During our three days in Berlin we traveled the streets on a variety of conveyances. Buses, inner city trains, S-Bahn, regional train and subway were our prime modes. Oh, I almost forgot, our feet did a lot of work as well.

Europeans rely on public transportation far more than do Americans. The highly developed transport system allows people to move about rapidly at an affordable cost for many. You can do a great deal without ever owning a personal automobile. The buses even run into the country outside the larger city regions allowing people to move in and out quiet easily. We took a bus from Spandau to Potsdam and passed through a rural section of farms and wide open spreads.

Watching how people live each day in this type of system is interesting. Going to work, to school and even grocery shopping one has to carry only what is easy and prepare accordingly. Outside a grocery store this morning I watched an elderly pensioner take his rolling suitcase and latch it onto the front of a shopping cart and enter to buy his groceries. He would only be buying what could easily fit into the suitcase and be carried, or wheeled, back home on the bus. Nothing larger than what would fit into the suitcase would be purchased. I doubt he would be buying a ten pound bag of potatoes or a case of soda, like I might back in the states. I could easily throw my stuff into my SUV while he could not.  It is just interesting to see how people live.

While waiting for our train, the last one I'll take while on this trip, we spent some time in Spandau listening to a jazz band play and having a "Berliner", a jelly doughnut. I believe Paul has a picture at his ucog.org web site.

Paul Kieffer and I boarded a train for the four and one half hour return trip to Niederkassel, near Bonn. Tomorrow we travel to the Netherlands to be with our UCG members there and then return to Dormagen for the afternoon service with some of the German members.

I found Berlin to be a dynamic exciting city. Walking its streets you feel the energy at the heart of Europe's strongest economic state. While reading the paper on today's train I noticed a short article referencing the growing European force now moving into Lebanon in the wake off the recent war. It is a historic shift that Germany now has troops stationed i this pivotal region. More on that subject in a later post.