarder for hours. The Russian travellers joked about the western democracy and called the Germans lazy…….
With several hours delay I finally reached Berlin, only to find out that my hostel gave away my bed because I didn´t show up earlier.
