Transient Thoughts in Transit

I've been collecting various minor tidbits of information to share with my loyal readers, many captured by photograph, and others will be brought to light with my cunning prose (boy I'm full of myself!)

ON TRAIN TRAVEL

Trains are really the prime long distance choice for traveling within Europe. No security lines, there are plenty of options, and they're often at least as fast as air travel when you consider point-to-point travel time (and the fact that most European airports are 20+ minutes out of town, while the Hauptbahnhoffen are usually in the heart of the city.)


Every German train has a pamphlet entitled "Ihr Reiseplan" in your seat pocket which means "Your Travel Guide". It contains information about the services on the train you're riding and information about each stop, including connecting train service. In first class, there's also a menu in your seat pocket. The cabin attendant will go get your desired food/drink from either the Bordbistro (cafe car) or Bordresaurant, depending on which kind of car your train has. The diet Coke (called Coke Light in Europe) is not included with your first class ticket.








There are two ways to find your train while at the station. There are large electronic information screens, and there are also printed schedules. The yellow one is for departures, the white for arrivals. Each schedule lists all of the trains in a single 24 hour period for its particular station. It's kind of hard to discern in my dark photo, but the posters are about 30"x40" and the print is in 12 point Helvetica. That's a lot of trains, and this photo is from the smallish Heidelberg Hbf.

On each Gleis (track) there is also a graphical representation of each train that uses the track, and how the cars are configured. It's called a Wagenreihungsplan in German, but most people seem to refer to it by its French nom de plume - Composition de Train. Yellow is for 1st class, green for second. The difference between the two? Three seats across vs. four, more leg room, a free newspaper, seat-side food and drink service, and -of course - price. Once you're older than 26, you can no longer buy a Eurrail pass in second class; apparently you're considered old enough to have some money. The price differential wasn't that great between the passes, anyway. The larger difference is seen if you were to buy individual tickets.


Self-serve ticket machines at the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof. To the left and rear are the ticket counters for personal service, the Reisezentrum.

BEDS, BATHS AND BEYOND

There's weird stuff going on in your continental European bedroom, and I don't mean what you might be picturing.





You don't get sheets, a blanket and a duvet as you would in the U.S., U.K., or Ireland. Instead, you get a bottom sheet and a duvet-like rectangle that has been slipped into a giant-sized pillow case. This becomes your combined top sheet and blanket/duvet. You'll also notice, in the first picture, that I got a double bed at this particular hotel. That just means that the are two single beds pushed up against one another - how romantic. The second photo is of my single bed in Frankfurt. The pillows are a little more square than we're used to, and that giant pillow/duvet/top sheet thingie isn't very wide -parts can get cold if you're not careful.


The good news is that bathroom sinks are pretty normal. Toilets are a little funky. They're deeper and often have kind of a shallow shelf in the bowl. Not to get too detailed, but I think the general idea is that solids will slide into the deep end while rectangular toilet tissue (yup, no one can seem to spare a square in Germany) hangs out on the shelf until the flush. And here's the fun part: the longer you hold down the flush button (there is no handle like we have) the harder, longer and faster the thing flushes. Yippee!





Take a close look at the tub surround in this first picture. There is no shower door and there's only a sink's width's worth of frosted glass to protect your modesty and the floor from the backsplash of your energetic cleansing. The second picture shows a wider screen, but note that it is foldable. All but my first hotel supplied soap and shampoo, but in the form of an all-in-one body wash and shampoo. You can see the dispenser behind the glass screen in the second picture, and both next to the sink and on the tub surround in the first picture.


There is never a shower head permanently mounted to the wall. Rather you have a bar permanently mounted, to which is affixed hardware to hold what I can only imagine is called a shower wand. It's detachable and you can spray yourself from all sorts of angles.


Here's what a light switch, an electrical outlet in use, and an empty electrical socket look like. Cut off on the extreme left of the photo is a phone jack - also different.


Many doors have a lip; they're not squared-off at the jamb. It makes it feel like you're not closing the door all the way.


I've had all sorts of different types of room keys. Actual keys, credit card keys, and this interesting one. Makes me think of the old computer punch cards before floppy disks.

The first floor of a building is the zeroth floor; the second is the first, and so on.

ET CETERA

1. I saw my first bicycle helmet in Heidelberg; actually, I saw two.
2. Heidelbergers are pretty laid back and friendly. One full day in Heidelberg was probably enough for me. None of the other attractions particularly interested me, but I did want to check out the castle and the old town.
3. Can you tell that I like the process of travel just as much as the destinations themselves?
4. The slideshow is now working on the blog website, and I've removed the weather information since I couldn't get it to update. The weather will be sunny and 73 for the remainder of my stay.

Location:Riding the Rails Between Stuttgart and Munchen, Germany