Monday, October 16 marked our last day in Nuremberg and our first in the city of Berlin.
In our final hours in Nuremberg, in the southern state of Bavaria, the group gathered inside the train station to prepare for the next phase of our trip. We grabbed lunch at the station, which offered a variety of options — cannoli, currywurst, enormous blocks of cheese, and of course, American fast food chains. (Dunkin Donuts has a different menu in Germany!)
Then, it was time to hop on our train, a sleek, high-speed vehicle that carried us 275 miles in about three hours. With no time to lose upon arrival, we crossed the street to our dinner destination. The Cube, a large glass structure adjacent to the station, is home to a food hall on the ground floor where we were set to meet a group of volunteers.
Their task, we found, is to meet Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war as they get off the train in Berlin. I had the pleasure of eating at a table with three of these volunteers. Zahra is a young filmmaker who worked primarily in the children’s corner that was set up in the train station, helping out during the height of surging arrivals from Ukraine last year. Alp, who is from Turkey but also spent three years in New York and now makes his home in Berlin, shared with us his knowledge of the city, its changing neighborhoods, and its many communities. David turned out to be a bit of a train enthusiast, telling us about his visit to the MTA Museum in New York City, and that he initially got involved with greeting refugees simply because he worked at the train station and was there when refugees began to arrive.
Trains were a running theme throughout the day; aside from our three-hour journey and our discussions of migrant travels, weekly train passes were also distributed during dinner. David explained to us that, although Germany’s trains have a reputation for modernity, the country only uses a paper ticketing system. There are no turnstiles in the subway here, and no place to scan a ticket before boarding; whether or not your ticket is checked is solely up to whether or not a conductor on the train asks you to produce it. In fact, after riding a high-speed train to Nuremberg and multiple metro trains in Munich earlier in the week, today was the first time my ticket was actually checked. (Imagine the money we could’ve saved had we skipped buying the tickets in the first place!)
All of this is to say, trains produce a lot of material for discussion, and actually gave us an opportunity to connect with these new people we met in Berlin tonight. Lively discussions bounced back and forth as we shared stories about lackluster American public transit, and compared higher- and lower-tech ticketing infrastructures.
Expectedly, it’s sometimes easy to feel out of place as an American abroad, especially when you don’t speak German, and especially when you’re traveling with a large and noticeable group. It’s nice to come across a common experience with people — something as simple, even childlike, as the enjoyment of a train.
