I was at FFXIV Fanfest a week ago, and no diary from Germany can be complete without a mention of German trains. When I was picking our hotel, I thought it was well connected to the Fanfest location. And it is, but not when they decide to do a little weekend track renovation. And then when we tried to get to the keynote on day 1, an entire train station got evacuated due to a fire alarm, and we had to scramble for alternative routes. After Berlin, I spent a few hours in Leipzig, and then left for Wrocław to spend a week at a film festival. In Leipzig, I had a doubtful pleasure of "you can take this S-bahn or that tram, but it's gonna be equally slow". In Wrocław, I got to take a tram that needed half an hour for the equivalent of 1 hour of walking, and it was only going every 20 minutes, so I had to get up early anyway. Yesterday I got back to Warsaw, which seems to have finished the tram track renovation where I live (yay!), so I can take trams to work again when my vacation is over (less yay!). This is part of what I like the most about living here, in one of the central districts: I don't have to think too hard when to leave home, most of the time I can leave anytime I want and within 5 minutes there will be a tram going towards where I want to be. I don't mean no transfers by this, I just mean, I can start moving somewhere, and I'll figure out the rest on the fly. I think I actually enjoy silly complexity of public transport systems? Once it was time to leave after Fanfest day 1, and everyone was rushing towards Messe Süd, I clicked around in Citymapper until I saw that we could just take a slightly extended walk in the opposite direction, and get a combination of U lines. It was probably not the fastest route, but it was a more predictable one with the mass of people trying get onto Sbahn. This is the kind of puzzle I enjoy. I sometimes wish there was an app properly enabling my stupid approach, where I could like tap out my planned transfers instead of only having suggested options. Side note: random stuff I found interesting: Berlin tries harder to keep people from boarding trains at last minute, from the flashing red lights, to just delisting trains from screens if said screen is too far for you to reach the train in good time I like the U-bahn sound effect! Berlin is not afraid to just put an U-bahn entrance/exit in the middle of the street between car lanes whereas Warsaw digs out convoluted tunnels (which I think I still prefer though (I am very slowly unlearning prioritizing car traffic when thinking about my ideal city))