881–890 of 1001 posts
I guess that's what happens if you live in a failed state. It's like watching an accident happen in super slow motion. I live rather remotely and 90% of bus drivers don't even speak German so when they skip a station despite you pushing the button to signal wanting to exit, you basically can't even communicate, leading to having to walk up to 2km with all your grocery bags.
Did you really just blame immigration for the German railway's issues...?
Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time and if you're unlucky most probably a delay of 4+ hours and missing your connecting train. The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inef…
Before the DB became a public limited company, their services worked remarkably well. I know from first hand experience because I was already a customer then. The privatisation and the crazy idea that it could somehow not being run on a deficit is what ruined it. Of course the competition thing is artificial, and the internal structures are kaput, but I doubt that more competition would fix it. Surprisingly, 90% of t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you really just blame immigration for the German railway's issues...?
wtf? No.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a train going to an airport, English. This is the norm around the world, especially with complicated situations like a train splitting in two.
Is it though? Why should anywhere cater to my failure to learn their language and systems? It’s nice if they do but I don’t expect it.
For my job, I travel all over Germany very often. I take the car, train, bus, or sometimes even the plane. The train is the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany. Of course, there are delays, and sometimes mistakes happen that result in very long delays. But where doesn't that happen? I find traveling by car to be the worst. How many times this year have I been stuck in traffic jams for several hours wi…
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. A complex system that delivers customer further from destination than they were originally from, is flawed by design. And we all know what the problem is exactly: it is the design for capabilities that the company could not afford based on its budget/planning/KPIs. DB did not invest enough in infrastructure to support the big dream, and now they also have huge aging and retiring workfor…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what's the level of mutual ineligibility between DE NL (probably DE is easier to NL) but it's funny how Germans sometimes seem to play dumb and not understand a thing in NL
Ironically, technically speaking, there are seemingly more similarities between British English, i.e., Anglican German and current High German due to various perversions and "reforms" of the German language over the last many decades, in order to drive the Germanic people away from each other. If the EU were a serious and legitimate institution, there would be an effort to implement reforms that nudge English, Dutch,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany and Italy should gang up together to make the trains run on time and... wait a minute.
Hey Japan wants to join. I know we are a bit far away but we can form some sort of a tri-something axis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it Centraal? That would have been my guess.
Hah nope! Even as a Belgian I find the naming of the Brussels train stations maddening. Brussels-Midi is the south station, so Brussel-Zuid. Midi allegedly means south in French, but I've never actually heard it being used over "sud", also south. In conversation, midi also means noon (e.g. used as "meet me at noon"), which for my brain correlates more with central than south, given the context of a day. Not a linguis…
So we winged it and got off at Zuid (since Noord felt wrong and Centraal definitely seemed wrong) and luckily it was the right one.
We did have a wonderful evening (perhaps too much so) the night before at a nice craft beer bar in Leuven which had 100 beers on tap, and it had just bought over by a nice young couple as well. So perhaps neither of us were in the right state that morning to navigate a confusing train map! Good memories.