Not much travel in 2020, for obvious reasons. Instead, let me introduce you to a local flavour of Germany (or possibly just Berlin?) — Waldmeister.
Waldmeister is a commonplace soda syrup flavour in all the stores around here, tasting much the same as Play-Doh smells; once you’re over the surprise, it’s rather pleasant.
Given that I am sufficiently experimental with my cooking that even my British friends are horrified (my German friends, upon hearing my exploits, shrug and say “well obviously, you’re British, that’s expected of you”), I have decided to make a dessert with this flavour.
Ingredients
50g butter
50g sugar
15g Waldmeister soda syrup
45g plain flour
45g grated coconut
A pinch of salt
1 large egg
5g vanilla syrup
Enough cashew nuts to be interesting, exact quantity is up to you
Enough chocolate vermicelli to be interesting, exact quantity is up to you
Method
Preheat oven to 170°C (or 150°C fan)
Put the butter, sugar, and Waldmeister syrup into a small saucepan and gently warm, stirring occasionally, until the butter is melted and the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat.
Fork together the flour, coconut, and salt, then pour into the butter and sugar pan and mix with a wooden spoon or spatula until smoothly combined.
Whisk the egg (just casually with a fork is sufficient) then mix into the pan.
Mix in the nuts and the chocolate into the pan.
Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes; when it is ready it will have just started to come away at the sides.
Transfer to grease paper on a wire rack, and leave ~20-30 minutes.
Greenies, and not (despite appearances) kiwi in cake formPerfect for desert even in bite-size squares
I’m on the train to Köln, and a woman wearing a holstered gun on her hip just walked past. From her walk and her rucksack, I’d say she looked like a normal person rather than a plain clothed police officer. (Note for non-British readers: such a thing would be unheard of in the UK, as the UK has such a strong ban on guns that even police officers are not (with a few exceptions) armed).
Köln Cathedral has a lot of interesting fiddly bits on the outside, but is also covered in an incredibly ugly layer of grime. The contrast between it and the surrounding buildings is even more extreme than for similar gothic cathedrals in the UK, and the whole thing feels wildly out of place.
Köln Cathedral
My first need in the city was, as usual on this trip, to get to the hotel; so I didn’t stay long by the cathedral. The bridge to the east is both rail and foot, and its fences are covered in enough love locks to put the famous love lock bridge in Paris to shame. The city to the east was a mixture of pleasant architecture and brutalist shopping districts that would be immediately familiar to anyone from the UK. However, one of the nicer looking residential areas I walked through had a surprise that would shock most British people: on a residential wall, there was a billboard with two adverts, the one on the left advertising the biggest brothel in Europe (or at least, that’s what it seemed to be claiming the “Magnum Sauna Club” was), the one on the right a public health campaign to always use condoms.
Köln bridge love locks
Köln bridge love locks
Seeing solar panels everywhere brings me joy. It’s a feeling that yes, the world is taking climate change seriously, and actually solving things now. There is an Aldi (budget supermarket) here, with a roof covered in solar panels, and it looks like the roof was designed with those panels in mind. Something about the place gave me the feeling that Britain is an unfree country, but sadly my notes were not good enough to remind me why. Still, that is an interesting idea for a blog post about what ‘freedom’ means anyway. Köln feels very multicultural. In particular, Greek food seems very popular. The edges of the city of Köln (yes, I did walk from the main train station to past the city limits, that took something like two hours) are as sudden and magnificent as those of a rural English town: A block of flats and then, suddenly, countryside. In part of the city that feels rougher, more worn down. Noticeably more German flags. I wonder which is cause and which is effect, if either? Dense traffic at 15:30. Mere coincidence that that is the UK’s school closing time, as I’ve read that German schools close “between 12 noon and 1:30 p.m.”.
While wandering, I took a wrong turn and I think I ended up on somebody’s driveway. They opened a window and shouted at me anyway, and I did my best to apologise, leave and blame my phone (which I was looking at while walking). Some of the blocks of flats have a lot of visible chimneys on them. Sometimes I remember how incredibly fast technological progress has been, and how recently open fireplaces stopped being the main form of heating in the Western world. Chimneysweep is still an official job in Germany, and (I’m told, my German isn’t good enough to check), the law requires you to let Chimneysweeps in when they call on you — if you don’t have a fireplace, they check the gas systems for carbon monoxide etc. I didn’t see any beggars in Zürich or Heidelberg, but I didn’t realise that I hadn’t seen them until I reached Köln and saw them again. Some of the city centre public transport stops smell faintly of urine. The centre is far too crowded for people like me; in retrospect, I’d say it felt as crowded as the popular parts of Manhattan, except that Manhattan was designed for it and Köln’s city centre is struggling with it. Don’t get me wrong — you don’t have to go far if you want relaxed, it’s just that you can’t get it in the immediate area around the cathedral. On the Rhine, I saw what looks like a two part boat, where the nose of one is pushing into a U-shaped hole in the back of the other. I have no idea what that was about, and couldn’t get a good picture. There’s a lot about Köln that reminded me of Sheffield in the UK. I have the impression that similarity is not merely superficial, that Köln really is to Germany as Sheffield is to the UK. All in all, it just wasn’t that interesting a place compared to the other places I visited. So onward I went; the next destination was Luxembourg City, which took me through Trier. Trier was so bad that my diary says “Trier Hbf lacks the sophistication of many of the other German stations I’ve stopped at. Reminds me of a typical British station.”
California (🇺🇸), based mainly in Davis, including a multi-day road trip along the I-80 to Salt Lake City (Utah), returning via Reno (Nevada), camping one night more than expected in an unincorporated village near Redding whose name I can’t remember because the Carr Fire had literally begun a few hours before it diverted us to a much longer route to the next stop — McKinleyville — and a few days after that visiting Eureka as we returned to Davis, having a few day trips to Sacramento, and then seeing the Pacific coast of San Francisco
Helsinki (🇫🇮), where I was for New Year’s, but I didn’t have anyone around for the celebrations this time, and my flight home the next day was too early in the morning to be worth going out alone.
I need to finish off my original series of blog posts on the topic of travelling around Europe for a month on an Interrail pass just before the Brexit referendum vote before I do these in any detail.
Going from Zürich to Heidelberg by train, Freiburg looked a lot nicer when going past it northwards than it seemed going southwards.
The route required I change train at Manheim. Manheim station is far less commercial than the other city stations I’ve been to on this trip. In that regard, it almost felt like a British station. Manheim itself looks heavily industrialized, so I don’t think I’ll miss out if I don’t explore it.
Panorama from one of Heidelberg’s bridges
Heidelberg is pretty. There are many bicycles here, often locked to themselves rather than to fences and bike racks, which implies low fear of crime than I’m used to in the UK.
On the walk from the station to the hotel I saw a motorcycle driving on the cycle path, something I’ve only otherwise seen in The Netherlands; I passed signs pointing to asparagus and potato without explanation… curiously followed by signs for asparagus and strawberries.
Surprisingly, a car used the bicycle lane to skip a queue and turn right. Very un-stereotypical for Germany. (I’ve since learned that the German word for someone who crosses the road without waiting for a green light is “Außlander” (foreigner), and while I don’t know how facetious they were being, it felt correct).
Open farm in Heidelberg
North of the university, and close to my hotel, there were large open farms; think allotments but without any barriers. Presumably this is what the signs for strawberries, potatoes and asparagus were for, thought I have only seen the strawberries so far.
The university is pleasant; while it has plenty of dilapidated Brutalist buildings, many are covered in vines that make them look much nicer. Some of the nearby buildings — I’m not clear if they’re university or not — are much more modern. All look appealing.
The river has a large dam with a footbridge above it; the power and ferocity of the water flowing under the dam is terrifying to behold, even though it’s not even particularly tall — 4m difference in water level, I would guess.
I continued to be surprised by how many vegetarian options there are here. There’s so much good stuff!
One thing you don’t get from pictures is the smell of a place; and even in person, I often find I only notice it when it changes — when the UK suffered petrol shortages after truckers blockaded refineries in protest against taxes, the air quality massively improved, but I only noticed the improvement not the previous poor quality, and I didn’t notice it get worse again.
There is a cycle path south of the train station, just far enough away to be blocked from sight by buildings, where the air smells so much fresher and cleaner that I can almost imagine I’m in the wilderness, not the city centre. I wish I could fully describe what this place smelled like, but I never built up a good olfactory vocabulary.
There are some Arabic signs here and there, and I’ve seen far more black people living in Heidelberg than in Zürich. (Alas, between my notes and this being years later, I’m not sure if I meant “black” as in sub-saharan African decent or in the colloquial sense it has in the UK that also encompasses northern African, Middle-Eastern, and significant parts of the Indian subcontinent. Sorry about that — just as Posh Person Privilege means I don’t think to make note of which football team a person supports, White Privilege means I don’t really notice fine details of race unless it gets spelled out for me.)
The old city (Altstadt on OpenStreetMap) is a similar quaint style to the old city in Zurich, but without such dense crowds. It is full of old reddish stone and cobbled roads.
Heidelberg is a small-yet-pleasant place, although though I would recommend staying away from the immediate vicinity of the railway station. On that thought, perhaps I misjudged Utrecht earlier on this trip, having seen it only from passing through the station?
German vending machine which vends condoms
German vending machines sometimes stock condoms — Something I’ve never seen in the UK, and I suspect I will never see in the USA.
When I left for the next stop on the trip, I once again changed at Mannheim. The entrance hall of Mannheim station looks better than the rest of it, but I’m still not going to regret missing the chance to explore a city that seems dominated by such large industrial buildings.
I definitely recommend a break in Heidelberg to anyone who likes relaxed, historic, or close-(ish)-to-nature environments.
The train from Hannover to Frankfurt was pleasant enough, but all the seats were taken. The countryside we passed was mostly beautiful rolling hills, and just a few ugly man-made hills.
Frankfurt Hbf itself instantly reminded me of Paris Gare du Nord (the Eurostar terminal). Different, but somehow very similar.
There were news broadcast on a giant screen, I couldn’t read it but the pictures were showing floods. There had been a bit of rain the previous day in Hannover, with more was forecast for today, but the only rain I had seen by this point of the day was in and near Frankfurt itself; the route was almost completely dry.
There was a book, sold in one of the shops of Frankfurt Hbf, with the title “Die Again”, and I wondered if the title was in English or in German. I never did pick it up to find out.
The shops in city station are very multicultural: In the station area I saw African and Asian, American, German (and the Germans seem to like pizza and pasta the way the British like fish ‘n chips and Indian); next to my hotel there was “Bosnische Spezialitären Čevabdžinica Sarajevo Imbiss”, and then two Arabic places with names I can’t even write. There are two major shopping malls, the main (I think) mall, “MyZeil”, is a fantastic piece of architecture, and the info points inside it are trilingual English-German-Chinese. Thai, Iranian, Mediterranean, Malaysian and other shops and restaurants on the road between the train station and the city centre.
The city centre is surrounded by a narrow strip of greenery, public parks and so forth, that look on the map as if they were the former city walls.
“The city centre itself has a lovely atmosphere”, I wrote while walking through it. Of course, having written that, once I got back to the train station the escalator had stopped moving and smelled of urine (albeit nowhere near as bad as the smell in Portsmouth). There are less beggars here than either Berlin or Hannover, at least at first glance. There were many skyscrapers that felt like skyscrapers, but without the oppressive-bombastic feel of those in San Jose, San Francisco, or Sacramento, without the cramped feel of London.
The famous Euro.
The whole district is quite small.
While in Frankfurt, I think I finally figured out why I prefer German blocks of flats to British ones: the outsides are just cleaner. In Britain, a significant fraction of flats (certainly the larger blocks in city centres) have ugly stains under under every window and every external pipe, whereas the German ones are either completely clean or covered in a perfectly even layer of dirt that hides the fact it’s even dirt — the British stains looks like a sewage accidents in comparison.
Other than the handful of skyscrapers, Frankfurt seems to be mostly 4-7 story buildings, but it still feels friendly in a way that central London, which is about the same vertically, never is. And in comparison to America? A three lane by six lane cross-roads felt safe to cross here, compared to the feeling of risking life and limb crossing from one corner of the two main roads of the Apple Maps icon to the other.
The only emergency fire/ambulance vehicles I’ve seen so far in Germany have used a fluorescent orange and white colour scheme. Looks like Ambulances are branded by the hospital they’re associated with, but I’m not sure. Seeing them made me realise that if I were to move to Germany, I would need health insurance (UK has “national insurance” which is a tax, and taxes pay for healthcare amongst other things), so perhaps the effective tax rate is more complicated than I thought. (Well of course it will be complicated, why ever did I imagine it might be simple?)
I had to read a news story about the German far-right political group AfD to notice this point, but while Britain has plenty of visible Muslims and mosques, I’ve not noticed a single mosque in Germany for all the Muslims I’ve seen while walking around the cities. A relatively small number of churches, too, now I think about it.
Frankfurt Hbf has so many platforms that three streets face the entrance, parallel with the tracks. One night’s jaunt took me back through the southern street, Münchener Straße; the next day’s walk took me back through the northern street, Taunusstraße.
Taunusstraße is the red light and casino district. Plymouth has a red light district that I’ve walked through without even knowing it was one until the street was named as such in the local news. Amsterdam is famous for its red light district, but again it was so easy to miss that when the naked women in its glass shop fronts remain stationary, they look like shop mannequins and it just feels like any other part of Amsterdam (that said, when the women tire of standing still and change pose just as you walk past, it’s as if a mannequin has come to life next to you).
Taunusstraße just feels seedy — nothing explicitly upsetting, just tacky, gaudy, and unsophisticated, like the rides of a travelling funfair.
As I was writing up for the day, I heard some shouting on the street outside, and the deep rumble of a motorbike whose only purpose is to make the owner feel big — so, just like Britain. Overall, I think Frankfurt is like a good British city, not as different or as nice (by my tastes) as Hannover, Berlin, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, etc., which is worth knowing and the entire point of this trip. Score!
Fire brigades have their own emergency doctors with their own emergency vehicles. That’s something you don’t see in the UK.
The train from Berlin to Hamburg was straightforward enough. We passed lots of nice countryside, woodland, and tiny hamlets by the side of the railway line. The odd urban area that we passed through had more “refugees welcome” graffiti, just like Berlin. I saw a power line that terminated in a building about the same size (both height and ground area) as a normal pylon, painted yellow and complete with a lone door at its base. Many of the fields we passed had another kind of tower — a wooden lookout, one story off the ground, with a ladder and a roof.
My German isn’t good enough to buy things if the person at the till says anything other than “yes” or naming a price, which forces me to revert to English. This is frustrating.
By the time I had arrived, Hamburg had run out of (affordable) hotels, the only things that remained were over €200 per night. Thanks to the flexible travel power of my Interrail Pass, I was able to go straight onward to Hannover without worrying about an extra ticket. I don’t get the feeling I’m missing much, the path of the railway makes the city of Hamburg look far more British than Berlin had, with only a few bits of interesting people-friendly architecture to shield against the post industrial wasteland that reminds me so much of Portsmouth and Southampton on the south coast of the UK.
The first train station book store that I looked at in Hamburg had language guides for Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and what looked like Romanian. There were tourists maps to Denmark. That made me almost sad I had decided not to go to Denmark this time, but as Denmark hasn’t joined the Euro, as Euros were the only cash I had, and as I had been advised to make sure I had some form of backup payment (which later turned out to be very useful), Denmark really wasn’t going to happen on this trip.
On the train, the next station was announced as “Hamburg Hamburg”. A later stop was announced as something like “Bad Bressen”, but a Google search doesn’t show any place with that name. The “Bad” prefix is common on Germany, it means “Bath” in the same sense as the British city of Bath.
Hannover seemed much nicer than Hamburg even at first glance. I did wonder how much of that was the weather, how much is the lesser crowding (Hamburg station was very crowded), how much was it’s familiar layout, and how much was the fact that the nearest hotel to Hannover train station is a third of the price of the cheapest available in the entire city when I checked at Hamburg? (Of course, by the time I had set up WiFi in the Hannover hotel room and was able to double check, I got a different and much cheaper answer from the price comparison website than had been offered a few hours earlier 😛 ).
The first night was little more than: chill, relax, and go to the local supermarket — a windowless affair on two floors of a building fairly close to the hotel. It gave me the most bizarrely artificial feeling; not malicious like the artifice of a casino, but alien, soulless, creepy, efficient. The upper floor was accessed by a moving walkway in the middle rather than the edge, making the place feel almost endless.
The next day, I started exploring Hannover properly. The hotel has another new-to-me kind of toilet, this time the flush mechanism needs to be switched off manually once you’ve decided enough water has gone through.
After just one minute on the other side of the train station to my hotel, I realised the place wasn’t just familiar, I had passed through the city years ago, going between an airport and Magdeburg. I’d even bought pizza from the very pizza place under the station that had seemed familiar the night before. To the south (ish) is a church with a giant inverted pentagram on the tower, and a multilevel pedestrianised shopping district that was disappointingly similar to British ones. The zone has a “Euro shop” where everything costs €1 (and has slightly better stuff than a British £1 shop despite the exchange rates), and there is also a sex district in one run-down corner (I guessed lap dances and similar, but my German isn’t that good and it later turned out that continental Europe is much more relaxed about this sort of thing than the UK).
There is a lot of cycling here. I’ve not seen any beggars so far. Pedestrians seem more likely to obey the red lights on crossings than in the UK, but that may just be because the roads with explicit pedestrian crossings are wider than typical British streets (one lane each way is common in the UK, but these are all multi-lane). Berlin had no litter that I saw, but I didn’t realise that until I got to Hannover and found myself automatically picking up random litter and taking it to the next bin I passed (something I often do in the UK, a habit my mum gave me probably by accident when she got me to help her clear out a stream strewn with litter in my home town as a young child).
Maschsee
There is a vast lake in Hannover — at least, vast by the standards I’m used to, it’s nothing compared to the Great Lakes or even Lake Zurich, but I don’t recall anything this size in a British city. I saw more graffiti and more litter as I walked around the lake. At the far end of it I saw an older lady with grey hair riding a bicycle and wearing an “XCOM the enemy unknown” T-shirt. At the south end, I decided to go away from the lake to get more of a feel for the built-up parts of the city, and that took me along a foot-and-cycle route that keeps pedestrians on the North and cyclists on the South, separated by a small hedge, which is a nice touch (British foot-and-cycle routes are often separated by a white line, and sometimes not even that).
I walked past the Stadtfriedhof Engesohde, a very pretty graveyard. I’ve not seen any that nice in the UK.
The next road, Hildesheimer Str., is green but fairly samey. I realised on that road that Apotheke, Bibliothike, Spielotheke, all shared a root word. Also, Kindergarten is literally “Kid(s?) Garden”.
There was more sexually explicit imagery on public display; this time a magazine, visible outside the shop selling it, showing multiple naked breasts on the front cover. It’s odd how ladies’ breasts are seen as sexual, while men’s are not, but there we are.
Through its window, Hannover city library looks just like any British library.
I finally encountered some beggars! They seem better off than the ones in Berlin. Enough to be scary, actually. But I didn’t take enough notes to remind myself why when I wrote this up over a month later.
The next day, I explored to the North-east of my hotel. There’s an enormous inner-city woodland in the far corner of the Hannover-Mitte quarter of the city. It was very pleasant, but had a slight feeling of familiarity that confused me. I know I visited Germany as a kid, did my mum take me to Hannover at some point in that? I don’t know. Regardless, it’s wonderful to have a large peaceful area with many benches in which to sit down and read. It made me wish that British cities had more large patches of dense woodland within them.
There were several square kilometres of this.
For all the German reputation for loving meat, they have a lot of vegetarian and vegan food stores. Some of it good, some of it mediocre — just like the UK. I recall the British have the nickname “Roastbeef” in France, yet the British also have many good options for vegetarian and vegan food, so perhaps meaty stereotypes are over-stated and out-dated.
I finally saw a single cyclist jumping a red light! He checked it was safe, then crossed the road. Up until this point, everyone else — pedestrian and cyclist alike — has been fastidiously obedient of the lights, and there are an enormous number of cyclists in Germany (by British standards) and the clearly labeled cycle paths go everywhere that I had gone on foot.
Hannover, like Berlin, has both a metro and an underground system. I’ve not used either, but the rails of the former and the entrances to the latter are easily seen. The combination of good public transport and good cycle infrastructure is probably one of the main reasons why German cities feel so much nicer than British ones (the graffiti and beggar problems appear to be worse in Germany than the UK, while the litter is roughly the same, so it’s certainly not any of those things).
The city, like many British cities, contains a ruined church. Presumably a burned out wreck from the second world war.
I saw more beggars, including a the first Muslim woman beggar; and one man slumped and stationary against a wall, lighter and tobacco bag in hand. He might well have been dead, but I didn’t want to investigate, either possibility may have been traumatic.
That evening, music poured through my bedroom window. First it was Indian, then a marching band, jazz, then many more pieces whose genres I don’t recognise.
Sunday morning. Hannover is covered in thick cloud, and it’s raining. So dark and gloomy it feels like twilight even though sunrise was just over 5 hours ago, at 05:06. It’s good for me that the rain has coincided with my feet’s need to recover, unfortunately more rain is forecast for tomorrow. The music I first heard last night has continued today, a quick venture into town for food suggests it’s a cultural festival in Andreas-Hermes-Platz. I have no idea if it will still be there tomorrow, my last day in Hannover (a half day at that) before I journey to Frankfurt.
Knowing binary didn’t help me understand this.
My next trip had me wandering Hannover in a new direction, to the North west and past the university, past the aquarium and Herrenhausen Palace before I turned back. I saw fly-posted stickers on streetlights advertising a Facebook group for LGBT refugees. In English rather than German or Arabic. I’m so lucky my native language is the lingua-Franca of the world.
There were more erotic stores. The outside of these shops are like the inside of British adult stores, which makes me wonder what the insides are like, but this isn’t the time to check them out.
I also saw the first German pedestrian jumping a red light.
There are cigarette vending machines on the footpaths. Well, one of them at least. And a small tractor driving down the street — I’m used to that in small countryside villages in England, but this is near a major city centre.
Who lives in a home like this?
Ooh, a German flag! First time I’ve seen one flying here, I think. For any Americans surprised by my surprise, Europe doesn’t seem to fly national flags anything like as much as you do. Most of the British would only care about flag burning because of the smoke, although I wouldn’t dare assume anything either way about the rest of the continent.
Walking further along the route, I passed some more flags that I don’t recognise, then another German flag. All were in what might be allotments, but there are many of what look like single room cottages — too big to be sheds, too small to be real homes. Student houses, perhaps?
I found Quorn for sale! But not in every supermarket. “Rewe” has it, I’m not sure what Rewe would be the equivalent of in the UK.
I never did check Andreas-Hermes-Platz in the end. Next stop, Frankfurt.
Starting just on the German side of the German-Dutch border. There was no announcement, but there’s something a little different about the surroundings — not enough for me to put my finger on most of it, but what I can explicitly see is the station platforms seem lower, the front licence plates of the cars we pass are white (the licence plates were yellow in Rotterdam).
The train has stopped. Two of the American passengers are flirting with each other, with occasional petting. And then they started whispering about drug use and popping pills from a blister pack. While drinking beer. The train eventually started moving slowly, but didn’t get much over human speed before it stopped again, albeit stopping for less time than it too to type that, and then the ticket inspectors started walking down the carriage; two inspectors, one for the left and one for the right.
The flirty possibly-American couple move on to talking about child free lifestyles. Now I think the guy studying Quantum mechanics at Delft is European and only the woman (possibly a supervisor of one or more of the other students) is American.
There has just been an announcement of 10-15 minutes of delays due to rail works — so much for German efficiency. I’m not sure if that’s including or excluding the earlier pause in our motion.
We’d stopped at a station called Empel-Rees, which gave me a location to double-check when I wrote this up.
Another text from the phone company. Either they send reminders every day, or they send reminders every time you enter a new country.
Quick transfer at Duisburg thanks to the delays. The flirting couple had left “to explore the train” and not returned by the time I disembarked. I assume they were shagging in the toilets.
The station at Duisburg, like Rotterdam, has a design pattern that I have only seen in Europe. A lot of platforms (13 in this case) all leading down to a lower level, perpendicular to the platforms and filled with shops and cafés, and the entrances to the station are at opposite ends of the lower level. It’s a better use of space than I’ve seen anywhere in the UK, even at the larger London stations that do actually have shops.
Germany has a lot of graffiti along this railway line. I can’t explain why, but I like Germany even despite that. Perhaps it’s the familiarity — I’ve been here more often than any other foreign country I’ve visited.
Going through Essen, and of course the first thing I noticed was the food advert. (Linguistic pun there, for the non-German speakers amongst you).
An announcement says the seat reservations don’t work on this train. Interesting, they didn’t work on the previous train either. This time, not all the signs are illuminated. The WiFi, which I’d been hoping to use to keep in touch with my friend in Berlin? It only works if I pay an absurd amount, more than an expensive PAYG mobile provider from the UK roaming in Germany, and much more than my own PAYG provider), so I’m not using that. The (free) map on the WiFi sign-up site was fairly neat though — live updated with OpenStreetMap as a base and local points of interest for all the places the train passes through.
There is a smoking area on one of the platforms we passed. Smoking has been forbidden on British stations for so long I had forgotten that was a thing that could happen.
Dortmund has a Deusches Fussball Museum visible from the station. No prizes for guessing what that translates to. I kept falling asleep from there until somewhere between Bielefeld and Berlin, but I was just about awake enough at Bielefeld to take a photo and hear an announcement that the train was delayed due to a medical emergency. Three for three, so much for the British belief that the UK has the worst public transport in Europe — British rail looks normal now. We came up to a range of hills leading to Porta Westfalica with an interesting monument on the end of the range facing the town (presumably the Emperor William Monument), but the camera on the phone stopped working as I tried to take a photo. Fixed the camera with a reboot, but not in time, I should replace this device at some point…
A hermaphroditic 5-pointed star. That’s a novel thing for a rucksack.
Loud drunken singing from further down the train carriage, “Wir sind die Gewinner!”. Feels like England.
Berlin Central station is basically a 7 story shopping mall whose top and bottom floors are train lines going in perpendicular directions.
Alexanderplatz had homeless drunks begging ineffectually in English only. That was odd. Later I found out there was a football match that very evening, so they might have just been English and so drunk they seemed like homeless beggars.
Berlin public transport is very different to British public transport. In Berlin, you buy a ticket for a zone, stamp it yourself on the station before you board, then you can use it freely for as many trips as you like in that zone for the two hours after you stamped it. The same ticket works for all public transport: S-Bahn, U-Bahn, buses, trams and ferries.
Berlin advertising is also very different to British advertising. For example, Germans seem to be comfortable with sexually explicit cartoons for a public health campaign to beat HIV with condoms on the tram stops in the middle of the streets. Another example, one of the rotating billboards I passed is for “Dildo King”. In the UK, the most sexually explicit public adverts I can remember are blacked out window fronts labeled “adult shop”, bra adverts, and the occasional adult magazine.
I’m staying with a British friend who moved to Berlin for work. I’m not certain (because tax laws are hard enough when you speak a language natively), but it seems like Berlin doesn’t have anything like the British council tax system. For non British people, council tax is a fixed amount paid by every household to the local government and based on how valuable your house is estimated to be; it is paid by the occupants rather than the owners, and there are a few discounts (for example, students and kids don’t count as occupants and if there is only one occupant you get a 25% discount). The tax is typically in the range of £1,000 per year for cheap homes up to about £2,000 per year for expensive homes. Learning this made me realise how complex tax systems can be to compare, and it does seem to partially offset Germany having a higher income tax rate than the UK. Germany also has a religious tax, which is opt-out and yet most people keep paying; an interesting observation worth remembering during discussion with people who believe tax is theft.
My friend took me to a local electronics store to buy a solar powered external battery for my phone. Everyone in the service sector speaks English, but I really do need to practice my German more if I live here. The self-charging battery cost €22 for 5 Ah, which will doubtless seem an excessive price in the near future as technology marches on. That reminds me, why do people write 5,000 mAh instead of 5 Ah? Fetishism for large numbers? In which case, why not 5,000,000 μAh? But that’s a discussion for a different time.
The buildings are large, but well spaced, with metro lines separating each direction of traffic on many major streets, and trees lining both major and minor streets. There are cycle paths on some pavements and some roadways. All the flats lining the streets seem to be five or six stories tall. In London these buildings and roads would be densely packed angry concrete monstrosities, in Sacramento and New York the buildings would be skyscrapers, in San Jose and Cupertino the roads would have twice as many lanes and three three times the width and no trams that I can recall from when I walked from one to the other.
The days pass and I get to explore this city in more depth, albeit slowly because my feet are still healing from the overlong walk in Dutch countryside. It’s Sunday today, and most of the shops are either shut it have limited hours (I’m not sure which). Despite that, the traffic is flowing heavily outside.
My host has said this is a relatively cheap area of the city, and the state of repair of the building fronts nearby reminded me of what I saw in Budapest (although the decay here is both far less severe and far less frequent, despite it being a cheap area of Berlin versus the most expensive street in Budapest!); if this is the cheap area, I wonder what the expensive areas look like?
A useful lesson from my host, “Die Fahrt” means any journey in a vehicle, not just a car, which can lead to interesting mistranslations — “We’re all «driving» to Berlin” / “OK, I’ll just take the train” / “Want to share our group ticket?”
There are some things you assume are universal, then you travel and find they’re not. Toilets, for example. Toilets are surprisingly varied by nation.
And if you ever visit Kenya, the toilet paper is often kept outside the stalls, so you have to get enough before you start.
My host told me that Berlin still makes regular use of chimney sweeps. Anywhere that uses domestic fireplaces would need chimney sweeps, but those disappeared in the UK sometime around them being banned in London for causing pea soup fog.
Berlin is beautiful, despite the smokers and the graffiti. There may be laws restricting smoking in some areas, but in practice Germany doesn’t have a smoking ban anything like the UK (where any public building or workplace could be fined for allowing it). Also, self service doesn’t mean what it does in the UK — in the UK “self service” is a buffet, while in Germany it’s “come to the counter to place your order”. Germany also has “self-clearing” café restaurants, where it’s up to you to take your plate back to the service people, while the UK only has that as an unspoken rule of canteens.
Berlin is vastly more open about sex than Britain. There’s a… shop, I guess one must call it… that advertises cruising and glory holes.
Just like Budapest, and unlike everything I remember of London, the flats here often have street level car-appropriate passages leading to off-street parking. Unlike both, there are a noticeable number of ancient looking cars still on the roads, there are lots of Smart cars, there are scooters parked on most footpaths, and the footpaths are easily as wide as the roadways including the parking as part of the roadway. Some, but not all, minor roads have pedestrianised entrances — motor vehicles can enter from the main road, but must give way to pedestrians and cyclists (who themselves are separated from both the road and the main part of the pedestrian pathway in many places).
I saw adverts for “The World of Cyberobics”, which sounds interesting, but I have no idea what it’s about as I have so many ad-blockers that to me their website is just the word “cyberobics” in the middle of the screen and nothing else.
There are quite a few beggars on the streets of Berlin. It feels like more than in London and less than in Budapest.
I tried to get a ticket for the tram line, but couldn’t figure out how to use the ticket machines at the station even when they were in English. Unfortunately a ticket tout then sold me an expired ticket and I didn’t realise (it would be plausibly real in the UK); fortunately nobody checked it (if they had, it would have been a €60 fine, I think). Being the sort of person I am, the moment I seriously suspected there was a problem, I got off and walked the rest of the way. Two days later I found out there are ticket machines on the trams (but not the S-Bahn, so don’t board those without a ticket). The onboard machines may only accept exact change, so be careful.
I suspect that if I published photos of some of the public artwork in Berlin, my blog would get deleted for content deemed adult in the state of American Puritanism. One spinning billboard has adverts for both “Fantasy Massage Studio” and “Kinderdentist”, which would lead to many letters from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells in the UK.
Aldi is branded differently here. Lidl has the same branding, but a different store layout. There are two different Aldi chains in Germany, and the split happened when two kids inherited the brand from their father and (according to Wikipedia) argued about what they should sell.
I’ve just noticed that the builders across the street are not wearing hard-hats. They would be turned away from the building site if they did that in England.
Mark 10:21-22
Germany has taken on a million refugees, compared to a few thousand by the UK, but looking at the graffiti (“Refugees willkommen” near the entrance to a supermarket) and the billboards, it feels like the numbers are the inverse of the rhetoric. Germany is looking out for the innocent victims of war and is glad to do so, while the UK moans and drags its feet and makes false complaints about the age and genders of the asylum seekers even after the famous photo of the drowned toddler on a beach had made it to the front page of our newspapers. I wonder now what the personalities of the other European nations is. Given how few refugees have been accepted by other countries, I am assuming Germany stands alone in being humane, but I cannot read newspapers other than in English and the odd German headline.
I saw a film where an apartment had a garbage chute. I didn’t realise those were a thing. The film theatre didn’t show any rating before the film, and the adverts were at a pleasant volume, both interesting differences from the UK.
Shopping and recycling: UK has “Chip and Pin”, and people will look at you funny if you try to sign instead; conversely in Berlin, Chip and Pin is the rarity. There are many multilingual cash machines. Plastic and glass bottles can be recycled at supermarkets for cash or a voucher for a discount on your next purchase.
Saw more beggars today. One was missing all his toes on one foot. Walking from Alexanderplatz to the Tiergarden, I was accosted by some girls with a petition for something to help the disabled, but I didn’t get to read it before a local shopkeeper shooed them away and threatened to call the police — but as “Polize” was the only word I understood, I have to just assume that they were a gang who used a good cause to cause trouble.
The route took me past some grand scale architecture, the sort of scale that is to an adult what normal architecture is to a kid. Somehow it was still nicer than the same thing in London — in Berlin it felt like it was just supposed to look nice, whereas the similar stuff in London felt like it was meant to intimidate, to put subjects “in their place”.
I had a chance to try gazpacho soup, so I took it. I like it!
I visited the zoo. It’s a pleasant walk from the city centre.
Linguistic confusion at the zoo: “Flusspferde” literally means “River horses” which seems like it should mean something like “sea horse” but actually means “hippopotamus” because the English “hippopotamus” comes from the Greek ἱπποπόταμος (“river horse”) out of pretentious upper class snobbery or something.
This is the first time I’ve seen cattle in a zoo. Are they really so difficult for people to see otherwise? I guess they must be.
Lippenbär (Sloth Bear) look like dogs, border collies if anything (mainly the face and ears, but their claws do look sloth-like). This particular one is going back and forth on a single line in their enclosure, I would say stressed and/or bored if I dared anthropomorphise them. Definitely not slothful.
There was a semi-decapitated pigeon outside one of the bear enclosures. It looks like the same kind of bear in all but one of the bear enclosures, so I’m not sure if it really was a Lippenbär that I just saw.
Le woofs
The zoo has four wolves, that I can see, and they totally fail to acknowledge humans howling. Quite possibly because everyone howls at them and they’re bored of it. A bunch of English school kids showed up at the same time as I did, some thought they looked like foxes and started singing “What Does The Fox Say”, while another pair of kids had this conversion:
Kid 1) Would you like to pet a wolf?
Kid 2) No
Kid 1) Why?
The souvenir shop sells toys of fictitious animals. That’s not going to help educate people! They also sold an enormous range of lenticular 3D postcards — that stuff’s getting cheap.
I bought a Berliner. In Berlin. By asking for “eine Berliner”. It is, as far as I can tell, a filled doughnut. I’m sure everyone reading this will have heard about the famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.
The walk home took me past a semi-ruined-semi-repaired church, past the only boring empty concrete square I’ve seen in the city, through a middle-class shopping mall with a giant indoor pond, around a fancy shopping mall, and on to the Wittenbergplatz U-bahn station, which is rather impressive and in its own traffic island. Berlin underground lines often run one or two stories above ground, and their surface lines often run underground. There are many good views.
A successful exploration of a fine city. Next up was going to be Hamburg and from there to Denmark, but I changed my mind once I reached Hamburg…
Travelling Curious 