Over the past two weeks, I’ve had two amusing encounters with the German police.

On one day, I was riding my bike along my usual route. It turned out that part of the road was closed due to construction, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it. After riding about 100 meters, bang!, a female police officer stops me and starts speaking in German. I ask her to switch to English, and she calmly explains that due to the roadworks, you’re not allowed to ride there and shows me where I can take a detour.

On August 19th, there was a supermoon, and I wanted to photograph it in Treptower Park. The idea was to capture the moon behind the Soviet War Memorial. So I went there during the day to scout out the best spot. I should mention that my photography gear isn’t the most professional, but it might look that way from a distance: tripod, camera, 300mm lens. About five minutes later, two police officers approached me and started asking what I was doing there and if I was shooting for commercial purposes. I explained about the supermoon and that at most, I’d post the photo on my little blog. The guys said they had no issues with what I was doing but warned me that the monument and park are under Russian control, and if “they” (it wasn’t entirely clear who exactly) don’t like my photos, “they” might ask me to delete them. I hope it won’t come to that :/ Below is the supermoon photo I took that evening.

A few short observations from the trip to Istanbul.

Food

The food here is either extreeemely sweet, or tastes of lamb. It doesn’t matter whether you order chicken, fish or even vegetables — it tastes of lamb.

Service in restaurants

The first case happened in a restaurant downtown. A waiter brings a meal to a customer and accidentally drops it on the floor. He quickly picks up all the fallen parts from the floor, puts them back to the plate, looks around to make sure that the guest hasn’t seen this incident and brings him the meal. 10 minutes later a similar incident occurrs! Another waiter at the same place drops a similar meal on the floor! This time, however, the customer saw it and refused to eat the food from the floor. The waiter, for about 10 minutes, tried to convince the guest that nothing bad had happened and the fallen parts of the meal are not even edible and could be put to one side.

The second case happened in another restaurant which is located a few kilometres away from the downtown. After the lunch we asked for our bill but it seemed that the cash register wasn’t working. A waiter wrote down the amount from memory on a piece of paper. Our first thoughts were: they are going to cheat us, but before we paid the bill they fixed the cash register and it turned out that initially they wanted 200 Liras less from us than we should have paid.

Btw, it’s enough to go only 2-3 kilometres away from the main tourist routes and prices in restaurants will be 2-3 times cheaper.

Hammam

A Turkish sauna isn’t as hardcore as a Russian one: the temperature is lower and the humidity is higher. But you spend more time in the sauna (15-20 minutes), and that’s more than enough to warm you up from the inside out. Nice experience.

Cats

You can’t talk about Istanbul without mentioning street cats. They are literally around every corner. Both tourists and locals feed them and the cats here are calm and confident. They allow themselves to be petted. They boldly and sometimes brazenly jump onto the laps of tourists sitting in street cafes and may even demand feeding!

The html representation of this blog is built using the Hugo static sites generator and theme Frühling that I created by myself for this blog. Recently, I’ve published this theme under the MIT licence on themes.gohugo.io and on GitHub. So, now anyone can reuse it for their own blog. A simplified demo version of the blog built with this theme is available on GitHub Pages.

Olya and I went to Prague for a couple of days, below are a few short notable things from that trip.

Transport

The first thing I want to mention is not about Czech Republic but about Germany. I probably won’t ever stop marvelling at how terrible the railway system works here. The information system in Germany’s railway stations tells you exactly in which section of the platform to wait in order to get the correct carriage. Very convenient! Except the cases when the train arrives in reverse order and you have to run from one end of the platform to the other in 2 minutes before the train departs. No carriage with the number on your ticket? Well, sometimes it happens, passengers will somehow sort it out. You have bought two tickets for neighbouring seats, but the train with a different carriage arrives and now you are sitting across the aisle four rows from each other. Who cares?

Cities

The second thing, which was really highlighted to me, is not about Prague, but about Berlin. Berlin is, without exaggeration, — the dirtiest city in Europe I’ve ever been to, whereas Prague, at least its centre, is one of the cleanest cities. In Berlin, you slowly get used to the trash, cigarette butts and other traces of human life scattered everywhere, but it is especially noticeable after you have travelled to other European cities.

Food

I spent quite a lot of time in Prague in 2014 and 2017, therefore this time we didn’t do much sightseeing (though, apparently, we went to Charles Bridge and Staroměstské náměstí) and mostly focused on the local cuisine. The most popular local meal is a pork knee but its disadvantage is that it has almost the same taste everywhere. However, pork ribs have a specific authentic recipe in each restaurant. The number 1 pork ribs, in my personal opinion, are cooked in the restaurant Lavička. They are marinated in a honey sauce and served with horseradish, barbecue sauce and crispy croutons. Delicious caramelised crust, soft tender meat that separates easily from the bone… mmm… ich mag das. You should eat this meal oooonly with your hands, it’s muuuch tastier in this way :)

The first time I tasted these ribs in this place was during my first visit to Prague 9 years ago and since then the taste hasn’t changed a bit. But it’s times like these when you don’t want there to be any changes.

Despite the fact that pork knees have relatively the same taste in all places, here I also have my own favourite place from 2014, it’s the restaurant U Balbínů. Here they serve this meal with pickled onions and cucumbers. Pork meat, to my taste, is too fatty and the pickles here create a perfect balance: on the one hand they suppress this sticky fatty taste left in your mouth by the meat, but on the other hand the meat eliminates the acidity created by the pickles, in case you ate too many of them. The knee itself here is literally enormous, it may easily weigh more than 1 kilogram, so, it’s safe to order for two.

To add to that, when talking about local food it would be a crime not to mention the Wenceslas sausage — a hot-dog in which they use a chopped meat sausage instead of regular one. Yummy. Earlier, in 2014, in Prague’s downtown there were plenty of kiosks where such hot-dogs were served. These days, for some reason, they’ve been removed and you now can only find Wenceslas sausages in a few small restaurants where this street food is to go.

Currency exchange

In 2014 in Prague’s downtown there was an obscenely large number of currency exchange kiosks with predatory Euro to Czech Krone exchange rates. Now they also exist, but their number has reduced significantly, I stumbled upon only 2 of these, where the exchange rate was about 16 Krones to 1 Euro whereas the official exchange rate is about 23. The fact that the number of such scummy exchangers has been reduced is a big advantage, but tourists still have to be careful.

Massage

In Prague’s downtown there are still a lot of Thai massage salons with prices starting from 9.99 Euros per session. I can’t imagine what kind of service they provide for this price, highly unlikely to be anything valuable. Apart from such fishy salons you can find those where a massage costs more or less an adequate amount of money. For example, in 5 minutes by foot from the Wenceslas Square (in other words, the heart of the city) an hour of a good Thai oil-massage costs 1000-1200 Krones (50-60 Euros) and in the salon Leela, 4-5 tram-stops from the downtown, 700-800 Krones. By the way, from the 2014 prices Leela’s have remained almost the same.