10,000 Trabants

So we are off.  My mobile has died and I am reliant on hotel wifi.

I was going to write yesterday about the asylum seekers and stacked lorries around Calais.  Ill come back to that.

But last night we ended up in the town of Duderstadt.  It is a wonderful medieval town and we stayed in the Hotel Budapest.  Owned by Hungarians from Osijek in the Former Yugoslavia.  Over slivovitz the owner told us of the day the wall came down.  He said that there were suddenly 10,000 Trabants in this town where, by his own admission, nothing happens.

We are using the 1936 Baedeker Touring Guide published for the Berlin Olympics.  It is an extraordinary and sometimes chilling thing.  Did you know that the Heil Hitler salute has taken the place of doffing ones hat?  Well according to the guidebook it has.

Tonight we are in Swidnica, which I would like to think is the Polish for Swindon.  And we are in the Red Baron Hotel named after Baron von Richthofen, the WW1 fighter ace shot down by the British, Australians, Indians, Canadians, French...take your pick.

The hotel has been refurbished with EU money.

Tomorrow is the Greek referendum and I am in a town built by the Germans and lived in by Poles and....it is time we had some bigger thoughts and discourse about Europe.