I am lucky enough to have family in Germany. I am not the first generation in my paternal family to reverse our ancestors’ journey. My aunt left after college and started her family over here. I left a few years into my career as a school librarian and thought I would move from school to school, from country to country. I made it to a second international school before stopping. Part of me envies my friends who have bounced continents, but also moving is exhausting.
But having family in Germany is really lovely as they are just a day’s travel away by train. Yes, I could fly, but I struggle with the environmental impact of airplanes anyways, so to take one when there is a perfectly serviceable train route, I just can’t. Even when it means having to use the DeutscheBahn. The first time I visited and took the train, my cousins and their families joked about the DB. But since the ride up had only involved one leg on the DB, their remarks didn’t mean much. And then, I learned… Going back to Switzerland, the train was so delayed that I missed all my connections. The next time, it was even worse. The train was running so behind that Switzerland said, “park yourself in Basel-Bad and send your passengers over on the next commuter rail. You’re so late we don’t have a platform for you.” The time after that, I was traveling with my mom, our train back to Switzerland was canceled altogether.
But lest you think that the Swiss railway is perfect, let me assure you that it is not. The last time I went to visit, it took me fifteen hours to get out of Switzerland and involved an overnight stay in Basel. My cousin still blamed DB for the mess because I ended up on the route with the broken track in the first place because the leg from Bern to Mannheim was canceled and I was rerouted. In any case, it was cold, the SBB could have done better with their communication as there were loads of us in Grenschen Nord and of course, I had a dying phone battery.
This trip involved a “layover” in Stuttgart of more than an hour… And Stuttgart must be a hidden jewel. So hidden that I could not discover its positive attributes in the hour plus I was there. The train station has been under renovation for so long that the project is called Stuttgart 21. And it is clearly designed by people who hate pedestrians. But aside from wandering tunnels and construction sites to nowhere in Stuttgart, the trip to and from Frankfurt was the least eventful I have had so far.
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