Foreign Public Transportation? Challenge Accepted

On Saturday we decided to go to the nearest bigger city, Gießen, to go shopping. It is about 25 minutes south of Marburg by train, and each of us had passed through it coming to Marburg from the Frankfurt airport.

Each of us has a pass that allows us to use any bus or train in the state of Hesse for free, so we took a bus to the train station in Marburg and then a train from there down to Gießen. We spent the day shopping and wandering around Gießen, and around 4:30pm we decided to head back so we had time to nap before going out later. We looked at the departure schedule and there was a train leaving for Marburg at 5:09pm from platform 1d. We walk up to the platform, and a few minutes before 5:09 a train arrives with the destination “Siegen” displayed on the screen.

The trains on this route do a tricky thing. When coming from Frankfurt, it’s very common for the train to split at Gießen and half go west to Siegen and the other half continue north to Marburg. Usually the cars display the name of the respective city they’re heading to, but none of these cars said Marburg on them. We decided that maybe it was a mistake, and since the schedule said the car at platform 1d was going to Marburg, we got on.

After a while we reached a city called Dillenburg that none of us remembered passing on the way there. We pulled up a map and realized that we were already halfway to Siegen.

We got off the train there and went to look at the schedule to see if we could get a train back to Gießen. That’s when we realized our mistake: There was a smaller schedule on a piece of paper that was for Saturdays and Sundays which we hadn’t read back in Gießen. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a train headed back to Gießen until 11:45pm, and there wouldn’t be a train going from Gießen back to Marburg that late.

We walked up to the ticket counter to see if they could help us figure out a way to get back, but because it was Saturday they were closed. Stumped, we decided to look up the train schedule on the automatic ticket machines to see if there was another way to get back, and luckily it calculated a route via bus back to Marburg.

It took two hours on three buses to get back to Marburg, and after finally taking a fourth bus from the Marburg train station to our dorm, it was 8pm. The worst part was that we were all so anxious that none of us were able to sleep on the way. So much for our naps. 

We still got home though, which in my book makes the score:

Foreign Public Transportation: 0; Sarah: 1

Suck it.

Weird German Thing of the Week:

An issue that I dealt with this weekend is German-style service. German waiters make a living wage so you’re only expected to tip around 10% if at all. The result of that, however, is that they don’t really care if you like their service or not. They don’t ever come to check on you, so if you want something you have to get their attention, which can be quite difficult if they’re busy. As far as culture shock goes, this has definitely been that most irritating thing so far. I’ve definitely waited for over twenty minutes for service while actively trying to get their attention. I guess Germans are just much more laid back and aren't in a hurry to get their food or drinks.