“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake.
The great affair is to move.”
― Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
Once the travel bug has bit you, an airport becomes the most exciting place you can be! In the Frankfurt airport, there is a great black board with departure schedules; it is wonderfully old-fashioned and the individual letter and number blocks click and roll as the schedules update. I have always loved to stand in front of it and read off all the places one might go anywhere in the world - if only one could.
Truthfully, I love travel in any mode - although ships and ferries are my least favorite (since I always get a touch of queasy sea-sickness!). My travels in Germany have afforded me many different means of public transportation.
In my previous post about travel and transportation (link here), I showed some pictures of our train travels. Above is one more form of transportation that is the S-bahn (ca. mid-1980s), which stands for Stadtschnellbahn (city rapid railway). While the regional trains and the ICE (inter-city express) trains get you from one city to another, the S-bahn gets you around a city and its suburbs without stopping at every station as the U-bahn and Strassenbahn do.
In the picture above, my little brother is getting his ticket for a U-bahn ride (or Untergrundbahn - underground train or subway) sometime in 1984 or 85. I think it is interesting to note that Germans "pull" a ticket out of the machine ... ein Fahrschein ZIEHEN. Ziehen can mean to pull, to take, or to draw (out).
In the picture above, my little brother is standing by an old Frankfurt Strassenbahn (street car), yet another common form of public transportation in cities. There's also buses readily available. You are bound to get where you are going one way or the other!!
One last photo of a streetcar in Würzburg in 2012 (above), leaving the train station behind it ... I think you can probably tell that the cars have been updated a little since the 1980s.
More on transportation in my next post - Part 3 of this series.
Read Part 1
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