Autobahn Fail
Thursday, October 27th, 2011I’m writing this on a train somewhere in Poland on Tuesday afternoon and will upload it when I have a computer connection. I’m hoping the Marriott in Warsaw will have a good one (they ought to).
The most dreaded word on German radio when you drive on the the Autobahn is STAU. It’s German for traffic jam. Yesterday (Tuesday), I ran into the worst one since I started traveling in Germany more than ten years ago.
My last appointment of the day was with a customer west of Münster in the afternoon and I had a long drive ahead of me to Magdeburg in former East Germany. My estimated ETA was 20:30. But it was not meant to be…
East of Hannover I ran into 13 km of STAU that took close to three hours to get through. You know it’s a bad one when men get out of their cars to relieve themselves against the divider in plain view. I arrived at my hotel past eleven o’clock at night and everything was closed, so no dinner.
Fortunately, I have been stuffing myself full with breakfast in the mornings and haven’t needed lunch. It’s not a good long-term diet, but it works when you’re on the road like this. Yesterday was a bit extreme, though, with a diet consisting of breakfast, a Twix bar, five paprika chips and too much coffee.
This is my first time in East Germany and there was a marked difference driving through the streets of Magdeburg compared to any equally sized town in West Germany. Wide, boring boulevards, void of people and with an architectural nod to Stalin.
Driving through the countryside to see my customer this morning was also a big difference from what I’m used to. In West Germany you can’t drive for more than a few kilometers before coming upon the next nice village or small town, with well-maintained streets everywhere. Not so in the East. There’s much more open space and I thought my Opel rental car was going to fall apart on some of the roads. Houses in the rural villages are still dilapidated and depressing.
You can’t undo forty years of Communist mismanagement and destruction in twenty years.
My first visit to Berlin was so brief it barely qualifies as me being there. I made it to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) just in time to drop off my rental car and hop on the EC-train to Poland. It’s not fast, but 1st class is quiet and clean. The restaurant cart is run by poles but the tickets checked by Deutsche Bahn. I pre-booked this with DB for a mere €40. Beats flying any day!