Nov
26
2008
Winter has taken a firm grip on northern Europe this year. The last couple of weeks have been colder than usual for the area and the time of year, with temperatures below 5°C (in the low 30s F) during the day, and below freezing at night. We’ve also had snow. I’ve gone winters in Dusseldorf without seeing a single snowflake, but this year it seems we’ll be getting more than our normal share.
On Sunday, I went to Dusseldorf’s Museum Kunst Palast with two friends from Hannover, and while it was particularly chilly, there was a bit of blue in the sky that made it feel less wintery. However, while we were inside, snow-laden clouds rolled in, and we emerged into a particularly heavy snowfall: clumped flakes in a strong wind leaving next to no visibility, and a completely white courtyard.
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Oct
22
2008
Over the summer, I visited my folks in County Wexford, Ireland, and my mother and I decided to go for a day out. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of what Wexford has to offer, and we wanted to try somewhere new. Both of us have an interest in archaeology and history, so the Irish National Heritage Park in Ferrycarraig sounded like just the thing. It is an open-air museum with reconstructions of stone age, bronze age and Celtic and Viking era homesteads, burial sites and places of ritual; the web site even promises ancient animal breeds. I’d been to an excellent open-air museum in Poland, and was looking forward to a great day out. Unfortunately, I’d reckoned without the possibility of bad design making the park essentially inaccessible.
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Oct
14
2008
At the time of writing, I´m on a train, unsure of where I can get out. When I bought the ticket to Erkelenz this afternoon, and saw that I´d be traveling by regional train, I went straight to the service point to order the Mobility Service. There are two models of regional train in Germany: an older one with two or three steps up into it and a verticla bar in the middle of the doorway, and the newer double-decker models with the floor of the compartment for wheelchairs lower than the platform. Either way, there´s no getting on without help. Anyway, the man at the service point took dow my details and told me to come back 20 minutes before my departure time, which I duly did, only to discover that there´d been a shift change, and there was now no record of my having ordered any help. They didn´t even know if I´d be able to get on the train, as the Mobility Service staff were apparently all busy.
Of course, like anyone, I find this sort of situation extremely irritating, but I try not to go fro 0 to furious in 60 seconds, and instead attempt to find a solution. I asked if they could call again, and told them that I was going up onto the platform to wait. My real intention was to see if I could corral a conductor or a few passengers into helping.
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Oct
07
2008
I’m supposed to be going to Hanover on Friday, and while the trip is now in doubt because the tail end of the cold I brought back from Poland has turned into the flu, complete with shivers and aches, I had already gone through the process of booking a train ticket, and what a process it was. Deutsche Bahn run a generally good service that I’m satisfied with, but with being sick, the run-around of trying to make the seat reservation was more than a little irritating. German institutions tend to have rules and procedures, and people with authority love reminding you of them.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s important to call and let them know when you’re traveling with a wheelchair, just in case there’s a reason you can’t travel. In the case of the Inter-City Express trains in Germany, the issue is one of space: there are only a couple of wheelchair berths per train, sometimes only one. You have to reserve the berth or risk not being able to travel at the time you wanted, because they can’t take more wheelchairs that they have berths. However, you can’t reserve the berth online: I’ve always had to do it by phone. Not this time though.
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Sep
07
2008
If there is one attitude that is guaranteed to make me angry, it is the “Does he take sugar?” attitude. I really try to keep an even temper around people who are displaying their ignorance on the subject of wheelchairs and disability, because it doesn’t help anyone if I go around with a chip on my shoulder, but this particular perception of disabled people as unable to think or speak really pushes my buttons. I can understand people not knowing that some manual wheelchairs can go over a high curb or be pushed down a staircase, or thinking that all wheelchair users have spinal injuries and paralyzed legs. I get that people might think “You’re so brave!” or “I have a cousin in New York in a wheelchair; do you know him?” might be good ways to strike up a friendly conversation. I know children are going to stare and embarrass their parents. I try to maintain calm in the face of all that, but being talked over like I’m not even there just sets me off. This post has two tales of assuming being in a wheelchair means being deaf and dumb or helpless from Dublin and Chicago, and two illustrations of how it should be done from Wroclaw and Austin.
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Sep
02
2008
Yesterday, I made the claim that North America was overall more wheelchair friendly than Europe. The countries of Europe have made huge strides in improving accessibility for disabled people in general, but there are still many things to be done before they will equal North America’s level of accessibility. Today I would like to give four pieces of advice to Europe regarding relatively simple things it could do to improve accessibility for wheelchair users.
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Aug
26
2008
Picture the scene: it is after 11 pm in downtown San Francisco. My friend Geoff and I have just come out of the cinema, we both have to be up early the next day, and neither of us wants to face the stink of the Civic Center Muni Metro station elevators, so we decide to share a cab back to the Inner Sunset where we both live. We walk up to the nearby line of taxi cabs and head to the first in line, a station wagon whose driver is reading a newspaper.
“Evening,” I say, smiling. “We’d like to go to the Inner Sunset, 9th and Irving.”
He looks up, with the start of the smile on his face, but it quickly fades. He points at the wheelchair and scowls: “I can’t take that. You’ll have to call a cab from dispatch.” He then returns to his newspaper, discussion over.
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