Don't Try To Blip The Moon Without A Tripod

Although it is quite a soothing image.

There was a big demo in Wiesbaden today.  The farmers are unhappy and they came on their tractors to protest.  Over a thousand tractors in a city centre.  Our city centre can't copy with a 1000 SUVs*, you can imagine how well it coped with over a 1000 actual tractors of various sizes.

The authorities shut off the main road to the train station and the other main road next to the station and forced all the traffic to go down a one lane road into the city centre.  It would only need one idiot to snarl up the complete traffic flow into Wiesbaden. And I know that we are not short of idiots in automobiles (this most certainly includes the policeman I saw talking on his mobile while driving his police van).

Accordingly I reset expectations for getting home.  Buses were going to be late.  I saw that my bus was due at the bus stop in 2 minutes and that another was due 2 minutes after that (they're normally 20 minutes apart).  7 minutes later the first bus rolled up, and as is the common law here, everyone piled on to an already full bus.  I didn't.  I took one look at the bus (and here comes your German word-of-the-day) and saw it was pickepackevoll and thought how unpleasant it would be to be jammed in there for 40 minutes, and decided to get the next bus.

The next bus was empty because everyone has to get on the first bus that comes.  I had a seat to myself and the bus was no more than a quarter full.  Very civilised.

And the cherry on the cake was - or the raisin on the hotdog for the Icelanders out there - we overtook the pickepackevoll bus about 2 streets further on.  I did not gloat but I did enjoy all the space I had.

Ok as I got off the bus I saw that it was 15 minutes late but that counts as punctual here. 

*Also known in Britain as Chelsea Tractors