Well we arrived in Hamm a little earlier than we had anticipated. So when Mishko went in to check with the reservation people about our reservations he was told that because of the outages, they would not guarantee a seat. So, we rushed to platform 5 to await the arrival of our train. Because the train system has been so screwed up from the storm, we had no idea what time the train would arrive. So there we stood on platform 5 with trains coming and going - a bunch of foreigners with no working knowledge of German. After about 8 minutes of waiting and several announcements in German, Mishko said (in his very thick Eastern European accent), "Now they have moved da train to platform 10! Com'on everhybodee, must quickly move to platform 10!" By this time we were all quite hungry. It was nearly 1:00 and we hadn't eaten much for breakfast. But nothing to worry about since there was a dining car on the train. OK, no problem, I will eat on the train.
The train arrived at approximately 1:10, we all boarded the 1st class cars and off we went. About 30 minutes into our ride, I took a stroll to the dining car with Mom. What did we find? Nothing! Absolutley nothing was availalbe to eat. No, they hadn't run out of food, there wasn't any because the crew that was to serve the food couldn't get on the train in Dusseldorff. No food?!? Not only was I upset, but so was nearly half of our group as we had been promised when we rushed to the train that there would be food aboard. So, no food. For two days I have been hearing about how efficient and effective the Germans are when solving problems and so on. Well, they really managed to throw a monkey wrench into this problem!!! Not only were there many trains down in Dusseldorf, but there had been many others in other cities as well. And the kicker was that the German train officials didn't post anything on their webpage, their facebook page, instagram - NOTHING. As a matter of fact, one of the Canadian transplants got online with her phone to try and make a reservation so we could tell if the train was running through a nearby city. No only could she not make a reservation, the German government train officials actually shut down the entire reservation system! They had no plan for when catastrophies like this happened. They were unprepared and unable to deal with the thousands of people that this affected in a small geographic area. My dad mentioned that it sounded like something that would happen with the bureacracy within the U.S. I disagree, I believe tht we have ha catastrophies similar happen in Chicago and busses were put into service to get people from one place to another. Not here, it absolutely did not happen here. People were stranded and couldn't get to where they needed to go. The best part of the whole thing is that the German train system has busses that they use to get employees and food from one place to another. But not today, apparently the Germans' brains took a little holiday unable to get it right for their people. For goodness sake, they couldn't manage to get food to our train.......
But I digress, We left on the train at 1:15 or so. The ride was supposed to take 4 hours. We arrived in Berlin at 6:15. Chalk up another inefficiency for the Germans. This train was supposed to travel approximately 200 km/her, but because we were using a different track than we were supposed to, it rarely went above 120 km/hr. No matter how you measure it, km or miles, we got in late and missed the sightseeing tour of Berlin. By the time we got to the bus and the hotel, it was 6:45. So we ate dinner starting at 7:30 and we were all starving. but the food has been good so far. We have been disappointed at the lack of "German" food that we have been served. We have been expecting wiener schnitzel, strudel, and sauerkraut just to name a few. Not all at the same time mind you - that would be gross. But a bit here and there would be good.
Tomorrow we will be doing the tour that we missed today, then we will go to Hamburg to the Allied Museum. Maybe some strudel is in my future tomorrow. We shall see.
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