Month: August 2012

Posted on

Things you can do in Spain

I am back in Germany, doing things.

What can you do in Spain in summer? Swimming? Sure. Hiking? Possible, if it is not too warm. Blogging? Not really, since the internets in the hotel were rare. Traveling? Well… yes, but at a price.

Having a good knowledge about some possible (putting it mildly) irregularities you can face while being somewhere to the east of Germany or to the south of Austria is often not enough to anticipate this kind of things while being on vacation in the typical “vacation countries”.

Since the German law forbids me to rant about companies, I will anonymize them as much as possible. So yeah. The tale begins when I tried to rent a car. I tried several times: the first time, the hotline was unavailable, the second time, I ran into siesta, the third time, I was successful. And by 10AM in a few days I should be able to see my car.

This was obviously too easy. 10AM in the morning, I am waiting for a car to pick me up and to bring me to the place where the cars can be rented. At 10:15, I decide that fifteen minutes are a sufficiently long wait to declare that the guys are late even by non-German standards and call them. After ten minutes, a car arrives, takes me, drives for a while around to pick up similar-minded people with the wish to actually drive on Spanish streets.

Sooner or later, we arrive at a hotel where the car rental company resides. It turns out that my reservation did not include giving the car back at a different place, and it was in fact not possible to change the reservation accordingly, but it was actually possible to extend the reservation. Trying to extend the reservation worked, but the transaction was however still impossible, since I ran into the transfer limit on my credit card. Obviously, it was impossible to pay with other means.

So traveling by train it was, then. Trains in Spain are a very interesting story. In brief, the station did only feature a human-operated single-threaded and low-perfomance ticket buying interface that used a ticket computer as a terminal. Which was completely okay (as I had a lot of time on my hands), but as the ticket-selling system crashed, the whole ticket-selling process screeched to a halt. When the ticket-selling system was restarted, there were only first-class tickets. As I was cornered, I had to buy the only thing that was offered.

On the route back, I successfully managed to rent a car. In the end, it was marginally cheaper than traveling first-class by train, but far more nerve-consuming. The most terrible part started when I was close to my destination and found out that the city was a hell for drivers. I still somehow managed to get to my destination, but I burned a lot of my nerves on the way.

And now for some cute pictures from the south:

Posted on

MultiAka 2012

Another ~2500 km in two days and I am in Spain. But the interesting stuff was happening before: For the last 13 days, I have been to Vienna and then to a summer camp in Látky in Slovakia. What was so special about it? Well, almost everything:

  • The location chosen was not a Ritz, but it was decent enough to serve normal food and the landscape was great
  • The people (of which one half was from the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Poland) were absolutely fun.
  • The program was everything: from pure entertainment (a hike into the mountains) to interesting lectures on “economics for dummies”

So, how do I come to participating in such activities? To explain this, there is some context needed.


The whole story starts twenty-something years ago when some bright fellow in Germany decided to organize a series of summer camps for high-school students in their last or second-to-last year. This alone was a great idea, and at some point the participants of these summer camps had the brilliant idea to organize themselves into a club to do different activities together. Long story short, the “Club der Ehemaligen” came to life, and in the last decade it has been organizing different activities for its members, most of them consisting equally of fun and education (which is often fun, too). For some time now, the CdE (as it is called internally) has been organizing activities outside of Germany for its non-German members. And here I am, describing one of them, the “MultiAka”.

My impressions from the MultiAka (and of Vienna where I went in the beginning) can be described loosely as follows:

  • First and foremost, two Slavic languages make it easy to understand a third one, but it does not make you speak that third one. Educated guesses can bring you a long way, though.
  • I fell in love with Vienna. No, really, it is a city with a real summer and a real winter and it is really international.
  • Knowing some ballroom dances makes you at least 20% cooler
  • Austria is really leftish. The parliament sells critical books about the political system, the book shop features a lot of books on hot topics such as heteronormativity, gender and other internationally important subjects.
  • Bratislava is a complicated city: It has a lot of nice parts as well as some not-so-nice aspects. Falling bricks from government buildings and simultaneously a very pretty city center. Incompetent restaurant crew several footsteps from the main street and a cute castle. Ridiculously cheap good beer (“dobre pifko”, LOL) which is actually the cheapest drink per volume unit.

 In the end, I am pretty much impressed.