Our mini-tour is over and after several adventures, we finally made it safely home this morning.
Monday began with a trip to the hospital to get our second trimester ultrasound, where we ended up waiting two hours for our appointment because some problem was found with the woman that was seen before us. Hopefully things will work out okay for her. But das Baby proved again to be an uncooperative little tyke and spent almost the whole time curled up with it’s hands in front of it’s face. The doctor says that if she had to guess, she’d say it’s a boy, but she’s not at all sure. There are clarity problems with the ultrasound which may have to do with the fact that I have scarring from endometriosis (she said it wasn’t chubbiness, in fact, she called me “schlank” [slender] – whoa! thanks doc! most German docs tell me quite bluntly to lose weight!). Anyways, we have to go back in two weeks to have the ultrasound done again.
Then we were off to Göttingen, a very cute, old, college town full of half-timbered houses that was home to many brilliant folks and something like 40 Nobel prize winners (Rainer felt the need to tell me at least five times that it was where Gauss taught). I’ll most likely post pics later, but I haven’t downloaded them yet, so I’m not sure how they look. It was unfortunately raining the whole time we were away, so I actually spent more time shopping in Göttingen than sightseeing (by the way, the C & A there has a pretty good maternity section – better than the one in the Donauzentrum in Regensburg, anyway).
Berlin was Berlin, and a day and a half is too short for a visit and we’ll have to head up for a longer span next time. There just wasn’t enough time to visit with everyone that we would have liked to. We had lunch with a friend at Thai Insight near Alexanderplatz. Rainer thought the restaurant was brilliant. I found it a little bland (and Rainer says my cooking is really bland since I’ve been pregnant, so the food there must be seriously bland), but the food presentation is pretty amazing. It’s a bit pricey, but I think this is mostly to pay for all the man-hours spent carving vegetable flowers.
After lunched we rushed over to the Sony Center to meet up with Vailian, his ex and son, and watch Dreamgirls. Vailian’s quite cool and I was glad to finally meet him, but we sadly didn’t have that much time to talk. Hopefully we’ll get to meet up again in the future. Dreamgirls was good and although Rainer didn’t want to see it at first, he found it quite enjoyable. After the movie, I attempted to go shopping in the Potsdamer Arkaden, but Rainer wasn’t down with this, so we headed back over to Sony Center and saw Pan’s Labyrinth. I thought it was okay, but Rainer vehemently stated that it was the worst movie he’d ever seen. “Really, worse than the Hollywood movies filled with helicopters and explosions and the sound of bullet casings hitting the ground?” I asked him, at which point he seemed to back down on the harshness of his review.
The next day started out with a nice little trip to the Steglitz Arkaden, das Schloss, which is actually a pretty nice place to go if you’re looking for shoes like me, because at least half the stores there are shoe stores. After weeks of searching, I finally found a nice pair of comfortable walking shoes that aren’t sneakers and don’t require me to bend over to put them on. But then comes the trouble. I got back on the S-Bahn, heading towards Potsdam to visit Lynn, when the Kontrollers showed up to check that everyone had paid their fares. I promptly whipped out my ticket. The guy nodded and passed by, checked the next lady, then came back and asked to see my ticket again. It was at this point that I found out that although the tickets say (in German): good for 120 minutes, this is only one-way, and not good for a round trip (apparently this changed 2.5 years ago, at which point I had moved out of Berlin and when I did visit, I was coming in on day-tickets, so I never realized my mistake). I could have tried the non-German-speaking-American-tourist ploy, but I’m not that quick on my feet when surprised, so I just explained to him that I didn’t know the rule changed. He was sympathetic and instead of just calculating the amount of my fine, he told me to call the customer service number today to find out if I needed to pay the ticket. I felt pretty stupid the rest of the day, why hadn’t I paid closer attention when buying the ticket? Why couldn’t the Kontrollers checked the car before or after mine? Why couldn’t they have checked one station further, when my ticket could have been considered “legal” again? Oh well. I called this morning and the customer service guy had no idea why the Kontroller would tell me to call him. He told me that the only reason to call him is if I was mishandled. And he told me that the fine is usually 40 Euro, so I guess I will be paying that. It sucks, but after telling my story to many folks, it seems that this is something that happens to a lot of folks at some point (either accidentally or purposefully) and I can now claim a new German experience: Schwarzfahren (fare dodging).
Anyways, because of my S-Bahn adventure, I ended up 40 minutes late to meet Lynn, but it was all good and I got to see the 11 day old Edward in all his tiny cuteness! I can’t believe that I will have one of these little guys (or girls) in 4 months. Scary!
I also learned on my trip that I do not at all look five months pregnant. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, considering that I don’t even fit in my fat clothes anymore. Oh God, I can’t believe there will be a little Christina or Rainer here in 4 months time.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Great that we managed to meet up, sorry we were on such a tight schedule! Next time we will do it right…
BTW I think my kids would go into hysterics if they knew you put me and cool into the same paragraph. Not an adjective they consider applicable to me, but thanx anyhow!
@vailian: eh! What do kids know?
Last week I realized that I had fare dodged on accident too! I was talking and forgot to stop at the machine, and when I stepped off the elevator it was a dash to the train because it was about to leave… Three hours later I realized that I had to be happy that we didn’t get checked, because my friend from the US was visiting and she trusted me to make sure she was legal!
@maria: Yeah, mistakes and accidents happen. I just wish I hadn’t gotten caught when I made mine!
I think they should just make public transportation free. That would help the environment out a lot, although I guess taxes would skyrocket.
you can only call yourself a schwarzfahrerin when you did it on purpose. nobody should be held responsible for fine-print that changed some years ago, but was never made public. and who ever heard about tickets being valid for just one direction? in leipzig it’s perfectly possible to take a round trip with your 60-minutes ticket.
btw. always drive in the first car: there are hardly *any* kontrolleure.
Actually, they *did* mention it quite prominently when they changed the rules — not that that makes it any less inconvenient. It’s just another way of BVG squeezing money out of the people they hate the most: their customers.
My favorite Schwarzfahr story: This gal I used to know was doing it one day, but the controllers were in a hurry and didn’t get to her end of the car. She sort of went “whew” when they got off, and the grandmotherly woman next to her inquired, in a broad East Berlin accent, “Did you have a ticket?” She told her no, she didn’t. “Me, neither,” the old lady giggled. “Back in the old days, of course, one did it on principle, but now I just do it because it’s fun!”
Got caught out with the 2 hour ticket as well. I think I was out of the country when they changed the rules, and as it still says “Ab Entwertung 120 min gültig” on the ticket itself (and no mention of any restrictions), I never had any reason to think it had changed.
Fortunately I was doing a round trip and was checked a few stations before my start / destination, and after a long and heated argument with the Kontrollierer (who didn’t even have any documentation on them which explained the fare system) I ended up going to the S-Bahn’s fine-payment place at Nordbahnhof ready to give someone an earful. The guy took one look at the paperwork and said it was OK because I was on the Ringbahn, and as long as you’re not “caught” at the station you started from, it’s a legitimate use of the ticket.
@rita: Shucks! Well, my new experience is getting caught and ticketed then! I’ll keep that first car thing in mind for the future if I decide to try for the Schwarzfahrerin experience then.
@ed: Looking at the time frame, I think I was living in Rostock at the time it changed and not giving a hoot about Berlin transportation laws. And that’s a great story. I’ve also seen quite a few folks sighing when the controllers didn’t make it through the car.
@mount penguin: Yeah, that wording on the ticket is what got me too. And I’ve never gotten out of any kind of fine or ticket in my life. That’s a new experience I would like to add.