Saturday, 19 May 2007

Arrival

Bangalore-Frankfurt, LH

I was supposed to reach Frankfurt by about 8 am. I did.

Economy class travel is, I believe, wrongly termed. The first, and über class passengers get to board the plane first, and are greeted by spacious, plush, leather upholstered seats with armrests that can actually accommodate human sized arms.
Then they call for the cattle- us, I mean. We were herded together into seats that only people with a few additional joints along the femur can fit in. Since I don't belong to that category, I was forced to seek the diagonal dimension between the edge of my seat, and the cramped knees of my co-passenger to obtain leg space for my own. A few hours of sleepless torture later, the food arrives, and I manage to gulp down the reheated vadas and the nearly stale uppittu in time.

Cattle class does have its advantages. Getting off the plane at Frankfurt was the most liberating feeling in recent times that I've had, despite the fact that I had no idea of what to do next.
Frankfurt airport is big. I did not explore much myself, but I guessed from the number of electric carts that were being driven around that getting around on foot was not to be fancied.

I wandered aimlessly until I hit upon the customs counter, and then the baggage claim area. Some more random walking took me to a gift shop, a ticketing counter, a scary restaurant, and landed me in the midst of a bunch of English tourists before I managed to find the railway station. A little more wandering, and I managed to purchase a ticket to Erlangen. Buying the insanely expensive ticket did not sting until later, but in retrospect, the journey was well worth it.

Frankfurt-Nuremberg, ICE

I got to the platform at about 9 am, and realized that the 9:36 train arrives at 9:35. It always does.

'City 17's got nothing on Frankfurt', I remember muttering when the train reached the outskirts. The barns, roads, bridges and tunnels would have made for an ideal set for a live action HL2 movie. The Combine logo seemed oddly lacking. (If you don't understand any of this, you don't need to.)

A picture postcard slide show at 200 kmph. That pretty much sums up the train ride. I've never found picturesque countrysides aesthetically pleasing, but for two hours (and three hundred kilometers), I was taken in. Fields, pastures, clock towers and factories flashed past until I was politely asked by the ticket checker to go to the second class compartment. I was sitting in first class!

Everything in the scenery was pretty and intricate. Especially the graffiti. There was tonnes of detail spray painted on to the walls, and the vandal (artist?) had even added perspective to the drawings. The messages (atleast the ones in English) were mostly obscure references to freedom and liberty. I wonder...

Awesome thing: There were huge chimneys at one point that released white smoke in large volumes. Large is too small a word. The smoke coalesced with a low hanging humongous cloud, and it looked like the chimneys were sucking in the cloud! Wait, perhaps they were...
If I wasn't glancing at my watch every few minutes (wouldn't want to miss the connecting train, would I?), I might have remembered to snap pictures.

Awesomer thing: Imagine an acre of timber, about twenty feet high. Now imagine four giant sprays tenderizing the wood at four corners of the plot, spraying water over a hundred and fifty feet high. The water jet goes so high (and far), most of it atomizes before the spray begins to fall towards the timber! Surreal. Yup, I saw that.

Nuremberg-Erlangen, RB

I manage to get off at Nuremberg, and see the first of many railway stations in Germany.
This is first time (many to come later, I fear) that I feel that the chap who wrote "Pleasant, expected to get warmer in the coming months" as a weather description for Germany on the internet should have been in my position. It's freezing.

I realize that there's nothing to train travel in Germany. For the 11:59 to Erlangen, reach the platform by 11:58. The train arrives by 11:58, and the automatic train doors stay open for about a minute. Get on, grab an empty seat (all of them are empty, most of the time), and glance at your watch occasionally. Get off at 12:36.

I call up the company from the Erlangen railway station, but the professor's out of town. Take a bus, they tell me. I do.
The railway station opens out to the city square. Its the same in all small towns, apparently. The city square is a picturesque paved area with benches and a bus stop, for people to get together and chat (which they never do), and for pigeons to hoot and holler (which they never do). This is a portion of the Erlangen city square, and DB is die bahn, or 'the railway':


At a corner, the temperature display reads 9 degrees celcius. It begins to rain.

Its the same with buses. The 1:12 always arrives at 1:12, and leaves a few seconds later.

The buses, I realize, actually tilt by a few degrees so as to lower the door on the passenger's side. Here's a bus in the tilted position (taken at the bus stop, Erlangen city square, Hugenottenplatz)


The door is two inches off the road!

I find the right bus, and reach the company. I am supposed to buy a ticket to Am Weichselgarten, and I'll be darned if I can ever pronounce that correctly. So I write it down, show it to the driver, and get a ticket. Expensive, that.

I reach the company by about 2 pm, and I'm hungry, cold, and almost wet. I lug my luggage down two office blocks, reading the signposts on the way, and finally reach the office. I'm greeted with smiles and handshakes, and a coffee and some chocolate later, I'm not shivering anymore (The photos were taken on a warm, sunny day, and do not quite reflect the mood of the hour, or the weather of that day), and Adnan, an intern from Sarajevo, generously agrees to drop me to the hostel in his car.
He does.

I'm home.

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