Travel notes¶
1114 words on Travel
As the last week came with plenty of travelling for me, I had plenty of time to cook up a few silly thoughts:
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
