The trip I took to Berlin, between the 23rd and 29th of December, wasn’t really mapped out ahead of time. I admit most of my trips aren’t, but Berlin was a little different, even, than the usual disorganization and unpreparedness. For example, I booked a train ticket and hotel fewer than 24 hours before I left. And considering the intense awesomeness that’s associated with Berlin, and how badly I’ve been wanting to go, it’s sort of hard to believe that my first visit there over the 2010 holidays was actually a sudden and tearfully made B-Plan. What the heck, I know. Here’s what happened.It was around mid-November that I started feeling pretty homesick—the days had become dark, cold, rainy, and snowy. The novelty of immersion language learning was wearing off, and I was starting to feel frustrated by how much I still couldn’t express or understand in conversation. I missed my family and friends; I turned 25, and though I’m a currently a fulltime student, I’m also unemployed. I was feeling kind of bad about all these things and I decided I needed a break to sort through my German experience and soak up some vitamin D.
So I got a plane ticket home to visit my family in Southern California for the holidays. Just what I needed, I thought, it was going to be brilliant! I was going to see everyone I love the most! I was going to come back bearing all the gifts I’d spent the last several weeks accumulating. I was going to sit in the sun in my parents’ backyard. Run outside in shorts! Sleep late and eat way too many Christmas cookies! See my best friends from high school! Get a haircut, which I (still) badly need but have been avoiding in Heidelberg, given serious hair-cut fears and a limited German vocabulary. I was going to buy all the things that I need to make my life work properly that are unavailable in Germany (Frank’s hot sauce, an Oral-B soft cross-action toothbrush, a few new books of contemporary poetry in English).
But as the date of my trip approached, it started to look a little complicated for air travel. For over a week before my flight, newspapers were filled with the headlines of travel hubs all over Europe shut down by winter weather—by snow, ice, and would-be air travelers, all piling up portentously on every runway and in every flight terminal. I was checking the weather reports 3 times a day, hoping the skies would clear! That the ice would melt and an army of snow plows would be working around the clock for my special benefit.
And then it did get better! With two, full days before my departure, the sky was dull and cloudy but precipitation in all of its forms had stopped and the weather had warmed a little. Things were still hectic, but the tangle of missed connections and holiday-travelers-turned-airport-campers was finally beginning to get sorted out.
But just after the alarm went off at 5:30 in the morning on the day of my flight—I leapt out of bed! I was scrambling around in the darkness! throwing things in my purse! making last minute changes to the contents of my over-stuffed suitcase! packing my laptop and pulling book after book of well-intentioned airplane reading from the shelves!!—my phone started to ring, too.
It was U.S. Airways: “Flight’s cancelled due to prior weather conditions. Sorry……”
I really thought I could hear sucker!, as in, “Sorry, sucker!”, hanging at the end of this terrible little memo. Prior weather conditions? Prior? Are you kidding? No arrangements were made for a different flight and, as several thorough searches determined, a last-minute ticket with another airline would have to be business class, would cost another $1,000.
I didn’t know what to do! It seemed impossible that there was really this enormous immoveable wall between me and getting on a plane back to the U.S. After all, I’d bought a ticket already at great expense. I’d bought train tickets to and from the airport, packed 85% of my Germany-based life into a bag.
But there’s really no sense writing about it. Everyone has their own personal annals of travel disaster and frustration, and certainly mine are no worse than anyone else’s. In fact, with the retrospect of just a couple weeks it doesn’t even look so bad. I still really miss home and everyone there. But I didn’t have to stand around at the airport for 18 hours fighting with bureaucrats about getting a refund or another flight; I didn’t crash on a plane into the Atlantic or have to de-board a plane because of an engine fire or bird’s wing caught in the propeller. Etcetera. It's embarrassing to say, but at the time the word to describe how I was feeling would have to bitter. Bitter mixed with disbelief, bitter mixed with self-pity, bitter mixed with disappointment the size of seventeen airplanes, bitter mixed with totally devastated. Sorry friends and fam, it was not my finest moment. Or day, or couple of days.
The alternatives to my now cancelled California-bound flight were either to stay in Heidelberg, in an all but entirely abandoned 12-story, dilapidated student dormitory, or buy a last minute train-ticket to Berlin and spend the Holidays with our very good friends, Aaron and Lily. Of course, once I took a three hour stress nap and recovered a little from my disappointment, I happily opted for the latter. And they were nice enough to have me stay, even on such short notice. (Thanks, you guys!)
So that is the story of how I ended up going to Berlin for Christmas, instead of peacing out to California or Hawaii or Costa Rica or any of these other places one might think of as desirable, mid-winter holiday destinations. And while I’m not sure I’d recommend being one of a handful of travelers slugging north when everyone else is flocking south, this turned out to be one of the best trips I’ve taken here in Germany, to what's now maybe my new favorite city. Because Berlin really is as awesome as it’s rumored and I can’t wait to say more about it. I should have Berlin Part II posted later this weekend—and I’m pretty sure it should be more interesting than my airing of grievances with U.S. Airways and northern European weather patterns :)
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