On a recent ICE trip from Berlin to Bremen, I read in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the German government will cut VAT for train tickets in 2020 to just 7% (about 10% off ticket price at present 19.5% VAT rates) and consider raising taxes for flights. I am in total Read more…
If I’ve written, complained, and praised the German railways, Amtrak, Vancouver’s West Coast Express, Thalys, the Euro Star, and China Railway Highspeed, I might as well do it for the Swiss railways while I’m here. Between June and Christmas, I’ve visited 57 Swiss cities, 3 German cities, and 5 peaks Read more…
In the first six months of my life in Switzerland, I was rather confused and disappointed with the behavior of the people here. Why would drivers in Geneva park their cars all over the place? Why can’t passengers just move to the window seat on the bus? Why don’t people Read more…
Recently, I’ve been averaging about 6000km by rail a month and have been reflecting on my levels of carbon emissions. One of my longest journeys took me from Geneva through Bern, Basel, and Frankfurt to reach Berlin on an overnight journey. While I was pondering on how much carbon I Read more…
I’ve been working and traveling so much these past three months that I’ve not had time to write about topics that interest me. Funnily enough, this topic came to me while on a train journey to Luzern, so I would not have thought of it if I had not been Read more…
Fact Flash: – Rubber takes 50 years to decompose in the natural environment – Nylon takes 30-40 years to decompose in the natural environment Anyone who needed to attach a pen to a clipboard at work or wanted to make a bracelet in class might have contemplated using a link Read more…
About ten years ago, former US President Barack Obama claimed that women in the US were paid 77 cents on the dollar when compared to men. Soon after, further dissemination of the studies showed that the actual pay gap between the two genders are actually much lower (93 cents on Read more…
If you want to fall in love, the 36 questions that lead to love are terrible at doing that. I suspect that the online videos showing people falling in love after answering the questions are only doing it for show. But the questions are a great way to get to Read more…
Most of what I express here will be directed towards North America’s path dependency on the private vehicle although some of it will also be relevant to policy incentives in East Asia. As my father always used to tell me: “You have to think in systems, you can’t expect everything Read more…
After discussing the media’s coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent German reunification, I thought it’d be interesting to explore my own perspective on the current state of Berlin after 20 years of reunification. “Asking if the unification of Germany was ‘complete’ is the Read more…