We’d been looking forward to Berlin. The capital city of one of the world’s great economic powers is an interesting place to kill an hour or two.

The sheer size of the station was the first thing that struck us. Brodos was visibly impressed by how clean and posh it was. We found the main entrance and gasped again at the size - both of the structure we had just left and of the city sprawling out in front of us.

We headed off towards some more large buildings before parking ourselves on the lawn in front of the Reichstag. We didn’t know it was the Reichstag at that point, but whatever it was, it was massive. Everything in Berlin was massive.

We set off again after a few minutes. Heading under the Brandenburg gate, we trundled down an incredibly expensive looking street, enjoyed being sneered at by a haughty hotel doorman - I wish I’d paid attention at school so I could have become a doorman - and barely stifled our sheer delight at spotting the ostentatious looking Russian embassy. We wondered if they might let us stay there.

I haven’t really mentioned just how much we had been speaking in Russian accents. It had started in Finland with an offhand reference to a long-standing Internet joke about Russia. It runs along the lines of “In Soviet Russia, car drive you,” or, “In Soviet Russia, hat wear you,” or, “In Soviet Russia, book read you,” and can be applied to almost any activity, providing an endless stream of entertainment until somebody involved starts to find it annoying. It says something about the simplicity of the minds of Brodos and myself that this same joke had sustained us for 10 days.

It had developed, quite swiftly, into simply speaking with a bad Russian accent. Iscaria had tolerated this during our stay in Finland - indeed his approach to most of what we did was best described as tolerance - while in Sweden, Morani dismissed it with a sigh whenever it surfaced. Maddok and Aakarp had joined in to some extent, which Morani’s tutting only served to render more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, this running joke began to fizzle out in Germany. For we were travelling further into areas where a terrible impression of a Russian had a decent chance of being construed as a terrible impression of a local. And so we never braved the Russian embassy in Berlin and thus never discovered whether we were proficient enough to convince genuine Russians.

We wouldn’t have been able to spend the night there anyway. In Soviet Russia, of course, embassy sleep in you.

The time had come to turn around. We hadn’t reached Brodos’ desired destination of Checkpoint Charlie, which isn’t surprising given that his plan for locating it involved little more than simply expecting it to appear in front of us. We saw some military action nonetheless, shambling past the American embassy. Abandoned terraced houses beside it looked to be straight out of World War Two and it was guarded on all corners by armed policemen.

We’re not used to guns in Britain, so spying people with weaponry automatically makes us feel like we’re in a film.

The US flag was clear to see, but I asked a bunch of policemen what the building was just to check. I wondered if they might think I was a terrorist - such things tend to flash through your mind when approaching men with guns - but the collective expression on their faces revealed that they just thought I was an idiot. The friendliest one told me the embassy would be moving very soon and joked that we might like to buy the current building.

Jokes generally leave all their merits dangling on the fence when they cross the language barrier, but I chuckled pleasantly nonetheless. Before detonating my suicide belt.

We ambled off back to the station - pausing to indulge in some forbidden photography of the embassy, with pathetic results - and reached the platform on time. We dumped our bags on the ground, funnelled some euros into a snack machine in the interests of international confectionery research and awaited the train to Vienna.

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I walked up to the counter, flashed a winning smile and delivered my line in a half-arsed accent. It meant nothing to the ticket girl, who looked at me with the uncertain curiosity with which you might regard something which had just fallen out of your nostril. “I speak English,” she said. So we spoke English.

That was fortunate, because when I handed over the little piece of paper I had written all our train times on, figuring this would be easier than reading them out, she pointed out that our train to Berlin had left ten minutes ago. It turned out we had only had 30 minutes to waste in Hamburg, not an hour and a half as I had believed.

Luck was on our side, though. There was another train, leaving in 20 minutes or so, which got us to Berlin not much later than the one we had missed. Which makes for a boring story now, but was quite a relief at the time.

When we had finished the transaction, Brodos asked the counter girl to show him her tongue piercing. I hadn’t spotted it, but he, like all pierced people, had had a metal detector installed in his head along with his first chunk of steel which enabled him to spot others of his kind at 50 feet. She stuck her tongue out briefly and bashfully, blushed a little and smiled.

Brodos 1, Pixelsmith 0. Five years of German? Screw you, school. You gave me nothing.

We nipped outside to get a gorgeous random German lady to take our photograph, bought some bread products - my German skills again prompting befuddlement and disgust from the sales assistant - and then headed to the platform.

Our train arrived, and we began walking down the platform to our carriage. This proved tough, as the vehicle had been assembled by a madman, with the numbers of consecutive carriages fluctuating from 21 to 24 to 3 and back to 22 as we plodded past them. We eventually gave up the search and just climbed onto the train, then wandered down the carriages - fretting faintly about what kind of rules we may have been breaking unwittingly - before finally biting the bullet and sitting down on a pair of seats with no reservation tickets sticking out of them.

Ten minutes later, we realised we had stopped our search just a carriage or two short of our actual seats. We gathered up our things and relocated, before settling down to play Nintendo DS and eat some sweets. Berlin lay ahead of us, and we had two hours in which to explore it. The travelling was beginning to take its toll, but that thought kept us awake.

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When we last heard from Brodos and Pixelsmith on their European adventure, they had recently departed the home of Aakarp, in Sweden, and were heading by train to Belgrade, Serbia. We rejoin them a few hours into their trip, as they reach German terra firma.

Monday, April 28

We arrived in Hamburg. This was exciting for Brodos and for me. He’d been here before and enjoyed the vague feeling of recollection created by the station. I’d not been here before, unless I was small at the time and had forgotten it, but German was one of the two languages I studied at school - the other being French - and I was itching to try it out.

German had been my highest marked subject at GCSE level (we take around 10 of those at the age of 16) so in my head I was great at it. In fact, 12 years have passed since then, so I am actually awful. I had tried conversing with the food trolley man on the train and had barely got beyond saying “hello” and “thank you”. I’d managed about the same level of competence in Swedish after a couple of days. It was a sorry thought, that five years of concerted study of a language could wither away to such a pathetic level. The food man took pity on me and mostly spoke in English. He meant well, but he was pouring salt in the wound.

We had an hour and a half to waste in Hamburg, so we had a relaxed wander around the station. It was special by virtue of being our first proper step onto German soil, but it was otherwise unremarkable. We dawdled along to the ticket centre, hoping to reserve our place on the upcoming sleeper train from Berlin to Vienna. The queue was long, so I spent the time conjuring up a proper German sentence in my head to say to the person behind the counter. It was strangely nerve wracking.

By the time our turn came, I had constructed what I thought to be a suitably friendly opener, something along the lines of: “Ich habe nicht Deutsch gesprechen fur zwolf jahre aber wir sind freundlich.” Essentially, I was hoping that said: “I haven’t spoken German for 12 years but we’re friendly,” give or take a few glaring grammatical inaccuracies which make the speaker look like an idiot to anyone who actually speaks German.

The problem was, that’s not a normal way to greet anyone. This is what happens when you don’t know much of a language but you’re convinced you’re good at it. You’re too proud to just use the basics - “hi….ticket…bye” - but too short on vocabulary to have a proper conversation, so you build what you can out of the pitiful selection of available parts. I didn’t even really want to say how long it was since I’d spoken German, or that we were friendly. I just couldn’t remember much else.

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This is another thing planned for my newspaper column, about me being useless. That’s a running theme. It might be more interesting if you pretend it’s about WoW.

My lungs are full of oven cleaner. It’s raining cats and dogs outside and I’m standing on the back step coughing my head off, having just sprinted five feet from the inside of the kitchen after the noxious contents of my cooker poured themselves into my nose and mouth without warning. I only opened the door to see how things were going. I wasn’t expected to die.

Ovens present a peculiar challenge to the new homeowner. I am a new homeowner - relatively new, that is, having moved into a terraced house 12 months ago - and thus the laws of the oven still flummox me. Just how often are these things supposed to be cleaned? Their frequent climb to 240ºC must destroy anything too dangerous, so the answer depends on how much you dislike smoke, how many black crusty bits you can ignore and how long you can put up with all your food tasting like burnt chips. Fortunately my tolerance is pretty high.

The problem with this laissez faire approach is that the task becomes increasingly nasty over time. Tackle it early and the worst can be removed with elbow grease and a damp cloth. Leave it too late and you need a hand grenade. And so, deducing that my oven would indeed require military-grade hardware, I equipped myself with a cylinder of “serious” oven cleaner, which is essentially a hand grenade in a can. Then, with room ventilated, I held my breath, knelt down and decorated the walls of my oven with caustic foam.

30 minutes later I was getting bored. The can advised a half hour minimum for its fearsome contents to get to work, so I headed back into the breach for a status update. With the closed door of the cooker keeping the horrors contained within, the kitchen seemed disarmingly safe. I leaned down, opened the hatch and took a look.

It was like poking my head inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus. Toxic fluff coated the walls, dripping ominously and gradually turning brown. Involuntarily I took a tiny breath in. Big mistake. Acrid fumes began storming my airways like a squadron of microscopic Spitfires. I slammed the door shut and raced outside, choking with the unbridled enthusiasm of a man who has just inhaled an anthill. I could feel my life expectancy contracting in front of my eyes. This was definitely not healthy.

A few minutes passed before I mustered the courage to return. Exercising more caution this time - rubber gloves and regular trips to the window for refills of fresh air - I wiped down the irradiated cooker with the delicacy of a bomb disposal unit. The final result was disappointing. The foam came out browner than it went in, implying progress had been made, but the ultimate state of the post-nuclear oven was distressingly close to its pre-war appearance. Perhaps some of the crusty bits were a bit smaller.

In the end, I threw my oven cleaner away - presumably shortening the lives of numerous binmen in the process - then bought something which didn’t look like the chemical by-product of a terrifying industrial process. It worked very well.

Hopefully it’ll still be working when it’s next time to clean the cooker. In about two years.

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We’re beginning to feel incredibly sorry for the landline phone. Our walk home from work takes us past a phonebox bearing the message “20 minutes to any landline for just 40p.” It’s a cold, dirty phonebox and it smells of wee. We’d require at least £10 wired directly to our Swiss bank account before we’d even set foot inside, let alone stay for 20 minutes.

And that’s coming from someone who can remember a time when we used to actively seek phoneboxes out for communicating with others while “on the go.” Heaven knows what kids born in the last decade think they’re for. Tramps, probably. Tramps and weeing.

When the public face of the landline is as depressing as that, it’s no surprise the in house version is suffering some knock-on effects on its desirability. Sat there chained to the wall, all plastic and lumpen, its most exciting feature an LCD panel displaying caller ID and its only tune a dull, incessant and outdated “ring ring… ring ring…” It doesn’t smell of wee, but it might as well.

And it’s all thanks, of course, to the handy telecommunications device which now lives in our pocket gradually rendering us infertile with its deadly microwave radiation. It has a cutesy colour screen, it texts and takes pictures and plays music and stores lots of numbers and it has a good little try, bless it, at delivering the internet. It’s everything a landline is not.

But the landline is a hardy beast, and like a boxing prostitute, its not going to go down without a fight. Enter the Ringboxx. This unassuming looking device - currently on sale in America - plugs into your PC, lets you download ringtones onto it, then sits between your phone and the wall and plays the audio of your choice when somebody calls you.

There are thousands of tones to choose from and you can assign different ones to different numbers, so you can tell who’s calling without having to even stand up and go and look at the phone. That’s being billed as a plus point, but it does leave open the possibility of the phone ringing while you’re having sex and you knowing it’s your parents.

Very impressive, eh? Well, no, not really, it’s rubbish. It only costs about $35 - around 15p at current exchange rates - but you have to pay for the ringtones, between about $1.50 and $3, which is galling. And bearing in mind mobile phones have been doing this for 700 years now, it’s a little bit like sticking sat nav on a horse. Still, it’ll probably sell by the bucketload. The bastards.

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Hair is a powerful thing. Whether you want more of it, less of it, or simply an improved version of what you already have, it’s a very emotive topic. Put some hair on the right spot - the head, say - and the recipient instantly climbs two rungs on the attractiveness scale. But stick it to the wrong one - teeth, palms or eyeballs, for example - and the victim tumbles off the bottom of the graph entirely.

Technology has largely kept pace with the incredible world of hair, providing exciting year on year developments in the important areas of drying, removal and adjustment. And yet those seeking new hair have been left short changed. Wigs, extensions, spray-on hair and drug treatment are all viable methods of putting back what Mother Nature takes away, but none of them sound like much fun for the gadget fan. There aren’t any buttons on a wig.

But that was then. This is the future. It’s a place where crazy inventions like the Hairmax Lasercomb can become a reality. Talk about upping the stakes. Lasers - an invention whose primary function is killing aliens in space - have been tamed and contained within a small anti-baldness device. This is the bleeding edge of techno hair care, at least until someone comes up with holographic curcling tongs or a shaver that transforms into a jet ski.

So what is it? Well, according its sales pitch, it’s the only way to make yourself genuinely hairier that doesn’t involve downing drugs. That sounds pretty good - heroin is bad news - until you remember it works by shooting lasers directly into your head. That’s mental.

Although on the plus side, with a few modifications it may be possible to convert the revolutionary follicular science of the Lasercomb into some kind of deadly futuristic ray gun and then leave it near your grandparents. A little curosity on their part and flash, bang, bingo! No more Sunday lunchtimes talking about Countdown and jigsaws. If you’re really lucky, you might even get their bungalow.

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Yeah so me and the motherfucking Brodos had to get on a train and that, so we got on a train and it was all like CHOO CHOO MOTHERFUCKER like Thomas the Tank Engine but without a face and Ringo Starr.

Right so we’re on this train, and Bro’s got Vanilla Ice pumpin’ out his phone because that’s how we roll and we’re dancin’ and rappin’ and shit and it’s all good. Probably the best train we’ve been on. Then we had to get off the train and get another one, but then the first train carried on in THE SAME FUCKING DIRECTION?! We didn’t know what the hell, B to the R to the O said the driver probably didn’t like us because we’re too STREET and just pretended we had to get off that train. What a prick.

That was whack so we went and got on a motherfucking COACH and the damn Nazi coach people wouldn’t let me eat on the coach. I was all like “look motherfucker you let me eat my fucking Iced Gems and let me drink my Cherry Tango or me and my buddy here will tear shit up” and Brodos went “YEAH” really loud in the old lady’s face. It was proper cool and street and shit and we showed them bitches who’s boss (us) and then the bitch kicked us off. Fucking Nazis.

After that we tried to get a hovercraft and the dude said “NO we ain’t got hovercrafts” so we hung out at the station and had a rap battle and shit until another train came and we got on, but after the rap battle and the dance off we were tired so we had a motherfucking NAP then we woke up and watched Blazin’ Squad videos on my laptop til we got to wherever the hell it was we were going. There was some cows and that we went past and I moonied at them and was like “IN YOUR FACE COW BITCHES.”

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Technology is becoming fearsome. The nightmarish predictions of science fiction, those visions of future worlds in which every human action is monitored, processed and recorded, are creeping ever closer.

Know what the worst thing is? We’re not putting up a fight. We’re not even complaining. On the contrary, we’re embracing this downward spiral to dystopia with open arms and wide grins. We’re turning to our friends in the street, whipping our phones out of our pockets and saying: “Hey, guess what - this thing knows where I am!”

OH MY GOD. IT KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE. Have we thought this through? No, no we haven’t. Instead, we bimble around like the bipedal ants that we are, cheerily keying our personal data into every electronic device that allows it on the blind assumption that this is a good thing, that our lives will be incomplete until our mp3 player matches music to our heartbeat, our television predicts precisely what we want to watch and our sandwich toaster knows our favourite brand of marmalade and preferred sexual position. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Perhaps that’s a little negative. Because whether you like it or fear it, there are some substantial benefits to this terrifying trend.

Sat nav is one area of gadgetry with plenty to gain. It has already granted us the ability to dispense with decision making and forethought while driving, as long as we don’t mind that an orbiting spaceship knows our exact location.

But the TomTom GO x40 LIVE goes a step further. Firstly it sucks up a bundle of traffic jam information, generating a live map of known congestion points. Second, it predicts how long it expects a drive through said hotspots would take. Finally, it combines all the data with the co-ordinates of your car and your destination, and works out a constantly updated ideal route.

That’s all pretty amazing. But the scary part is step two. Just how, you might ask, does TomTom work out the journey time through these constantly changing clogged-up roads? The answer is mobile phones. Specifically, the system charts the progress of vehicle-based phone owners in these hotspots who have stated they don’t mind being observed. They’re anonymous, obviously, little more than blobs of data analysed for the good of those wishing to pay TomTom’s £10 monthly LIVE subscription.

It’s the kind of astounding innovation that makes you feel insignificant and paranoid at the same time. If you’re that way inclined.

For the sake of completeness, we should point out that the service has just come to the UK after cropping up in the Netherlands last year, is available from £300 on the TomTom GO 940 LIVE, 740 LIVE and 540 LIVE (plus that subscription after three months) and also comes with details of fuel prices, speed cameras and a Google local search to find out a bit more about wherever you’re headed.

We have to admit, we’d absolutely love one, if we ever left the shed. As things stand, we’re so busy converting the place into an underground bunker that we’re not seeing much of the outside world. Still, it’s probably seeing plenty of us. Brrr.

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