Day Three - Cologne to Berlin

I awake to find what resembles a goblin, only much fatter and uglier, stomping in his hobnail boots around the dorm when five other innocents are trying to rest. At 5am. I pull the pillow wearily over my puffy eyes and roll over.

The banging continues for another 20 minutes, and I half expect to turn around to see him hunched on the bed, like a buck-toothed incubus, with a sound effects machine noisily drilling into the morning light.

After stumbling aimlessly around the Dom last night - and scaring the bejesus out of ourselves in the process as the Gothic organ struck up and almighty chord for midnight mass - we wanted to scale the thing, all 509 steps.

(I´ve since found out that there are two bigger Cathedrals in the world: one at Ulm, in Germany and one in New York on top of a skyscraper. Which is a bit like taping a cocktail stick to the end of your willy and claiming to be the best hung of all your mates.)

As we mounted the dripping spiral stairs we positively flew past old German and American ladies who were a few desperate gasps from cardiac arrest. Around three quarters into the climb, you can see the bell tower - apparently the biggest chimers in the world, but I just donť know anything anymore. Just as Claire had positioned herself nice and close to take a close-up shot of the copper inscriptions, the bells chimed half past and nearly sent her hurtling back down the 300 steps we had just ascended.

The views from the top were obviously spectacular, but my favourite part - owing to the shape and elongation of the adjacent tower - was being able to hear every conversation that was going on in the plaza below. I felt like shouting from the rooftops, but no suitable German came to mind, profanity or proclamation.

It is a four hour train ride to Berlin, stopping at seemingly ever town on the map. The rivers of the Cologne delta drifted by and gradually conceded ground to expanses of corn and barley fields, flecked occasionally with the odd emerald Ash collection.

Arriving into Berlin's Ostbahnhof takes you through the whole of what was once the divided capital of GDR and it is a veritable who's who of landmarks, both Soviet, Allied and German. The Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor served as grandiose reminders of German past and present unity whereas the massive soviet TV tower strained skywards like a hypodermic needle.

We were met by Jonny and taken straight to Kreutzberg, where he is lucky enough to live during his Erasmus year.

Kreutzberg is Berlin's 'hippest' district, a post-anarchist area in what used to be soviet controlled East Germany. Once the place for violent and aggressively partisan demonstrations, protests and ransackings, Kreutzberg has been populated by the cities artists, writers and dilettantes after reunification.

Bars and cafes mushroom out onto the street, often not much more complicated than a set of reclaimed plastic chairs and bottled beer. It's home to the anti-capitalist communes that sprung up as the no man's land either side of the Wall fell in 1989, thanks to the Hoff. They serve as bastions of subversive and intimidating counter-culture, refusing to comply with the perceived constraints of market economy. They are scary places.

We watched Obama's JFK impersonation on a German news channel which decided to interview every black person they saw in the crowd. It's weird to think that a mile away a quarter of a million people are chanting "yes we can" at a man regrettably destined to be an American political footnote.

We go to a newly and haphazardly built bar skirting the edge of the Spree, manufactured to look like a beach with the help of several hundred tonnes of sand and a swimming pool in the middle of the river, lit up like an aquamarine jewel amid the oily black Spree.

As we settle down on some reclaimed deck chairs a heavy set German man brushes past me, removing his pants before diving naked as a baby into the icy water. Germans seem to be a lot more comfortable with their flesh than I am. With theirs.