No place like home

Just in case anyone was wondering, there are better ways to spend a day than by commuting four hours each way to work. However, I survived without catching cold (yet! knock on wood, spit over my shoulder) and got some fine sightseeing done.

The trip could be taken as an object lesson in disbelieving weather forecasts: it was generally not as bad as predicted, and specifically very variable from one place to another. South of Bonn, there was no snow at all but temperatures were far below zero, even quite large ponds were frozen over; half an hour further north, closer to the predicted cold&nasty, there was snow on the ground but the temperature was above zero and melt-water was running everywhere.

(I should mention, that I was riding on the ICE, so that half hour translates to something like 120 km. The train-makers understood the appeal of speed, and placed a spedometer readout in each carriage. My brother-in-commonlaw has a photo taken on a stretch of flat and straight track north of Stuttgart, where the spedometer stands at 274 kmh. (The French TGV is even faster, if memory is correct that one reached 320 kmh north of Avignon.))

The three-and-a-half-hour train journey took me up the Rhine to Cologne, then northeast to a small town, literally at the dead end of the railway line, then a further twenty minutes in a taxi to a tiny village with a huge factory (something fairly common in Germany) where I held the training session, then the same journey backwards with the fillip of a forty minute delay. At one point, the train conductor annnounced "We are currently running ten minutes late, however you will make the connection at the next station, because that train is running thirteen minutes late." Ragged cheers.

The northwest of Germany is very different from the south. Towns in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are small and dense, and kept apart from each other by hills and valleys and great tracts of forest. The north is one single low-density light-industrial suburb smeared across a largely flat non-landscape, where the demarcation between towns is often just a legal fiction. The north is also, in a word, dirty. I have become accustomed to Swabian standards of cleanliness in public places. No Swabe would allow a factory roof to fall in and rot, nor would they drive to the edge of town and dump their rubbish on common land.

I apparently misled Red Eft and others on Tuesday, I should have said that eagles are common in the south, as I didn't see a single one yesterday. There were generally fewer birds in sight, probably due to the aforementioned light-industrial smearing: two swans, a few miscellaneous ducks, three magpies, many crows (but fewer than on Monday), two hawks, one of them "treed" by a pair of crows, and a flock of at least a hundred terns floating together on a single pond. I also saw two rabbits, a possible badger, and what may have been a fox (or just a large ginger cat) far off at the edge of the woods.

Passing through Wuppertal, the train runs parallel to the Wupper river and thus to the Schwebebahn familiar to fans of Wim Wenders' marvellous film Alice in der Städten. It's a very strange thing, a monorail local-transit train that hangs from a track suspended above the river on rusting green-painted steel frames. The trains themselves are modern, plastic shells in garish colours, not at all the characterful rattletraps of the film.