A whinge

English is everywhere in the life of this city: in brand names; on adverts; in shop windows and generally somewhere to be found in all forms of marketing. Where it isn’t of course is where it might be useful i.e. in notices, announcements and signs giving vital information about trains, buses and trams. In fairness to the Berlin transport authority though, it must be pointed out that the aforementioned helpful items don’t exist in any other language either, including German. Maps and plans are also kept to the barest minimum (how often in my first months here would I be on a platform and watch a train pull in and then pull out again before I could locate a map to see if it was going in my direction. My favourite was always the map on the wall obscured by the very train which might or might not be the one you wanted).

So, I had an appointment on Saturday with a new physio, and he lives up beyond Prenzlauerberg in Weissensee, in other words further north/east than I normally set foot. However, having consulted the BVG website, I felt myself equal to the task of getting there. An absolutely vital part of the journey was the tram I would get from Alexander Platz up to the lake, there being no other form of transport in that part of the city. And of course I arrived under the Fernsehturm to find every one of the tram lines being excavated by men with diggers, and no form of a clue offered as to where any replacement service might be located. I wandered around the whole of Alex’s soviet bemuralled concrete sprawl, gazing vacantly at the many disused tram stops (I won’t deny that there was an element of adverse effect from the previous two nights’ drinking which may not have seen me at the absolute peak of my mental powers) and asking locals who were just as confused as I was. And in the end, I gave up. I gave up and went home again. I have travelled in some of the most far flung corners of the globe, have managed to find myself a boat to take me down the Amazon river, have sped across Cambodia in a speedboat when the Khmer Rouge were still in the hills and it wasn’t safe to go overland. And yet I was ultimately defeated by the determination on behalf of the city of Berlin to withhold all vital information regarding its transport system from its users.

I’m not sure whether or not the authorities feel that a loud burst of Star Wars music precipitated by the U8 train pulling into Alex U-Bahn will somehow make up for this. In my case, it didn’t.