Goodbye Berlin. Hello Deutsche Bahn and a marathon cross-country train ride.

The phenomenon of reserving train seats in Germany is a curious one. Because we are happy to pay inflated prices for fast train connections but not willing to part with the required €1.50 to reserve seats, Wilken and I tend to join the throngs of harried travellers who get shunted from seat to seat every time the rightful owners turn up.

The ultimate seats are those facing each other over a table – which on German trains have power outlets for the important business commuter or, in Wilken’s case, Starcraft-playing square-eyed nerds – and now, on account of his gammy knee, our search for seats must be even more precise. Table seats but with just a single seat on one side, if you please, so said gammy knee can be comfortably outstretched.

Given that at the best of times it’s a rare find to get even two seats – not next to each other, mind – in cattle car class, we’re really after the holy grail of train travel.

But today we hit paydirt, and though we spent six bated hours fearing that at any moment the displaced Bochum to Magdeburg reservees might show, we emerged nonetheless wholly satisfied with ourselves.

See? Who needs seat reservations, we say. Not us.

As they say, a pic speaks a thousand words, and who can best express the differences between European cultures better than a bunch of cartoon pac-men looking things. I was after one of these about all those little ‘dearly-loved’ German things that Germans do – you know, that whole up at dawn to spread a beach towel on the pool recliner, that sort of thing. But I’ve gone and stumbled across this Italian number now, and it’s spot on. Couldn’t resist.

Today we stumbled across an Aussie bar, ‘Corroborree’, in Berlin, with Fosters flags proudly flying above the tables and the menu boasting specialties such as cheese on damper, macadamia bruschetta and baked potato with kangaroo fillet. The back leaf of the menu even explained ‘the word corroborree is still today a synonym for celebrations and festivities intended purely for relaxation and entertainment’ (??).

But so what if they spelt the word kangaroo differently every time it appeared in the menu - they had cheesecake! True blue, mouth-watering baked cheesecake. The Europe-wide quest I’d begun way back in 2005 had finally come to fruition.

We were tempted to ask for the manager and explain that as Australian ambassadors all the way from downunder we’d need a free sample of everything on the menu, just to check for authenticity, but instead we settled for two helpings of cheesecake (yes, that’s cake as a dinner subsitute - how naughty).

And then, it came. Perfect, jumbo triangle slices. Enough for four people in one serving. Blissful, baked cookie-crumble base. I took a tiny nibble from the side, savouring the delicious goodness of -

NOOO! NOT AGAIN! But yes. It was imposter cheesecake. Matter of fact, it wasn’t cheesecake at all. Just like the last time I thought my quest had come to a happy end, way back in Paris, it was….oh, I can barely say the word. Yes - flan. FLAN.

The mortal enemy of cheescake lovers. The evil imposter that poses as cheesecake until you take that first bite, then - BAM - it’s all custardy.

One day though, I swear it. One day I will complete my quest for cheesecake. Oh no, it’s not over.

My Berlin obsession has been rekindled by my sister’s visit to the capital. I’m now sidling up to random people on the street and begging them to give me a job or a place to live here.

Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but I am genuinely obsessed with Berlin. Today we took the same guided walking tour I did with a friend a few weeks back, and this time I was the dorky loser who got to put my hand up every time he said ‘So, who knows what this is…?’

But our guide himself admitted it’s his own obsession with German history that sees him still here three years after arriving in 2002 for a three-week holiday - he used to sidle up to people on the street and murmur ”Uh huh, Brandenburg Gate right there, built in 1871′…So anyway, after my second arrest for doing this I thought I should really try my hand at being a legitimate tour leader…’

In the evening we go to see an exhibition of Near East and Islamic art, which is quite impressive, if for no other reason than it appears a bunch of excavators had pretty much just nicked a huge number of monumental chunks of palace walls, statues and altars from their original sites in Syria and Iran and dumped them in a Berlin museum.

Finders keepers I guess.

I’m about to make an announcement, so sit down, please. Really – it’s for your own safety. Here goes: I do believe I enjoy book shopping more than clothes shopping. There, I’ve said it.

Today I spent five and a half blissful hours traipsing around Berlin trying to find a bookshop that would knock a few bucks off the price of a bestseller. It wasn’t about the money, not really – but the satisfaction you get from buying something you really want is multiplied infinitely when you get what you really want for a bargain price. Anyone’s who’s ever bought a stereo out the back of a truck knows what I’m talking about.

Anyway, it all started at Dussmann’s on Friedrichstrasse, where I found exactly what I wanted within six minutes of embarking on my mission (Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day, to be precise, which is all about the cock-ups you make learning a new language, like asking for the tellers in a German bank and naively thinking teller might actually mean teller, not a piece of crockery. More fool me.).

Thinking that it couldn’t possibly be over as soon as it had started, I readjusted the objective of my mission to encompass not just finding the book but finding the cheapest version in Berlin.

Now, I know you’re probably thinking I should rename this Diary of a Cheapskate, but I’m pleased to impart that in fact I had no qualms about shedding piles of dough on Berlin’s inordinately expensive subway to get to far-out bookshops in still unknown locations.

Indeed, when I finally found my sought-after little number tucked away in a Ku’damm alley for the bargain price of €9.53 (a good 37 cents cheaper than the Dussmann’s original), I was well pleased with myself. What with inflation, interest and what-not, I’ll be darned if that’s not nearly one Aussie dollar. Mission accomplished.

As I discovered after having folded all my knickers up out of sheer boredom, the day had been far more eventful than I’d thought. Wilken had spent his day diligently handling a number of taxing issues that had, unbeknownst to me, arisen in the kitchen.

The first incident had to do with the stash of snacks I’d bought in preparation for our next trip. Willy had neatly laid them out on the kitchen bench with a handwritten note saying, in English (and hence mostly for my benefit, as opposed to the houseful of brothers) “Don’t eat”.

Despite this careful measure, at least one bar of chocolate (the one with the caramel and honeycomb layers) had mysteriously fallen prey to thieves.

Having spent half his day on the hunt for the wily burglar, Wilken had at last given up and spent the next half of the day bracing himself to break the news to me that we were minus one stuck of chocolatey goodness.

Meanwhile, little brother Carli, in a vain attempt to soften a killer hangover, had thrown some buns in the oven and turned it on heat, so to speak, then wandered off to play Call of Duty for three hours. Some time later Wilken marched in, ostensibly on the hunt for the aforementioned confectionary crook, to find the kitchen full of black smoke and the buns as black and hard as the meatballs that Frau Bruns had so meticulously prepared that morning and hidden in the back of the oven so no-one could possibly stumble across them before dinner.

Into damage control went Captain Willy, carefully assessing the damaged meatballs with a firm finger and concluding that they were indeed utterly inedible, and that the only possible solution was to butcher and pluck a full chicken in their place.

At this, I retired to the bedroom; after all, I had a chocolate bar to eat.

Berlin. Sunshine. Bits of it, anyway.

I drag Wilken out of bed at 11.30 (luckily I packed the cattle prod) to visit the Berlin flea market, or one of the many, anyway. Turns out everyone else in Berlin has the same idea, and we all have a merry time of treading on each other’s heels.

Even Wilken gets the hang of it after a while, once he’s recovered from the grave mistake of asking “What precisely are you looking for, anyway?” (I don’t know till I’ve found it, do I?) Naturally enough, I turn a few ancient books over, finger one or two dusty rugs and end up buying nothing.

Wilken, on the other hand, comes away sporting a new T-shirt that reads My Pen Is Huge (get it?) and a 1937 Mickey Mouse cartoon which appears to have been sold for a song but, as the inside back cover so tellingly indicates, was in fact printed in 1985.

The evening starts out rather pinkish, and I don’t mean metaphorically. We catch the S-Bahn to Rosenthalerplatz station and amble the length of Rosenthalerstrasse to a restaurant in the Rosenhof that is, fittingly, decked out in pink. I have a pink margherita with my scampi linguini that itself is arrestingly sauced in pink.

Then we walk two blocks, four flights of stairs and over a short overpass – I don’t remember the colour of any of these – to get to a comedy show where we are seated in, um, blue chairs.

Before leaving Guilin we toyed part seriously with the idea of staying and working in the hotel there for a time. We have a lot to offer, we thought, what with Wilken’s hospitality experience and my unmatched bed-making skills.

But we didn’t, on account of him not wanting his folks to be jailed for killing him for putting off his studies, and because I decided to pass on a year of stowing used loo paper in the bin to preserve the precious sewerage system.

Besides, Europe awaited. China to Germany via Gatwick and Luton.

Wait a minute. Gatwick AND Luton?

Yes, we are indeed such tightasses that we took the cheapest flight there was – one of those where you have to swipe a credit card for the luxury of a life jacket and pay by the hour in the event of using a lifeboat – with little thought as to subtleties such as airport location and what it takes to travel from one to the next.

A 12-hour flight took us to the motherland, where £20 and a 3-hour bus ride later we realised that London Luton was not really in the vicinity of anywhere, even Luton, and probably should be renamed Far Side of England Luton.

We passed the journey by idly people watching, and at one point Wilken remarked casually that he could see where my roots came from. Yes, my scalp, I said. Boo-boom. But what he meant was that apparently I and everyone else of pure British blood have spindly legs and prominent foreheads.