Is this seat taken? A look at German transportation
As I write this blog post, I’m traveling home from the German/Austrian border, where we spent the day at Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat. This trip is unusually difficult – due to track transfers on our what-should-be-one-ride train, we’ll be taking three trains and two buses home. But usually, it’s far easier than this.
This four hour (one way) travel saga is the first lengthy trip of what will be many – when we head to Nuremberg, we’ll take a train from Munich that will take an hour and a half. But that doesn’t even compare to the eight hour rides between Berlin and Auschwitz when the time comes.
We take public transportation everywhere. Munich’s S-Bahn and U-Bahn are comparable to Boston’s T system, and since our hotel is just five minutes from Munich’s Hauptbahnof (Central Station) we’re able to take the Bahn to different parts of the city, both on our group trips out and during our free time.
There’s a certain level of independence that comes with traveling on public transportation in a foreign country, especially when you don’t understand a lick of German and your native-speaker-of-German professor doesn’t accompany you during your free time. Sometimes we’ve struggled to read the maps and we can’t understand the announcements that come over the loudspeaker in rapid fire German, but we’ve perfected the art of recognizing station stops – to get to the Englischer Gardens, where all of Munich goes on warm days to relax, bike and swim in the Isar river and where we spent our last free day in Munich, we take the U3 (which is orange) toward the cow station with the M (Moosach.)
Once you arrive at your stop or the train arrives to pick you up, passengers are responsible for opening the train doors – a unique feature. It’s all done via a button from the inside or a handle from the outside, which seems easy enough until you have a crowd of Germans eager to start their weekend standing behind you on a Friday afternoon and you’re responsible for opening the door.
When we’ve run into trouble on public transport, the German people have been very happy to help. All it takes is a simple “Do you speak English?” before those that do come forward to answer our questions. They’ve mostly been helpful and eager to learn more about us and why we’re in their city, and we are always looking to swap stories.
The best part about the German Bahn system? Most trains have a pole sticking out of the ground in the middle part of the train for those squished into the middle to make room to hold on to. As someone who isn’t always the biggest fan of subway surfing on the green line at home on a busy weekday afternoon, the City of Boston should give Angela Merkel a call to discuss this.
Either way, one thing remains the same between the subway drivers in Boston and Munich – it’s always impossible to understand them over the loudspeaker.
