• I used two planes, seven trains and a coach in the course of my trip. I think there were five different train operators involved in this.
• Even though the British railway system is notoriously bad, I have to say that none of my trains was actually late or something. Even with my one train from Stansted to London being replaced by a coach service, I made all connections in time.
• The only thing that’s as painful today as it was ten years ago is trying to book a railway ticket. It took me two weeks to do that. Because their railway sites suck so badly. It seems that all the sites actually rely on the same back-end system, but they manage to put extra pain into it.
• The Trainline, for example, with whom I had booked tickets before, think it’s funny to add random extra charges for booking tickets online and for paying with a credit card.
• Interestingly, other railway companies let you purchase the very same tickets without those extra charges. Of course to actually do that, you’ll have to try out their websites. I ended up booking with Cross Country Trains who didn’t even require me to create an account on their site.
• I picked the tickets up at a ticket machine at the airport. You tell them where you want to pick them up when booking, then insert the same credit card into the machine and *almost magic*. As I had two tickets booked, I needed to do two transactions, unfortunately, rather than the machine giving me everything in one go.
• When booking a return ticket going via a specific station, the UK railway booking system only used that station for the outgoing journey. Which was inconvenient to me as I actually wanted to use it only for the return trip. (The German system, in comparison, forces you to use the same via on both trips if you want to benefit from any return trip prices.)
• If you don’t need to buy a ticket but just want the timetable info for all of Europe, Deutsche Bahn’s site remains the place to go. Their iPhone app ‘DB Navigator’ will pick up your current location, help you plan your journey with that and has a display of your connections which is both pretty and useful. It even caches your last search results, so it’s useful for iPod users as well.
• As Dan explained to me, said inconvenience exists because nobody expects people to go by train. [Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for the British because they invented all those things (steam engine, railways, football, rugby, greedy banking) and invariably end up being distant third in all those areas.]
• So my trains were on time, but – like every time I use a British train – I couldn’t help thinking that the experience would be much better if only they bothered to clean the coaches every now and again. Dirty carpets and the areas beneath the seats looking like a landfill do not a pleasant journey make.

• Seen at Stansted station:

  

  … while it was totally appropriate to put up the sign, surely people should be embarrassed about it: You can design a railway station. And doing so will make sure that the platforms are not slippery, even when it’s cold and wet outside. Just sayin…

• Also seen there: A Google chrome ad. Isn’t it wrong to put up a billboard ad for a web browser? And don’t the notes next to it feel completely freaky because it’s none of Google’s business (well, technically it’s all of their business – in a business sense of the word) to creep up on you like that?
• I had to change trains at Paddington station. As a big fan of the bear, I always like that.
• It still strikes me as odd that pretty much every tube station in London also has National Rail services running there. Surely, consolidating railway stations a bit more might streamline things a little.
• I also indulged in low-cost flights with Ryanair once more. Since I last did that they added extra charges for checking in luggage (€15), printing a boarding pass (don’t bring your own and you pay €30 or so) and making you pay a credit card charge for each flight rather than the whole booking. While the prices remain very competitive, it always leaves me with the feeling of being ripped off and makes travelling less fun.
• It looks like Ryanair support mobile phone usage on some of their planes now. One would have hoped that they have different safety announcements for the planes with and without those systems. Instead they use sentences with if.
• While Stansted remains quite a clean and neat airport – the main building at least – Ryanair’s terminal in Bremen really looks like shit. The theory is that they make it look extra cheap so you feel like you got a better deal. I’m not sure that’s working for me. Surely not painting all the walls in yellow wouldn’t be more expensive but would feel better.
• I was lucky enough to get a emergency exit row seat on my way back. Even though I was among the last to board the plane. The flight attendant then told all people about their responsibilities there and asked whether we’re OK with it. It’s nice how everybody keeps a straight face when doing this, so the flight attendant doesn’t need to feel too awkward.
• I wanted to import some Thüringer Mett for Dan. But I with the crazy ‘security’ efforts of these days I figured they’d take it from me at the security check (unless I pack it in 100ml packs and put those in a zip-loc bag, I guess). Unfortunately I forgot to ask the ‘security’ staff/actors whether it’d be OK.
• Rather amusingly, my flight back was twenty minutes late because we didn’t take off on time. So they couldn’t play their little jingle for being Europe’s most on-time airline on arrival.
• … and I missed my train which happened to be the last one that evening, forcing me to stay over at my parents’ cold house.

• Another fun thing is that the Metronom trains in Niedersachsen now ban alcohol. The reason for that is quite likely that you tend to meet quite a few wasted people and football fans on trains during weekends. Which can be considered unpleasant. So they banned all alcoholic drinks last autumn. And they created some hideous signage for it:

  

  Verboten, verboten, verboten!

On Saturday we went to see The Armageddapocalypse at a student theatre which was completely packed despite being a 11p.m. show and was a rather well done and funny, if not particularly clever, parody on action films complete with the director and actor ‘comments’ they sell as ‘extras’ on DVDs. Interestingly it’s hard to find entertainment of that kind in our student theatres in Germany. People just seem to be too serious.

Later, I went on to Mike’s place in Reading to go to NSConference. The initial meetup took us to drinks with everyone and a curry and further drinks with Chris and Graham in the course of the evening.

Once you arrived there, you’re in for more trouble like people absolutely needing a caramel-chai-latte-frappucino right away, people getting lost or a weak understanding of the public transport maps and fare schemes of a city you don’t know. This year we failed on everything except the public transport thing as our hosts knew the way and Hamburg has a surprisingly affordable five person day pass for nine Euros. Needless to say that every time we do these trips our respect for kindergarden staff rises!

We didn’t visit a single exhibition or museum but spent most of Saturday walking through the hip Schanzenviertel, taking a peek at a flea market as well as the Gängeviertel. It was cold and rainy and very little of excitement happened in any of those places. Shortly afterwards we sat down to warm up with coffee and cakes at a corporatish café with surprisingly reasonable prices and stayed there long enough to go straight to the restaurant we had a reservation for dinner at.

Said restaurant was a Portuguese restaurant near the Landungsbrücken where many Portuguese places can be found. The food matched my memory of Portuguese food: not overly ‘creative’ or ‘nouvelle cuisine’ but pleasant if they serve you a nice bit of fish or meat. The sardines we had as a starter were great, the tuna after them a bit overcooked. Finally, the Portuguese coffee - nice and strong with a slightly ‘muddy’ taste - was lovely to have.

Afterwards we went on to excel in spending a night along the Reeperbahn which institutionalises the whole range of low brow entertainment all the way from music theatres to whores. After starting with a Glühwein at the local christmas market, we improved considerably and thanks to the guidance of a friend ended up in a few places which were at least one of nice and interesting [Meanie Bar, just above the Molotov; Clochard, presumably the cheapest place around; Rosie’s bar, somehow we even won a game of table football there…]. Remarkably those exist as well on that big entertainment strip.

What can I say, it was a lot of fun and left us rather exhausted the next morning. I also need to remark that even though Hamburg is a very rich and expensive city, the prices we paid were surprisingly resonable everywhere. When buying drinks for nine people on a night out and getting change for a twenty Euro bill, one smells the sweet danger of becoming an alcoholic…

To better survive the next morning we went to a local Portuguese deli (Seu Café) in Wilhelmsburg. Very nice place. Order the ‘Prego’ for breakfast, it’s a bread roll with a rump steak in it. And the toasted ‘croissants’ with cheese and ham as well as the pastel del nata can be recommended as well.

I don’t particularly like driving a car, so the 1000km which the weekend’s journeys added up to weren’t exactly brilliant. In fact, they were a bit worse than that because of Murphy’s Law adding a good dose of bad luck to it.

I started off at my parents’ place in Bremen and the first leg of the journey was to Hamburg, up the A1. That could be 100km of reasonably fast driving. However pretty much all of that bit of Autobahn is under construction at the moment, with 13 construction sites and maximum speeds of 60 or 80km/h going along with that. Of course that makes the driving more stressful and there was more than enough traffic as well, taking about 2 hours in the end. I amused myself by listening to British Forces Radio which is broadcast in Northern Germany. The music wasn’t good at the time, but hearing proper English was. With all the bridges crossing the Autobahn being under construction (replacement? repair?) as well there were many temporary bridges in use. Oddly, they tend to carry the web address of the owner, e.g. Janson Bridging or Stahlbau Niessen. After that I needed a break and decided to invite myself for a quick coffee with friends in Hamburg, using the opportunity to see them.

My vision was that the rest of the journey would be smooth driving. Unfortunately, all the way up to Lübeck was heavy traffic as well with very slow speeds being reached, wrecking my nerves further. I think school holidays may have been the cause for that. Then, finally, I reached the A20 which is in good shape and doesn’t have a lot of traffic, letting me hope I could catch up a little on all the time lost before. When taking a small rest and enjoying the snack my mum had given me (including a napkin!) at a rest area, I thought that the air was nice and fresh and decided to open the car’s window, to get some of that inside the car.

… which was the point at which the window decided to break, opening all the way and then stopping to work. As a consequence my next half hour or so was spent trying to find the fuses in the car and figure out what was going on there and how I could close the window again. Not just because it’s uncomfortable to drive fast with the windows open but also because it looked like it might rain. I soon learned that the fuses for the window openers in the car are actually quite clever: They don’t really blow but automatically close the circuit again a few seconds after disconnecting it. Not knowing that fact can make attempts to deduce what’s going on and why certain things work or don’t work in the car rather confusing.

After some additional fiddling, tweaking the plastic components of the car (and the joy of grabbing into the full ashtray which my dad conveniently prepared…), I found out that the up/down switch for the window seemed to be the problem. Luckily cars are not iPods and their circuitry is connected by solid plugs, so I could remove the switch and replace it with the passenger window’s, letting me solve the problem and drive on (I’ll still need a working switch and reassemble everything…).

Luckily the rest of the journey there was fine, and it was almost adventurous to drive the last few kilometres to a village with 30 or so inhabitants on a single lane road, who would have thought such things exist in Germany?

The party was fun, included funky candle driven balloons and ended with us sitting close to the stereo with a glass of whiskey listening to James Bond title tracks on vinyl while the cocks in the neighbourhood started waking people. The only complaint should go to the local mosquitoes. With only my hands being uncovered, I managed to collect nine mosquito bites on my left hand alone. They’ve been overdoing it.

The next afternoon I went on to Berlin. While things there started well, I somehow ended up on a Umleitung (do other countries even have this? The idea of a fixed set of detours along the Autobahn to easily redirect people in case the road is closed seems quite German to me) which took me 50km through the Brandenburgian countryside on slow, small roads (including an extension of the detour as indicated by traffic sign 466).

It’s green and leafy in Brandenburg, the towns look like they’ll die out soon and there were a few Alleen on the way: Pretty roads seamed by trees which are notorious for killing teenagers using them at high speed. After getting through that with not a single obvious petrol station on the way, I had to worry about refueling (and the fact that there were actual queues at the petrol station I found made me think that perhaps I didn’t just overlook other petrol station).

The final thing I did on that day was getting lost on my way into Berlin (hint: signs for Prenzlau and Prenzlauer Berg can point in opposite directions…) and experiencing once more that the directions given by Google maps may be quite good (even though they’re notoriously optimistic as far as their time estimates go), but lead to you feeling absolutely lost once you manage to get off the designated track. The final fact that the Autobahn exit I had to take was closed for construction almost seemed like a minor detail in the end and I was happy to stay with friends for the night. We even had a nice dinner at Sumo Sushi in Kreuzberg.

Just to complete the list of all-inconvenient-all-the-time car journeys, my trip back to Göttingen this morning started off with almost two hours in traffic jams on Berlin’s local Autobahns. Even though the rest of the journey went smoothly, it started the day with a bad mood.

There was a short moment of panic on my way to the railway station while leaving: An ambulance had passed by shortly before i got on my tram. And that ambulance parked on the road a few hundred metres further on. In a way that suggested the tram couldn’t pass it. Even with some safety minutes in my planning to make sure I’ll reach the train that my ticket was for, this made me a bit nervous. Luckily the tram driver was quite competent and cool and realised that the tram would just - a matter of a centimetre or so - be able to pass the parking ambulance if he went out and moved the mirror to a different position. He did just that and half a minute later we were going again.

We opened by having a meal and going to the wonderful Dr Pong once more, some of us even playing Rundlauf finals. Plans for getting up early were ruined by that - heck I’m happy that I didn’t go and laminate to-the-minute programmes in Darjeeling Limited style…

After mastering the obstacles of needing to buy public transport tickets for all of us and managing to get all of us on the same U-Bahn, we took a tour of the Berliner Unterwelten which took us through some old bunkers and their history which ranged from the third Reich to people trying to escape from the GDR. The whole bit of paranoia and lying that comes with these structures is amazing - as is the infrastructure in itself. A nice thing about the tour through the bunker at Gesundbrunnen were the many signs they had put up in there which showed plenty of old West and East German typefaces used for signage. At the end of the tour we visited another bunker inside the 1980s-style Pankstraße underground station which hides behind the walls there and excels by having doors which can close themselves without killing anybody who’s stuck in the middle.

After that we went to the Martin-Gropius-Bau, had some coffee and looked the Richard Avedon exhibition they have there. I left far less than impressed with the impression of having seen boring photos of people I’m not interested in. First they had a bunch of fashion photos (yawn), then some celebrity stuff, then random people and finally photos Avedon took in Berlin at the new year 1990. Those last ones were pointless and the other ones seemed just the bland ‘interesting’ stuff that magazines will flock to buy.

A different way to put it: When photos are great, I find that even photos of things I’m not particularly interested in will be attractive. When the only photo that sticks is one of Janis Joplin, i.e. someone I have a high opinion of anyway, it’s not particularly convincing. In addition, I keep thinking that making prints that are ‘framed’ by the outer bit of the negative with text and all on it, is pretentious crap.

After dinner in an African restaurant which people enjoyed we went out for some good music among a somewhat young audience.

Sunday started with a big disappointment. And that may be too weak a word to express the behaviour of people at Café November. Let’s just say when someone specifically walks to a place to book a brunch table for ten to make sure we won’t have to run around to find a big empty space and the people just shrug when you arrive there and indifferently mumble something like ugh some other people came, there’s no space, then you won’t become a regular at the place. After a bit of running around we finally found a bunch of seats along with food that pleased everyone, a charming French accent and a piano player at Café de Paris.

After the extensive breakfast, we strolled around the flea market at Mauerpark - definitely not my cup of tea, both because of the junk they have there and the fact that there seems to be no flea market without people burning some particularly disgusting kinds of incense. Before heading back home I followed Jan’s invitation to say hello at DevHouseBerlin at their office. It looked a bit like a MacBook zoo in there and I got to try a Club Mate which despite its alleged caffeine content didn’t prevent me from falling asleep on the train back home.

Also saw the small ‘Cities of the World’ exhibition with paintings by Titus Matiyane. He paints ‘maps’ of cities. They are huge and quite rough but still rather detailed and capturing a lot about the cities on them. Of course this is even cooler if you’ve lived in the cities in question or at least been there.

(Small part of the Pretoria map, featuring the city centre)

…

• sweet: Little bistro in Stellenbosch with proper breads run by Swedes. Nice if you want a solid bread but I found the ‘fillings’ a bit uninspired. And the traffic on the road next to it a bit too heavy when sitting outside.

• Eikendal wine farm: Their restaurant is situated quite close to a road but by the magic of elevation and a lake just in front of it, you won’t notice. The springbok carpaccio was probably a bit thick for carpaccio but still nice. And hooray for daytime drinking.

  

  We were also highly amused by finding Thüringer Bratwürste among their daily specials. Correctly spelled. Those Germans are everywhere.

  

• Mama Africa is a widely recommended restaurant in downtown Cape Town. With my parents being reluctant to travel there and back at night it took a bit of nagging to go there. The place was packed and the food was neither particularly exciting nor particularly good. I tried the crocodile sosati which tasted like chicken (with my memory of crocodile being more like fish but that may be because of different preparation) and had a Kudu steak which was rather dry.

  

  The place isn’t just a restaurant but also doubles as a bar. Many people came and went and there was live music playing which made things a bit too busy and loud for having dinner. The band was playing what I’d consider ‘Caribbean’ version of pop songs. I actually thought they were quite good but it’s a shame they didn’t do anything original.

  

  While it may just be a tourist trap after all, I’d say that just coming to Mama Africa for a drink and some music rather than a meal should be much more fun

• La Petite Ferme: Situated on the hills behind Franschhoek (the demise of whose great pancake restaurant keeps making me sad), doing only lunches and being fully booked doesn’t make this restaurant the most convenient one. But it was the best one during my whole holiday. We had to wait a bit for the table to be cleared and sat down in the sunshine of their garden with a view on the valley for the time being, ordering some wine.

  I had the rice paper with greens and pine nuts as a starter which was nice. The mussels with creamy white wine sauce were rather good as well.

  

  As a main dish I had the idea of staying lean by having the open ravioli which essentially meant sheets of noodle with plenty of tomato, feta, herbs and walnuts among them. Doesn’t sound too exciting but tasted good. The trout was very good as well and the seared tuna on green asparagus was such a generous portion and so well done that I may have regretted my choice after all.

  

  After that I had to have a dessert as well and went for a tarte, fruit, ice thingy. Quite nice particularly the fresh berries in it.

  

• The Guinea Fowl: The restaurant on the Saxenburg wine farm is quite good as well although many of their dishes suffer from being overly sauced and decorated as well as being fancy for the sake of being fancy rather than being downright good. Sitting on the stoep may give you a view all the way to Table Mountain.

  

• 96 Winery Road: This one has been a favourite with the family for a while. Not just for the meat platter they carry around to show off the different cuts and pieces but also for the rest of the menu. I had some oysters as a starter and, while OK, I keep wondering what the fuss is about. I also remembered them to be less fleshy from when I had some as a kid (imagine the suffering of holidays at a place where oysters are cheaper than ice cream…), continental differences, perhaps?

• Dros: Another franchise where you can eat a steak with onion rings. We went there because the place had a great entertainment area for my friends’ kids. With games and the facilities for them to roll out, top and bake their own pizzas. I would have loved that as a kid…