Memories and hints of a travelling IT professional.
Going to a country where a language with an own alphabet is used is always fun for me – because it is often a challenge and you have to learn like a child again. In Israel, Hebrew (Ivrit) is the official language, though a lot of Arabic is spoken. Most signs are trilingual (Hebrew, Arabic, English) and a lot of people speak English. And if not: there is always someone immediatly starting to translate if you seem to be in need.
When listening carefully you might find an ancient language in Israel: Jiddish. The cuteness of this language might only be obvious to German speaking persons, because it is a very old derivate of our language. But nowadays some Jiddish words have already found their way into everyday English, especially in New York.
The Shabbat is a time concept unknown to non-Jews. Travelling to Israel gives you the need to coordinate your travel plans in or around this time slot. It starts at sundown on Friday (often with a dinner of the family) and ends on Saturday at sundown. During this time shops are often closed, you might not check in to hotels (though I never experienced this problem) and most major sights are shut down. Just like on Sundays in Germany, only from dusk till dusk.
Official currency of Israel is the New Israeli Shekel (NIS), divided into 100 agorod. The sign used to display shekel values is ₪. Banknotes of 20, 50, 100 and 200 shekels are circulating; you get coins of 10, 5, 2, 1 and 1/2 shekel value. You could exchange money in your home country, but it is most often recommended to bring EUR or USD – you can easily exchange these currencies against NIS at post offices (even as there might be some waiting lines).
I went to Paris, France several times when I was a child. My parents were guiding tourist groups to the city and were a bit lost, not speaking French or even English. That’s why I had to use my uprising language skills at the capital city of France.
I returned to Paris once in 2010 to rediscover the city on my own. And now I had the feeling that another trip would by necessary, mainly because of two reasons: (a) I never used the train à grande vitesse (TGV) and (b) I never arrived at the Musée d’Orsay while it was open. It was like a curse and for me being a fan of French Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism this situation wasn’t acceptable.
Continue reading “36 hours at the living museum”
The TGV is a two-floor highspeed train of the French railway company SNCF running on the grande lignes in France. It also goes to Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Köln and München. It is on duty since 1981 and can go as fast as 320 km/h. The train à grande vitesse is comparable by quality with the German ICE. It has some special features like a nifty salon where four persons are sitting in a compartment faceing each other at a table. A classy kind of travelling!
It is quite impossible to have problems travelling throughout Paris, France. There are three major public transport systems bringing you everywhere: the metro, the RER and busses. They are very well described online and if you once have a ticket and a network map you are kind of unstopable.
Travelling by night train in a sleeper cabin is somehow out of fashion. Deutsche Bahn already started to abolish some routes formerly served. But in eastern Europe there are still some routes that are served on a regular basis, even if it is not cheaper to travel this way than going by plane.
It was the Feast of Corpus Christi, I had a day off and I was looking for a nice destination to travel to. The only location I’ve not seen before, somewhere around Germany, easily reachable by train – was Slovakia. I reminded myself that it is close to Vienna and I didn’t suspect something really interesting there.
Continue reading “Short trip to Bratislava”
Bratislava has a good bus and tram system that is quite easy to use if you once understood how to read the complex system maps. I didn’t use the tramway, mainly because at the time of my visit the trams didn’t run to the main railway station because of reconstruction works. But the busses and trams seem to be of good quality.
Continue reading “Getting around in Bratislava”