One thing that has fascinated me about Germany is the country’s public transport system. It is so efficient that you can barely manage to be on time for every appointment–there are no minibuses to blame for coming to work late as is the case back home. I am just hoping that some day Africa will experience the same development.
But wait a minute! I was almost late for class today, well, not really late but I got stuck because of transport problems. I know what you thinking, you think I am contradicting myself. I can’t blame you for that, and I won’t retract my statement that public transport in Germany, particularly in Berlin where I am, is efficient either. Today, though, is different case because workers for the train company are on a go-slow. Apparently, they want a salary increment of 7 percent. Thus, during part of the morning, the S band trains were not running and you can imagine what that meant. They targeted the pick hour when people would be rushing for school, work etc. I wasn’t spared, as you could imagine.
I and my Zimbabwean collegue happened to get off an underground train to connect with another one when we noticed that the S band trains were not ‘moving’. You can imagine what that meant, we had to find someone who speaks English to tell us what was going on. I must say I am still finding the language too difficult to learn. Perhaps, It has to do with my attitude. I don’t know but I also had the same problem when I tried to learn French. In fact, and I am ashamed to say this, I dropped out of a French class because I thought it was an unnecessary burden. Though I must confess, I will take it again as soon as possible.
Anyway, back to our story. We did find someone who told us we had to wait for atleast 50 minutes for the trains to start running again. By that time, I had to be in class.
To cut short the long story, we did manage to go into another underground train to get to one station ahead and we had to walk the rest of the trip to class. You can imagine when we came out of the station and had to discover that we had no clue as to where our training premises were. But we didn’t have to panick as God sorted our problem. In front of us were some colleagues from our class. Ee decided to follow them and that is how I found myself in class today–on time.
