Public transportation

Something I really had to get used to during my first days in Austin was the bus system. I have never used public transportation in the States before. And of course I am used to the German system. Well, here are a couple of differences:

1. In Germany, every stop is announced. Not in Austin. Here you have to know where you want to get off and you have to know where you are. So when your stop approaches, you pull the stop-string. (I am not sure if that's the official name, but it is a string pulled horizontally across the windows that you pull when you want to get off the bus. The driver then hears a sound signalizing that a stop has been requested.)
But the bus drivers here are very very nice, so it's not a problem to ask them when it would be best to get off the bus to get where you want to go.

And getting off the bus too late usually isn't a big problem either as all of the stops are pretty close to one another.

2. Austin does not have a map that shows all the stops on one route. The map shows a couple of stops referred to as time points. These stops mostly are a reference point that tell you when the bus is supposed to be at that particular stop. So you have to figure out if you would be ahead of or after that time point and do the math. And even if you figure out when the bus is approximately coming to pick you up, it never does. I haven't had one bus on time yet.

3. And, just one more proof of Austin's friendliness towards everybody: When people get off the bus, they thank the driver!I think this is a great thing and I will try to enforce that in Germany, also. That just reminds me of a story I experienced with my German roommate a couple of weeks back. We were on a bus getting home from uni. The bus route makes a loop so that both buses #146 going different directions take the same route and have the same stops for a while until one of them turns right and goes to the town center while the other one goes straight ahead. Well, at one of those stops a little, thickset black woman who wasn't very fluent in German asked the driver if that was the bus going to Wackenberg (the end of the line). Instead of answering her politely, explaining to her that she needed to wait for the other bus #146 or just telling her he didn't know (I am not sure if he did) he just closed the door again, mumbled something and drove on. The poor lady just stood there and stared after the bus. I am not sure if the driver was German by birth, but he definitely was by heart. That was just awfully typical of Germans.