Snowflakes and Workers' Strikes

Since my last post, I have been extremely busy trying to make sure I exist as a person (by getting our emergency passport), making sure that my sanity was not lost (by finally getting to Portugal and having a vacation), and showing my mom and brother around Berlin. However, all of my life has been made harder in the last week by the strike of "ver.di," the BVG Workers' Union.

After the warning strike that I wrote about that happened about a month ago, apparently the union did not get what they wanted. So, they decided to go on a strike of undetermined length, which started last Wednesday. The strike means that all U-bahns (subways), buses, and trams are not running (although there are some routes being covered by emergency buses). However, for now, the S-bahn is still running.

In my earlier post about the BVG, I said that it is the way to travel around Berlin. Now that it has stopped running, everyone is having trouble getting around. I live very close to the U-bahn - about a five minute walk. The nearest S-bahn is 20-30 minutes walking. This means that getting anywhere is taking way longer than it should.

To make things worse in the chaos of Berlin transport, it snowed for basically the first time all winter on Wednesday. It was really nice to have snow cover the city, but it made trekking around to find packed S-bahn stations really hard.

To make matters even worse, there is talk of the S-bahn train drivers striking on Monday. If that is the case, movement around Berlin might be near impossible for us car-less people. Although biking is an option I have explored, it is still much less convenient.