Germany Here I Come

With Anna and Mona


Last week when I checked in for my flight to Rome, I also checked in for my flight to Germany because I had a really hard time finding a place to print in Spain and didn’t want to have to spend a long time in Rome also looking for a place to print my boarding pass. If you don’t bring your boarding pass with you to the airport they will reprint it for you at a charge of €40 (I just found out that by pressing Ctrl + Alt + E you can make the symbol for Euro). Unfortunately on the check in for both flights I put 0 bags and as I learned from my flight to Rome I need to put 1 bag. Ryan Air doesn’t let you change this online, you have to call them and none of the numbers work from a calling card so I was unable to get the change made. It would have only cost me €10 to add my bag over the phone. When I got to the airport, I checked in and told them I wanted to check a single bag. The charge for this was €20 instead of the €30 I had expected. They apparently have a progressive charging scheme for checking bags, the longer you wait the more is costs.

At the desk where I had to pay my €20 the man working the counter asked me if I was at the beach in Italy two weeks ago because I looked familiar to him. I told him I thought he was mistaken and then he looked at me for a long moment and said “you really look like him, are you sure you weren’t there?” Since he was referring to a beach in Italy and I had been in Spain at the time, I knew he was wrong. His look was kind of creepy and I wonder what happened between him and the guy who looked like me on that beach.

When I arrived in Germany is was cold, really cold, I’m talking teens in Celsius and near the end of the night it reached single digits.

For the next week I will be staying with Anna and her family, Anna is a girl from Germany who lived with my mom’s family for a year, four years ago. I went to an information desk at the airport and asked how I get to a train stop near Anna’s families house. The woman behind the counter hit a few keystrokes on her computer and then gave me a customized printout for the journey telling me which bus and which trains to take and the time of them. It was amazingly easy and straightforward. I took the bus to a train station, hopped on the first train, and then went to another train station, walked to a different platform and hopped on the next train and then I was where I wanted to be. Anna was there waiting for me and she drove me to her parents house out in the country in Breckerfeld.

Anna’s parents own a cleaning company and were having their annual party the night I arrived. Everyone brought delicious food and there was German beer, it was a filling and a great time. I ate at least four full plates of food and then snacked all night. I think maybe from now on I will go to one all you can eat buffet a week to give myself an opportunity to eat more variety and stuff myself to the max.

It’s really nice to be in a home, with a private bedroom and a kitchen that is fully stocked and with nice people who all know and care about each other. I don’t really know the best way to explain it, but it’s nice to be in a home again.

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09_05_09 Breckerfeld small