Spider Hotel

Yesterday, Steve and I left Norway on the long drive to Berlin.

I have to say, Steve was such a champ in the car.

He got in the zone, and he just kept driving and driving. He drove a marathon 12 hours, through Norway, Sweden, the ferry to Denmark and then another 80 miles to departure point of the ferry from Denmark to Germany.

The weather, of course, was dismal: rainy and incredibly windy.

We wound up in the town of Rodby, Denmark, which was where we would catch the Denmark to Germany ferry the next morning.

We stayed in what I believe is fair to call the worst hotel in Denmark. No, in Scandanavia. This place looked like something out of The Twilight Zone, where when you enter your room you are immediately transported back to 1950.

I seriously have never seen anything quite like it: completely worn carpets and furniture and windows that looked like they had not been washed since the hotel was built.

What saved it for me was the fact that it was very clean. Because I can handle furniture from 1950, but dirt from 1950 I can do without.

The ceilings were that kind of weird corrugated metal with the millions of tiny holes in it.

As we prepared for bed we discovered that the underside of that ceiling was home to spiders. Lots and lots of spiders.

Big ones. Kind of like Daddy Long Legs, but bigger, heftier. They would crawl along the walls, or drop down on one thin web-strand from the ceiling and make their way to the floor. We killed about 5 of them, and then got in bed to read.

Steve, being exhausted, turned his light out ahead of me, and I used my little book light to read a bit longer. When I was finished reading, I did a little sweep of the room with my light to check for spiders.

There was a mosquito on the wall right behind me, and from the ceiling was hanging yet another spider, who was happily webbing its way down directly toward my pillow. As soon as my light swept over it, the spider started beating a hasty retreat back up its thread toward the ceiling, but that was it for me. There was no way I was going to go to sleep any time soon.

I just knew that as soon as my light was off, that spider was going to resume its downward journey to my pillow where it would then crawl over my face and lay eggs in my ear.

I pulled the desk chair as far away from the bed as I could so as not to disturb Steve, and I watched Back to the Future and Gilmore Girls on my laptop until 4am by which time I was so tired I couldn't remain upright and finally got in bed and fell asleep.

The advantage of Steve doing so much driving yesterday was that today we had an hour-long ferry ride followed by only about 3 1/2 hours of driving to get to Berlin.

We are staying at a terrific hotel called Louisa's Place on the Kurfurstendamm in the Charlottenburg area. We chose this hotel because it is actually apartments more than hotel rooms, and they kindly upgraded us to a huge three-room suite with bedroom, living room/kitchen and office.

Kurfurstendamm is a long street famous for its array of high-end shops. We took a stroll down it, arriving at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche (Emperor William Memorial Church). What you can see in this picture is all that is left: the tower of a once beautiful church which was bombed out during the war.

We also took the train to Potsdamer Platz and had a bit of a wander around there.

To celebrate our arrival in Berlin we sampled what is apparently a local institution: the currywurst. This is a sausage which is sliced up, sprinkled with curry powder and doused in a sauce which is kind of like HP Sauce mixed with BBQ sauce.

It was yummy, though the curry flavor was not as strong as I thought it would be.

So far, we are really enjoying Berlin, and are looking forward to spending the next few days here.

If anybody has any suggestions of places to go, eat, etc. please share!