5:30 am opens the café/bakery in the steel cookers’ town Eisenhüttenstadt, even on Sundays. But we arrive there at 8 am to have our breakfast.

“Sure, steel is still cooked here” confirm two ladies. The ensuing conversation refresh my vague memories from my school time: Eastern Germany had no steel factories after the WW2, so a new high furnace works including an adjacent workers’ town has been designed, built and named “Stalin town” in early 1950’s. Once Stalin passed away, the town was renamed to amusingly sounding Eisenhüttenstadt = Iron-Hut-Town. Arcelor Mittal owns now the steelworks, but the paragon socialist spirit is still present. Not just the buildings but also a huge ingot in the city centre bears the sign
“Steel will always be cooked here!”
Let see what the Arcelor Mittal CFO will add to it…

“We do not get the tip if you pay with the card” Reminiscent but almost omnipresent here. Anyway cash always comes handy. At least for making good waiters rewarded and smile.

“Jut” tells me a hotel owner when I tease her by questioning how is the reputation of her restaurant. “Jut”, pronounced as “yoot”,  is what you hear in Brandenburg instead of the standard German “gut” (good). I like it, so we stay in the hotel restaurant for dinner. A fabulous taste of the local slow food. Really fabulous and really slow, since the dinner took three hours. Two and half of them by keeping us hungry.

Long days in the North. Compared to Vienna the Sun is shining almost one hour more. But even the long lovely days come eventually to an end. Like this one when we did 95 km and enjoys the endless calm of the Oder Natural Park.