Right in the middle of downtown Aalen there's major construction going on so a lot of the buses aren't running their normal routes.
I went into town today to familiarize myself with the city more and to go what I call "real" grocery shopping. For those of you who don't know me very well, I become a big ugly green hairy monster when I'm hungry. "Real" grocery shopping means making sure the house is stocked full of food so Emi couldn't possibly get hungry. I got 2 1L. bottles of apfelschorle, 1 1L bottle of water, butter, crackers, chips, popcorn, milk, muesli, peppers, onions, cabbage, carrots, grapes, salami, pizza, pretzels, milk, cookies, peanut butter, bread, rolls, and cheese.
I decided to try out a new grocery store today. It was a little further away than the one I'd been going to, but it turned out to be a good thing because they had a bigger selection and the prices were about the same or cheaper. I can't get over how cheap food is here. You'd think with how overweight and obese Americans are that we'd be the ones to have the cheap food. Well, I guess our cheap food is the junk food, here everything is cheap. For instance I got a cardboard pizza for 1,80 Euros, 3 red peppers for .89 Euro, apple juice for .89 Euro and grapes for .75. (1 EURO= $.76)
I also found stenchless cleaning supplies today and they too didn't cost an arm and a leg. Imagine that!
Ok, so anyway, back to my story. After I went back to the train station which is where the buses are currently dropping people off because of the road construction I must have waited for my bus for over an hour. FINALLY a bus with my bus stop's name on it came through. I get on it and it drives away. Eventually we get near my neighborhood, but then it doesn't turn where it usually does and it keeps going and going and going and going. Two hours later I ended up right back at the train station where I'd gotten on the bus after driving out in the middle of nowhere through all these little farm towns. I saw lots of cows and lots of corn. Lots of cute houses though too.
So we finally get back to the train station where I can get on the right bus and it turns out that I've missed it by one minute and the next bus doesn't come for another hour..... and it has started pouring... and I'm still carrying all these groceries around. So, I said screw it and took a taxi home.
Turns out there are two different types of buses in Aalen and that the name of my bus stop is also the name of the neighborhood I live in. The white buses, one of which I took out to the middle of nowhere today, only drive on the main streets and not out into the neighborhoods. The yellow buses drive out into the neighborhoods. So the sign I saw on the white bus I got onto today was telling me that it drives past the Grauelshof neighborhood, not through it to my bus stop called Grauelshof.
Oh well! Live and learn. When I explained to the bus driver where I wanted to go, he told me that he could see how somebody who isn't familiar with the city could make that mistake really easily.
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| Good Bus |
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| Bad Bus |
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