Travel | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

1. About half of the way from Freising to Frankfurt/Hahn is covered with construction sites.
2. Most parts of the Autobahn have a speed limit.
3. Swabia is a very hilly region.
4. Nicotine gums help a smoker to smoke less, and the fellow travellers to avoid health hazards.
5. Don’t eat pizza at Frankfurt/Hahn.
6. While landing, the pilot has to turn off the cabin lights to comply with safety regulations.
7. Flygbussarna bring you from Stockholm-Skavsta Airport to the city. No idea if everyone finally got a place.
8. There still are subways on a sunday at 2:40 am.
9. Fried spaghetti with barbecue spice taste good… despite a massive amount of salt.

TripIt found out that we’re going to fly aboard a Boeing 737-800, Google got the route and I made a reservation for a parking lot so everything’s prepared for our trip to Stockholm.

We’re three again and the flight is booked. Stockholm, we’re coming!

Same wrong way, same traffic jam, but this time I took the right road back and only lost twenty minutes. So how could that happen again? I usually take the highway when driving home from university and the autobahn when I go to Munich. The problem is that they closed the highway due to road works and I have to take the autobahn in the other direction. Well, I’m not used to that, followed my habit and took the wrong ramp…. twice…. 🙄

I took the wrong way, landed in a traffic jam, behind an excavator, in the wrong part of the town and finally got back to where I had started thirty minutes before…

Zlango claims to be “the universal icon language”. I’m sceptical. It reminds me of all those tiny little pictures in the Chinese books trying to point out how the sign for “horse” developed from the drawing of the animal.

A real problem is the fact that they have very few icons and I have to admit that I wouldn’t understand most of them. Another analogy to Chinese…

Another reason for a detour to Singapore:

And it’ll open just in time.

A friend doing an internship in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria showed me her neighbourhood on Google Maps. She lives directly between a long beach and the harbor. If only we could swap…

Before going north I assumed there wouldn’t be any fast people. Though I never had a problem with changing trains I often couldn’t cross four-lane streets at once because the green phases of the traffic lights were just sufficient to reach the traffic island in the middle of the road.

And at first it was hard to find the youth hostel because the house numbers aren’t counted the same way as in the rest of Germany where the odd numbers are on one side of the road and the even ones on the other. In Berlin they start on one end and then count up on one side turn around and continue on the other one. So numbers 9 and 34 may stand vis-à-vis.

Berlin is about to replace Paris as my favorite city. Never thought that could ever happen. The last time I’ve been there was so determined by culture, museums, sights that the city itself was forced to the background. But it’s such an amazing place.

In order to attend the Raumfahrer.net Meeting 2007 I am going to fly to Berlin tomorrow. The flight (500 km) will last 75 minutes, the train ride to the city (20 km) between 35 and 50 minutes.

By the way: The homepage of Verkehrsverbund Berlin-Brandenburg, the local public transportation network, lets you chose how you would like to change trains: normally, comfortably or slowly.

Aren’t there any fast people in the north? Or is it just a question of how you define “normally”?