Train Tickets and Other Random Thoughts

I forgot to mention yesterday the oddity of Berlin's subway system:

Ticket-buying seems to be entirely on the honor system. There are no turnstiles for which one needs tickets to get in and out of the station, and, from what I have seen, no conductor who walks up and down checking tickets.

Tickets are purchased from a self-service kiosk on the platform and validated at a little machine nearby, and that's it. So far, we could easily not have paid for any of our train journeys. Unless I am missing some very secret way they have of knowing whether or not people have bought tickets, no one need ever pay.

But people do. In fact, everybody seems to. It's kind of incredible. I was trying to imagine what would happen if they took away all of the turnstiles in the NYC subway, and just left it up to people to buy tickets anyway. I'm sorry, but no one would ever buy a subway ticket again!

While I'm at it, a few random observations about our trip in general thus far: one of the things I have noticed and really liked is that the places we have been in Europe seem so much less fame and celebrity obsessed than in the US (this is not quite so true for England with all its tabloids).

One is not constantly being bombarded with stories and photos of Brittany Spears or Heidi Speigel and her ever-increasing ratio of silicone to actual flesh.

There also seems to not be quite the same obsession with wealth and outward symbols of it like flashy cars, massive houses and overly made-up and altered women wearing insanely expensive clothes.

I must say, it is really nice to not always be confronted with what one is not, or with what one doesn't have, which I can often feel is the case in California.

Part of that could be that I just am not watching television, so I'm not getting bombarded with certain stories or images, but there is also definitely a difference in what I see on the street and in the people around me. I haven't found myself looking around at other women in any of the places we've been and feeling fat, or old, or underdressed or under made-up, and that has been such a nice feeling.

The part about not watching television is, I think, a significant one. I do tend to watch a lot of television when I am at home: taping TV shows that I like and watching them, or getting things from Netflix. But there is definitely a link for me between watching television and feeling depressed and inadequate.

Everybody on TV of course, is thin and beautiful and young, for the most part (the women, at least), and not only am I reminded that I am not thin or young, but I am also reminded that these women are extremely well-paid actresses who are getting to do what I dreamed of doing but was not able to. This adds another layer of depression. And what does depression make people do? That's right....eat. And then the depression increases because not only am I not a skinny actress on a television show, but I am a rapidly-expanding, face-stuffing lady who's not on a TV show!

It is amazing how nice it has been not watching any television. I have watched a few DVDs that I brought along on my laptop, but that's it. Instead, we have both been reading voraciously. I used to do this when I was younger, read for hours at a time, getting completely lost in a book, but it has been a long time since I've done that. So far on this trip I have read 12 books and I have just begun number 13. That's a lot of books!! I will include my reading list in another blog.

The result of all this no-tv-watching (plus being sick those times) has been weight loss. Hooray! I think I have finally lost all the weight I gained while on the anti-anxiety meds. I don't know how much weight I've actually lost because there are no scales anywhere, but my clothes are definitely loose.

Last observation: I have not been carsick once since arriving in Europe. Not once, and we have been on some pretty windy roads, roads that certainly would have made me sick in the US. The only thing I can put it to is that the European cars are designed with a completely different style of handling than the US cars.

The thing that makes me sick on very windy roads is that wallow that seems to happen after turning a corner. I don't know if you know what I mean, but normally, on a windy road, the car makes the turn, and when coming out of the turn there is that kind of wallow, or sudden sway back out of the curve. It is that sway that leaves me feeling sick.

In the European cars, there seems to be no wallow out of a turn at all. It doesn't seem to matter who is driving, since I get sick all the time when Steve drives on windy roads in the US, and I have to have him pull over so I can drive. But here, Steve has been driving the whole time, and I haven't felt sick once.

It also doesn't seem to depend on the car. Since arriving in Europe we I have been a passenger in our friend's Range Rover, our rented Ford Fiesta, Steve's father's car, and now our Peugeot. All of these cars took me on windy roads and yet in none of these cars did I feel sick. How can this be?

Any ideas??