sekretariat@cpg-gilching.de 
Monday, 13th of February:
Hello you all and welcome to my new format of creating this blog. I had the idea of trying something new, an this it is! My objective is to describe a few things which were foreign to me and I had to get used to (or even just keep in mind that they´re handled in another way) when I came here. It may sound more critical than grateful, but please, don’t take it too seriously, because I don’t do it neither! And here we go with the first matter:
Buses
In Germany there are many types of public transport: buses, tubes and many types of trains. And if we were in a bigger city like Madrid or Barcelona, we could even take the metro, but we aren’t. Jonathan lives in Logroño, so he can reach nearly everything by foot, but as I live in a pueblo, to get to Logroño I normally take the bus (in Spanish autobús).
The timetable of the buses are very flexible and if there is nobody who wants to enter or leave the bus at a station, they just keep driving. Thus the bus sometimes arrives a few minutes earlier than it is written in the app and to people with my punctuality, this is the pure horror, because my caculations for when I have to leave the house to take the bus, don’t include waiting. Therefore, sometimes there is no way around waiting between twelve and and thirty minutes. That depends on the day I want to take the bus. Another thing what depends on the day (workday, Saturday or holiday) is the time, the last bus goes to Villamediana. The last one never goes after 10:30 pm, which shouldn’t be a problem normally, but since people here meet at 8 pm to go out, you have more or less two hours to spend with your friends. (Besides, the timetable of the first and last bus never is correct, so I am regulary checking my phone!)
Okay. so to be honest, that sounds worse than it actually is. My friends always help me to catch the right one and we wait together for the bus. And there are many advantages. To reach the busstation, I have to walk two minutes and moreover there is a card you just have to buy once for a few euros which works as a credit card: I load it with money and for five euros I can take ten times the bus, no matter which distance. When it is empty, I just have to reload it again. The buses can only be entered in the first door and when you put your card in front of the sensor, it debits one ride. Very simple, cheap and no frauds are possible. The buses connect many pueblos around Logroño with it and in addition, there are other types of buses to connect villages further away with the centre.
In total, I really like the system with the buses, because of the fact that it’s so cheap and its simplicity. Every system has its disadvantages and there are always things to complain about, but in my opinion, it is more developed than the German system.
Franzi
