Saturday 16 July 2011

Just when you thought it was safe to go back onto the internet...

you come back to find that I've been travelling by train. Again. What can I say? I love them.

And even though this has now morphed into a blog about public transport seat covers - which in NO WAY makes me into some kind of nerdy geek, by the way - I hope it's still vaguely interesting. (yeah, only to public transport seat covers geeks. - ed)



Anyway. I went to Berlin, by ICE which didn't give me any new material because we went first class. Again. Because - and this is the part that has me scratching my head - it was cheaper.

Ho hum. On the first evening, having brushed the country-bumpkin straw out of our hair, we excitedly boarded public transport that was still running after 6pm! The U5 from Tiergarten (eastern Berlin) to Alexanderplatz (where the Fernsehturm is). And had to sit on something that looked like this:


Now come ON! Someone designs this stuff for a living and someone selects it, and then pays money (which eventually trickles to our ticket price) for something LIKE THIS! Someone is having a laugh...

3 comments:

the quiet one said...

I see your 'cheaper in first class' and raise you a 'cheaper for longer distances':

A friend of mine wanted to travel from Kiel to Frankfurt, but the tickets were ridiculously overpriced. However, she somehow found a ticket to Zurich, with a stop in Frankfurt, which was considerably cheaper.

Sho said...

It's completely baffling to me - to be fair, we booked fairly late and all the really cheap 2nd class tickets had gone but there were still some of the cheaper 1st class ones left, which were cheaper than the regular 2nd class ones.

One thing really peeved though. When we got on the ICE at Düsseldorf, due to some failure the carriages weren't as advertised so our reserved seats just had to be found. We went to the seats that were shown on our ticket - the ticket guy came and clipped them then went off again. And 5 minutes later I realised we were sitting in 2nd class (mostly because I remember seat covers...)

I should complain that he didn't mention that to us and would have left us sitting in (more expensive) 2nd class seats the whole way. :(

the quiet one said...

How seat cover expertise saved you from travelling with Common People :-D