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**This blog is from last week, I forgot to post it**

Over the past few weekends, I’ve been traveling to various Dutch cities: Utrecht, Rotterdam, Maastricht, and of course Amsterdam. Between those longer trips and my time on the bus between Huygensgebouw and Centraal Station to get into town, I’ve truly come to appreciate Dutch public transportation. It is remarkably easy to use: you purchase your OV-chipkaart for 7.50 euros, and then periodically reload it. As you are getting on the bus or entering the train station, you just hold your card up against the check-in post, and you do the same thing when you reach your destination. You are charged for the distance you travel between your starting and ending point, not for the specific route you take. There are signs throughout the stations, announcements before the train stops at major stations, and it is generally just difficult to forget to check in or out. Between the information in the stations themselves and the websites that show the public transportation schedules and help plan trips, I have had remarkably little difficulty finding my way around the Netherlands, despite having little experience with public transportation even in Pennsylvania and speaking almost no Dutch.

But this weekend, for the first time since getting here 1.5 months ago I left the Netherlands and took the train to Germany. My destination was Bonn, but my research in the days leading up to the weekend taught me that there are a few castles in towns surrounding Bonn: Bruhl to the north and Konigswinter to the south. So on Saturday I took three trains, and made it from Nijmegen to Bruhl by way of Arnhem (Netherlands) and Cologne (Germany). Along the way, I learned an incredibly important lesson: the German public transportation system is not as straight-forward as the Dutch. There are many transport associations even within a single state in Germany, so you can’t just hop on the train in one city and then hop off on the other side of the country a few hours later without doing a bit of travel planning. Luckily my pre-purchased international train ticket took care of the hard part for me, but I still had to figure out how to get myself from Bruhl to Bonn on Saturday, and round-trip between Bonn and Konigswinter on Sunday. Basically, I learned that you need to know the distance between your starting and final destination, and figure out what ‘level’ that distance falls into. If the stations are within the same town it’s a level 1, level 2 is bordering towns, and then the distinctions get a bit fuzzier for levels 3-7. Learning that Bruhl to Bonn is a level 2b, but Bonn to Konigswinter is a level 3 even though the physical distances between stations don’t differ significantly took some time searching on the Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Sieg website (and on Google translate). I also learned that you need to purchase your ticket shortly before you get on the train—most tickets are only validated for up to 3 hours after time of purchase, so you can’t just buy the ticket whenever you have time and wait to use it until you’re ready. You must get to the station early enough to find a ticket machine, figure out how it works, make it take your money, and purchase your ticket.

Oh another thing, the machines don’t take cash. So make sure you have 5 euros in coins. Like I said, plan ahead.

Generally, I have learned the importance of coins. We take them for granted in the US—I rarely carry many coins around with me and typically just deposit them into a jar that’s sitting on my desk. They don’t get you very far, and personally I always feel like a child when I pay for anything more than a soda from a vending machine using only coins. But here, I don’t go anywhere without taking stock of my coins. A 2 euro coin is of course valuable—but perhaps the most important coin to have is the 50 cent. I learned that the hard way when I needed to use the restroom (WC) in a small train station between Nijmegen and Maastricht, but the only WC in the station was a self-service room that costs exactly 50 cents to use—and can’t take coins of any other denomination. Guess what? I didn’t have a single 50 cent coin. The vending machine with candy bars for 1,50 and my 2 euro coin came in handy that day, and since then I have made a point of keeping a collection of 50 cent coins in my wallet.

Except for that situation, I have greatly enjoyed my time using the Dutch transportation system. Sure, public transportation may never be a perfect experience, but a system that allows for a bit of spontaneity, provides well-publicized and easily to understand information, and has consistently clean, bright and airy stations is a system that is far better than any other I have experienced before.