As you might have noticed in the article on punks, I recently was in Dortmund for a project meeting. An as is usual for a project meeting, we spent the evening with a joint dinner. This time we were in a café bar in a Wilhelminian style quarter in Dortmund, the Swabedoo (link in German).

It is a very nice pub which offered a local beer which I did not know yet and which was quite good, the Hövels, which really reminded me of English ales. The food however was not that exciting, I have eaten much better food for sure. I always say that catering should either concentrate on being a restaurant or a pub, they mostly fail trying to be both. You should be careful, when you see a sign “Premiere Sportsbar” as this indicates that there you find people, which love beer, company or sports, but not necessarily food.

What I had ordered, did not sound too bad: Organic pork schnitzel with ratatouille, thyme potatoes and mushroom cream, where the mushroom cream was an extra 1,50 Euro and I was glad that I refrained from it. The plate was totally overloaded, apart from the ingredients on the menu there was a mixed salad on the plate which itself had the size of a starter. Unfortunately I am conditioned in such a way that I loose my appetite when the plate is overloaded. Potatoes and ratatouille were fine, unfortunatly the organic schnitzel was hard and tough and also much too big. I would not have missed the salad and liked a smaller but tender peace of meat and it would have been worth the same price. (To A.: sorry that I have to write this!).

I know that I am special with food, but I also have to say that most people from the international party left huge remains on their plates as well.

The ICE, which I enter at Berlin-Ostbahnhof is supposed to bring me to Dortmund stopping in Berlin Central, Spandau, Hannover and Bielefeld. I just had settled in my seat, when a group of punks enters the car, the only smoking compartment in second class. Typical punks with either leather or camouflage clothes, decorated with chains and one or more Mercedes or Volkswagen signs. They are well equipped, a crate of cheap lager, meat balls and sausages. No cigarettes however, making one of them travel the car to ask people for one, which he eventually gets.

They not only look typical (one of the girls had spikey hair as seen in the picture), their behaviour is typical as well, loud conversation, not interested in other people’s privacy and opinion. Everybody in the car learns from their talk that they want to go to Hannover, and they simply talk about not having a ticket and speculating that the conductor will only come after Berlin and that there will be no possibility to throw them off the train before their target city. Seemed like a clever idea.

But surely they did not take into account that DB was counting their passengers that day. Shortly before the last stop in Berlin therefore the conductor entered the car with a small counting machine. He stopped counting immediately when he saw the punks and instinctively asked for the ticket. The punk he had asked showed his identity card and said that they wanted to Hannover. The conductor remained unimpressed and asked for money or ticket or that they should leave in Berlin.

Normally I say that punks try to provoke but generally are quite peaceful. This proved to be true, without any protest they left the train with all their provisions. They discussed however if they should enter the train in its second, independent part.

If they had done that, I do not know. The conductor after that still looked confident and very distinctive. And distinctive he surely was, I recognized him from another trip to Hamburg. I just imagine… but no, that surely would be another “People” story.

Image by: Shavar