tornado thoughts

Germany Day 6 - Lost in Transition

All good things must come to an end (for part 1) and our fellow Asean counterparts were kind enough to give us a farewell lunch (Thai food) and see us off at the train station. The Thai food was really good (probably it has been quite a while since we had rice and spicy soup) and it gave us the morale booster for another week in Germany!

As Gary and I were carrying our luggages, we didn't take much pictures for the day. No spare hands! However, I still managed to take some pictures of a flower shop, countryside view from from the train.

One incident happened that will leave a mark in our Germany trip. That is the ICE train trip from Hamburg to Schwelm. We had to change train from Hamburg main station to Hannover main station. From there, we need to find out the platform that we are supposed to take. We had only 10minutes to do so. Imagine we were carrying our luggages at that time! It's worst then the amazing race.

When the train reached Hannover main station, you can see swarms of people rushing out to try to go to their respective platforms. For those who do not know (like me), we had to go down to the counter and look at the screen to see which platform our train was located. It's like a mini airport just that you substitute it as a train. Thank God, we managed to get onto the platform and into the train in the nick of time.

From Hannover main station, we need to make another transit to Hagen train station. That is when things went wrong. First, there was a technical fault with the train and the train conductor announced the fault and there would be a replacement train for those who are rushing for time. However, all these were spoken in German which I do not understand at all! After the announcement, I saw many people standing up and leaving. However, I also saw quite a number of people who remained in their seats. I approached a few of the people but none understand English. When I finally managed to speak to an American and understand what was going on, the "replacement" train had left. It's ok, we waited for the fault to be rectified and proceeded with the journey. When we were reaching Hagen main station, Gary and I stood at the door waiting for it to come to a stop. Guess what, when the train stopped, the door didn't open. We thought it may be some technical error or something but when we saw other people exiting from other doors, we realised something is wrong. We read the instructions by the side of the door and realised that we had to press the button and pull the handle to manually open the door! When we tried to do that, it was too late. The train had started on it's next journey! It was heading towards Wuppertal Main Station.

This was something unexpected and we told ourselves to get out of the train at the next stop no matter what. When we reached Wuppertal Main Station, we were deciding between taking a cab from Wuppertal to Schwelm or take a train back there. Taking a cab would cost us around 30Euros for half an hour ride. Take a train would cost us less than 10 Euros in total. I bought 2 train tickets from Wuppertal to Schwelm. You would have guessed that this would be the end of the episode right? NO!!!

Gary and I waited at the platform for the train to arrive. When the train came, Gary wanted to play safe and went to approach a couple to ask whether the train that has stopped is going to Schwelm. At that time, I was already in the train because I was quite sure that it was going there. It took a while for the couple to understand what Gary tried to ask and when they understood and told him that the train is heading to Schwelm, the door closed. Man, now we're seperated.

I called Gary up on his mobile and told him of the next train that is heading to Schwelm and also the platform and we would meet at the entrance of the Schwelm train station. Finally, we met up at the Schwelm train station after 2hours behind our scheduled time. We then proceeded to taking a cab to our hotel which is less than 5min drive. It cost us about 8Euro. Cabs are expensive! After a whole day saga, we met up with our other supplier and the asia delegates (India, Malaysia, Korea) and had dinner at the hotel. That sums up day 6 of Germany trip.

posted by tornado @ 8:12 AM