Well, I make that 17 days without a word from me. Some kind of record? Shortly after my last post I jetted off to Germany, where I spent a few days in Cadenberge (Cadenberge, Cadenberge, Cadenberge) and a few days in Hamburg. I also zipped over to Leipzig, for the Softwareforen Leipzig, where I spoke on “LiMo Foundation: collaborative development for the future of mobile“. It was an interesting event, and a good opportunity to talk to people from OpenMoko and Nokia/Trolltech, amongst others.
A couple of observations from the traveling part. Whilst Heathrow T5 is shiny, new, white, crisp, empty, and generally quite pleasant to travel through, T2 remains a squalid, shameful, disgusting experience. I flew with Lufthansa, who on the whole are better than BA, but the outbound experience makes me think the killer combination is now BA out and Lufthansa back. By comparison, Hamburg’s airport is pretty good. Even though it is relatively small, it packs in a good choice of shops and is clean, bright, and warm.
I took the ICE to get to Leipzig, and that was my first experience on German inter-city trains. It compared favourably with the Dutch experience and the Eurostar, and once again showed how ridiculously bad the UK rail infrastructure is. The only things missing on the german trains were power sockets and wifi, which was especially problematic on my return, when both my laptop and my phone were nearly dead.
And finally, an accolade for Leipzig’s rail station, shown in the photo. Some genius decided to put a shopping mall inside/alongside it, which makes so much sense: with a few minutes to kill before my train, I was able to have something decent to eat and to do some last-minute Christmas shopping without leaving the station. I honestly don’t know why more places don’t do this: it makes it a benefit to get to the station with plenty of time, and provides relief from those tedious waits for delayed trains. In the UK, they could make a fortune!
Probably you missed the power socket, because it’s pretty well hidden between two seats. Most of ICE trains nowadays should have one, if not all.
Most ICE trains do have power sockets these days. Either you just didn’t find it or had bad luck
On some routes you can even get wireless.
Power sockets are either between the seats or underneath the tables – where they are fixed to the carriage wall.
Here’s a trick someone told me as well:
Often the power light will be off and you’ll not get any power out of a socket. If that’s the case then you just need to push the fuse back in. The fuse “hole” is located midway between both sockets under the table. You need to push up into the hole with a pen to push the fuse back in.
Having kicked myself upon discovering hidden sockets at the end of journeys in the UK, I did look in all the non-obvious places, but without any luck. So let’s amend my request to “the only things missing on the german trains were CLEARLY VISIBLE power sockets”