Chris and I have successfully made it to our hotel in Munich. It's right downtown and really nice considering how cheap it is. A couple notes from the journey:
1. I saw the Isle of Man in person for the first time ever (from the airplane).
2. The Netherlands is a mindbogglingly wet place. Reservoirs of water just criss-cross the entire countryside. Irrigation ditches are 20 meters across. The whole place looks like it's built on a filled-in swamp. We saw a huge freighter really far inland, just chilling in a canal that was only 150% of its width. Also it's got huge fields of wind turbines right off the coast that Chris said looked like Sim City. Anyway, what little I saw of it from the plane makes it look like a bizarre and awesome place. I want to go.
3. The Amsterdam Airport is insane. First, picture the busiest airport you've ever been in, then reduce the width of all concourses by half. At least, that's the way it was for our brief and hectic layover there. Another kind of weird thing is that Dutch is very much a second language there. All the signs are in big English letters, with little Dutch captions. The ads don't bother with the Dutch at all.
4. As far as we can tell, the Munich train system runs on the honor system. We bought tickets to go from the airport to downtown, and five day passes to get around after that, but we have yet to see anybody actually take a ticket or look at a pass. We still have our tickets that we bought at the airport. There are little blue boxes at the stations that we later realized you're supposed to put your ticket in, but again, no verification whatsoever. Either we're missing something or Germans are an honest folk. Pretty cool if it actually is able to operate that way.
5. Did I mention our hotel is sweet? Our (shared) bathroom overlooks a cathedral. Also, we have three beds, so we can afford to make at least one friend.
3 comments:
Yay! I'll see you guys in a few days -- scope it out for me!
I was on an S-Bahn in Berlin once, and a bunch of uniformed guys got on all entrances at once, blocking the exits, checking tickets, and issuing fines to anyone without one. So it's somewhere between an honor system and gambling.
Damn hot-shot researchers. They checked tickets heavily in Prague, but not much in Vienna.
Drink a beer for me.
Chris - Man, that sounds scary. I wonder how much the fines are. The tickets from the airport weren't cheap, so they'd either have to give out hefty fines or they'd have to check fairly often in order to make buying a ticket a better expected value.
Tim - Will do, good sir!
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