Overbranded. That’s the only way you can describe this place. After a heavy late night last night, I could have done without Goofy on the wake up call this morning.

‘Hey hey hey, sleep head. What are you still doing in bed? There’s a busy day ahead.’

Ugh.

Still, it got me out of bed.

There are little Mickey Mouse quotes on the bars of soap. The cocktail shakers in the bar have kids’ cartoon characters on them, which is probably inappropriate. Even the toilets are ‘being cleaned for your future enjoyment’ with pictures of mop-weilding Donald and Mickey propped up in front of them.

It’s an interesting place. Our hotel is probably the most corporate of them all. It’s a bit art deco, and smart but slightly dull. The others look a lot more fun. The Santa Fe zone is peppered with crashed UFOs and rusting, desert-crashed cars. The wild west looks fairly authentic - or at least looks like the wild west of films. There are huge beavers in one of the zones, the name of which I couldn’t find.

So, despite all the branding (storage cupboards are for ‘Cast Only’), I’m quite impressed by the general look of the place, and that’s before even venturing into the park proper. I’m not sure it’s the kind of place I’d come on holiday, though.

Rusting cars litter Santa Fe…

…as do crashed UFOs

There is Mickey Mouse foam in my bathroom. That has to be a first for a press trip.

I’m still not entirely sure why Disneyland was picked as the venue for this trip, but at least it was a quick and easy scoot across on the Eurostar. Unfortunately, being the Disney Eurostar, rather than the one that cuts straight into Paris proper, it was over-run by kids, and there were the occasional mild whiffs of nappy.

It’s a subtly different experience to the regular journey to Paris. For one thing, they more or less ignore the French altogether. Whereas announcements on the British side of the Channel are usually English first and French second, then switch the order on the other, on this train they were English, English, English through and through, apart from a brief French note about the fact the doors were closing.

Needless to say, it was a noisy journey, and one where an iPod is a necessity rather than a luxury.

There’s a surprising amount of suicide nets over the lines that pass through the Magic Kingdom, although having spent 34 minutes queueing the check in, during which time only four people ahead of me were served, I was starting to understand why it might be. It was only made less amusing when the concierge sent me off around the corner to find a separate reception area for this trip, which was devoid of hacks, but overstocked by six bored-looking staff desperate to serve someone.

Still, I’m here now. The room is comfy, the tiny room safe is broken and the sun is out. I’ve just written my editorial for the current issue. The next task is to head downstairs with my iBook to try and find an open wifi point through which to send it (and upload this post).

Well, yes, it is kind of late. I’ve spent all night trying to work out a route for a journey to take next month. What is it with southern European railways? You’d think they were run by the Brits. There seems to be a bit of a no-mans patch down there where nobody talks to anyone else if they’re on the opposite side of a border.

There are also some pretty major cities that just don’t have more than one train a day, so if you want to get between them you have to take it, no matter what time it leaves or arrives. As such, it looks like I’m going to have to be up in time to catch something leaving at the ungodly hour of 04h51. I’ve hunted around to see if I can find anyone else who has done the same route and, as I suspected, anyone who has blogged about it has taken that train. So hmmm.

Rather ominously, it sounds like it’s often rather full, and as with many of these services, reservations don’t mean a whole lot at that time of night - particularly not when the people currently sitting in your seat have already been there four hours and are doing a very good impression of someone entirely comatose.

The alternative, of course, would be to take a long-distance coach, but I’m not sure I really fancy that.

Perhaps I’ll email my friends in the Welsh travel office. They seem to have a wizard-like mastery of pan-European rails that I’ve yet to beat.

What do us Brits smell of? I’d not really thought about it before, but according to a story in yesterday’s Telegraph, it’s After Eight mints.

A perfume maker in a small town in Germany has put together a smelling tour of all the nations in the World Cup, with the different smells featuring on different lamp posts.

‘We were going to give England the smell of tea,’ said Ernst-Adolf Hinrichs, a retired perfume maker who has created the smells tour. ‘But then we assigned green tea to Japan, and so England got the After Eight, a cult symbol of Englishness for Germans.’

Quite apart from the fact After Eights are Swiss, I’ve not eaten one in years. They’re made by Nestle, whose products I generally don’t buy.

They picked flat packed furniture as the smell for Sweden.

What a great contest. Admittedly it went in waves, starting out quite slow and dull, but the middle section was fantastic, with some really different songs that broke the Eurovision mold once and for all. The fact that the winners were Lordi, a metal band dressed as some creatures from a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, helped no end, as it’s broken the stereotypical cheesy, teenybop image entirely.

The UK came in a miserable 19th out of 24, which wasn’t entirely surprising, and in fairness was pretty much where we deserved to be. Naff song, naff concept, naff singer. To give Daz and the school girls their due, they did perform it quite well, but it was doomed from the start when stood beside Romania’s fantastic although close to incomprehensible song about a man having an affair, Russia’s woman-spawning piano or the man from Albania who was all bit strangled by his braces.

Germany should have scored better than it did, having bravely entered a country song, and Lithuania should have scored more poorly than it did with their abysmal We Are The Winners. Coming immediately before the UK it probably helped boost our score, although if that’s the case we should probably have scored nothing for the second year in three.

France was the big loser of the night. It scored just five points, beating only Malta (1) and Israel (4). Like Britain, Germany and Spain, though, it doesn’t need to come in the top ten to qualify for next year’s contest: we plough so much money into the EBU that we’re guaranteed a spot, so can afford to enter the kind of rubbish we do. It’s like a musical version of the UN Security Council, and should really be disbanded.

As usual, we watched it at Mark’s annual Eurovision Party, taking around food to represent each country. I submitted Spanish strawberries, Mediterranean crackers and, having had the same idea as someone else, Swiss Roll. Nobody really bought anything particularly sensible, so it was a night of key lime pie, banoffee pie, crisps and sweets. It’s as well it happens only once a year.

Our voting came pretty close to matching the leaderboard, as we put Finland at the top and France at the bottom, but Denmark was in our top five but polled 18th in real life, while we had Lithuania in the bottom five and it actually rolled home sixth.

Next year’s contest will be an interesting one. Each one is influenced by the winner of the previous year. Might Eurovision 2007 be a three-hour horror rock fest?

The second most important night of annual TV: the Eurovision semi-finals.

I was thinking it was a shame the UK didn’t have to qualify, because there was no doubt in my mind that we would have been chucked out for that embarrassing monstrosity of a song we’ve entered for Saturday’s final, but then I was pretty sure Lithuania faced a similar fate with their childish, playground-like We Are The Winners. ‘Ironically, this only works if they actually get through and then win,’ I said, sure that they never would.

But now they’re half way there.

They’re on immediately before us, which is a good thing for the UK, as it means our song can only sound better by comparison, but then we’re followed by Greece, which should trounce us once again.

As usual, I went around to watch it at Mark’s, where we’ll be having Saturday night’s party, and we marked them up all so we could text in our scores. Ukraine, Bulgaria and Slovenia were our top three, but for the second year in a row Slovenia pooped out. There must be something about the way they do songs in that country that just doesn’t gel with the rest of Europe.

Finland had the joke entry of the year - like Wig Wam of last year - with the performers in thick rubber masks and space-like costumes, looking like they’d just survived a nasty fall into some boiling radioactive pool. The song was heavy and loud and the stage filled with pryotechnics, but somehow it worked. We marked them among our highest and, fortunately, they got through, to deliver something a bit different in the final. I hope they do well.

Iceland did predictably poorly, unfortunately. I’d never liked the song before, but Silvia Night did very well singing it live, and gamely ignored all the booing from the crowd, infuriated that she’d criticised the organisation of the whole thing. Seeing as it over-ran by 20 minutes, though, she probably wasn’t entirely unjustified. If that’s any indication of how things are likely to run on Saturday, we could be in for a long night.

If it did prove one thing, it was that you need to be drawn in the second half of the contest to be in with any realistic chance of qualification or winning. Those who came up in the first 13 were very much under-represented in the final analysis, and so with us ranged in the second column for the final, I guess our chances are better than they deserve to be.

It’ll be an interesting night.

Poor old Iceland. Its Eurovision song for this year hasn’t really grabbed me, I must admit, but it’s turning out to be one of the most interesting entries so far.

Its lyrics include the words ‘I’ll fucking win’, which apart from being an unlikely prediction contravenes EBU rules as it includes a swear word.

That wouldn’t be such a problem if they hadn’t already pressed all the CDs for this year’s contest, including the offending words. Now the Union has written to the Icelandic head of delegation to point out that the use of those lyrics on the stage would leave Iceland open to disqualification.

Yet changing the lyrics would also contravene the rules, since no lyric changes can be allowed after the heads of delegation meeting six weeks ago.

So, they’re fucked if they do, and they’re fucked if they don’t.

Iceland’s official response came from Silvia Night, its singer: ‘I’ll fucking say what I fucking want!’

Rain rain rain, then grey skies. It wasn’t until gone three that it finally cleared up, so I decided to make the best of what remained of the day and head out to try and find another geocache. It didn’t go well. It was down on an old disused railway line, which has lain dormant since 1953. Quite picturesque, very green and fresh, and totally deserted, but muddy, too.

I’d taken the Chinese worry beads I’d picked up in the first cache yesterday afternoon, planning on leaving them in this cache for someone else, but despite making it to the coordinates and finding a fallen mossy log (one of the clues) I couldn’t find the cache box anywhere. I spent about half an hour tramping around in the nettles looking for it and almost slipped into a stream at one point, but had to admit defeat, and headed back to the car.

I’d arranged to meet up with Mark. There should have been a dozen of us, and we were going to watch this year’s Eurovision preview DVD, but in the end it was just the two of us, so we played Russian roulette with his videos and ended up watching A Song for Europe from 1990. Terrible songs, terrible fashion, terrible hair on Terry terrible Wogan. I can’t believe the oversized suits and nasty hairdos they all had were acceptable back then. Neither can I believe that I’m now twice as old as I was back then.

On a side note, Balazs drew my attention to the Degree Confluence Project today, on account of it having interesting parallels to geocaching. It’s a far simpler idea: simply that you visit every coordinate integer (eg N 53, W 01) and take a photo there. Every point in the UK has already been done, to produce this gallery here.

This was my fourth trip to Berlin, I think, but it was easily the best. It was cold, and as we came in to land it looked like we were coming down in a very barren, sun-scortched country. It was only when we saw that the river was frozen from side to side that we realised it was snow, not dusty earth on the ground.

Fortunately we spent a lot of time being ferried around in either buses of branded taxis. We did go out walking yesterday afternoon, though, and after heading down to the Brandenburg Gate for the benefit of those in the city for the very first time, we turned left and headed down to the enormous holocaust memorial. The last time I was here, it was still a fenced-off building site, but now this enormous expanse of land is home to 2,711 blocks of concrete, each one marking the deaths of around 2000 of the 6m Jews killed under the orders of the Nazis.

It is a very impressive construction. The blocks are all tilted slightly between 0.5 and 2 degrees, and the ground on which they are set waves up and down. Sometimes they are low, down around your knees, and at others they are so tall that they tower well above your head. The whole thing is supposed to give you a sense of disorientation. Beneath, there is a museum chronicling the unfolding disaster. It’s all understated and very well done.

I have always been very impressed by the way in which Germany does not hide from its gruesome past. I went to a museum in Bonn a few years ago that dealt with the Nazi era in some depth, and unflinching detail. It’s a shame more countries (Britain included) can’t deal with the unsavoury portions of their past in quite the same way.

It put us in sombre mood, reinforced by the film we went to see last night.

It was the premiere of The Road to Guantanamo, a very hard-hitting Film Four production about how four young Britons travel to Pakistan for a friend’s wedding and, through a series of unfortunate events, end up in Guantanamo Bay. It’s based on truth, and their treatment, shown in some detail, is shocking. Although it used only two - or perhaps three - quotes from George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, it was far more effective, and had far more impact, than Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

While walking in on the red carpet past the small group of press photographers had seemed quite fun, walking out again on the same plush strip felt highly decadent. We sat in a bar well into this morning talking about it all.

We had a city tour this morning. I’m not normally one for bus tours, but Berlin is a big place, and it’s very well spread out, so it’s more relevant here. Our narrator was excellent. He seemed to know everything about the city and its history, even though it’s only his part-time job (the rest of the time he’s a journalist). He told us all about how 20% of every new office building must be residential housing, despite the 150,000 empty apartments the city cannot fill, showed us the remaining parts of the wall and the tacky re-creation of Checkpoint Charlie, and talked us through the ‘politically contaminated’ buildings build by the Nazi Party but now used to house modern day ministries. He took us past the site of the famous Nazi book burnings, and the site of the long-gone palace (backed by the soon to be destroyed Socialist replacement put up while the city was partitioned by its wall) and then walked us up into the dome of the Reichstag, and into a restaurant on the roof, from which we could look out across the low-level city roofs.

Inside the Reichstag Dome

All in all, an excellent flying visit. There was some business, too, of course, but that’s not really the kind of thing you want to be recording on here. It’s certainly made me more keen to head back sooner, rather than later.

Well Brussels was v much fun. And I even had Brussels Sprouts, which was appropriate. They arrived disguised as an ingredient in a middle-eastern wheat and lentil dish, so I’m not entirely sure they were authentic, although they were indeed yummy. It’s far too long since I last had them.

But it was also cold. On Friday night, our first night there, it snowed harder than I have seen it in many years. It was coming down thick and fast, and being blown sideways by the fierce wind that was cutting up the wide street on which we eventually found our hotel. We had been told it was about two steps from the Grand Place, but it was more accurately two stops on the metro.

We ate far too much of the typical Brussels diet (read: fatty and very sweet), one night sharing our table with a tiny little mouse who scurried around by our feet, looking up at the table as though begging for food. We should have pointed him out to the waiter, but the last time we did that was in Vienna and now, no doubt, we have the little rodents’ death on our hands.

So, it’s still there, in one of the little eateries on a corner in the Rue des Boucheries, where we shouldn’t have eaten on account of it being a shameless tourist trap, but ended up anyway because it was recommended.

We spent Sunday in Bruges, where the town was welcoming in Fr Christmas. He arrived on a boat, ploughing slowly up one of the canals with a TV camera crew in hot pursuit as he threw sweets to the kids on the canalside. In the big central square they had erected a skating rink that was rapidly starting to thaw, with the skaters finding themselves transitioning from hard ice to wet slush almost as quickly as they simultaneously transitioned from upright gliding to horizontal face scraping, much to the delight of the sadistic onlookers.

The Eurostar, as always, was fabulous, and the people, on the whole, friendly, although the drivers could do with watching out for the crossings now and then. Particularly when there are people on them.

It’s much too long since I was last there. I hope it won’t be so long again before I’m back.