Oh gosh, Train blogging from Berlin to Munich

NOTE: As the first paragraph and title will probably make obvious, I wrote this on the train this past Sunday.

Happy Father’s Day, all you fathers. Especially my dad. Because he’s the greatest. Maybe not the greatest (there’s a lot of fathers out there), but he has done so much for me, and when you’re in Europe for three months, you realize how much you rely on your dads for everything from emotional support, to advice, to logistics. So, Happy Father’s Day, dad. I love you.

The past few days in Berlin have flown by. I’m train blogging again; the ICE is accelerating out of Nurnberg. I just passed a big building with an big red SPD sign flashing on top of it. It’s a beacon to a few decades ago, and I’d have expected it to be taken down by 2008.

My final day in Budapest was pretty uneventful. Evan and I visited another spa, this one at a pretty swanky hotel on the Buda side of the city. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the vitality of the other one. And I don’t think the spa was even more luxurious, though we had to pay maybe 12 dollars to go in. The building was a confusing maze of wood ancient wood paneling. Construction crews were outside grouting the building’s stone walls. The hotel needed construction crews to update the inside. The night before our second bathes experience, I got to see the ballet at the opera house. Evan had thought it was an opera, but getting to see a ballet was lucky for me for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t understand Magyar, or any other language that an opera would be in. And secondly, we got lucky to see the ballet because it was so good. The dance was an interpretation of Taming of the Shrew, and while I remembered the broad outlines of the play from when SLUH put on the play (did they put it on? I’m questioning myself now), the dance itself conveyed the plot perfectly. The more expressive, typically ballet-esque parts of the dance bored me a little when I was watching it. The parts I liked the most were the short ‘conversations’ between characters. How a choreographer was able to make a set gestures and movements seem so literal and obvious was amazing.

Since I am riding on one of their trains, I want to take a moment to express the love I have towards the Deutche Bahn corporation. I think any other rail traveller in Europe has similar sentiments, especially the ones with Eurorail passes. Carleton College, bless its soul, bought each student a Eurail ten day pass. That pass entitled us to ten days over a period of two months, of free riding on any railways in Europe. No preplanning required, no tickets (sometimes you need reservations but except in France, you can get those at the station right before the train leaves). Because of this pass, the traveling I have done over the past week and half has been extremely cheap (30 euros a day?) and extremely flexible. When I realized I wouldn’t have free housing in Paris, it only took about an hour to readjust my plans and head to Munich. And at the best example of this train system marvel is Die Bahn. Their trains are always on time and they go everywhere it seems. I’ve taken them to Vienna, I’ll take one to Zurich and another to southern France.

Which brings this tribute to Berlin Hauptbahnhof. The main station in Berlin is new, sleek, and enormous. Evan and I rode into Berlin and the Berlin station on an underground tunnel. When we got out, we just looked up and there were floors of train tracks with trains zipping in every direction. You know in Star Wars when they have city scenes of Coruscant and the thousands of levels of traffic in the planet’s atmosphere? The station had a similar three dimension feel that was awe-inspiring. And every where about the station was the DB logo. And everywhere about the city, the red DB logo paternally looked down from a number of tall buildings. One building next to the station had the biggest and highest logo and I’m pretty sure the building was completely empty. It served as one expensive billboard.

Berlin, like Paris, is a sui generis. While at the concert hall, Evan and I met a political scientist working in England, but his comment was that Berlin has no city center. “Just look at its history,” he said. Evan awed that the past one hundred years of Western History could be summed up in Berlin. Hell, all you have to do is stand in front of the Reichstag with the path of the Berlin wall subtly marked next to it to see how centrally the city has sat in the geography of history.

The city didn’t open itself easily to exploration. Where Budapest unfolded like a map, I could only understand the map of Berlin in its U- and S-bahn lines and where they slithered. At first the transportation system confounded me. What is the relationship beween the surface and underground trains. Often times the S goes underground while the U1 traveled above ground right next to S lines. I’m still not sure about the relationship between the two systems.

Oh gosh, I’m in Munich already. Trains, they’re the best.