[EuroTrip07] Part 1 - Preparation
I have been meaning to write about this for the last 6 months. I finally got around to it.
As you may or may not know, in June I took a trip to Europe. An unplanned trip to Europe. For reasons I will avoid discussing over the internets, AC was spending the month in the south-west corner of Germany, in a town called Saarloius. A month in Germany might sound exciting, but Saarloius is very small and very German, and AC doesn’t speak German, so she was kind of bored. Naturally, I had to come to her rescue. In an airplane.
Does this sound like madness to you? Well, it kind of was. But we had been talking about taking a real vacation for a while, and here was our chance. Plus, I got to walk into a travel agent and answer the question “When would you like to leave for Germany?” with “How about tonight?“. Downside: flying “tonight” is expensive. Actually I didn’t get to fly “tonight”. I got to fly “in 3 days, when the next Air Transat plane leaves for Frankfurt”, because Air Transat charges half of what Air Canada does when you want to book a trip to Europe only 3 days in advance. In retrospect, I should have paid for the Air Canada flight…
I spent the next 3 days alternating between packing, organizing things for when I was gone, and blind panic. Oh, and trying to call AC’s hotel with skype. This was harder than it sounds, because I was calling at roughly 3AM in German time, and the overnight attendant at the hotel front desk was a grumpy old man who didn’t speak a word of English. Initially I tried to formulate sentences with Google Translator, like “room 9 please”, but I’m sure I butchered the pronunciation and the grumpy old man was completely disinterested in trying to decipher my broken dialog. Our conversations would go like this:
<rms> Hello! raum 9 bitte!
<grumpyoldman> !?!!!?!?! (angry-sounding german words here)
<rms> …..um…..raum 9 bitte? (pronounced slightly differently, with less certainty…)
<grumpyoldman> !?!!!?!?! (more angry words)
<rms> ….ok….I’ll call back…
I quickly abandoned my valiant attempts at cultural exchange and had a German friend call, who learned that (1) the grumpy old man was on his cell phone and I should just call back later, and (2) he would prefer if I just called the room directly and left him alone. I could never get that to work, so we eventually established a system where I would call and shout “Carpendale, bitte” (shouting because the skype connection was abysmal), and he would shout back “Carpendale, ja, ja” and connect me.
I started to realize that communication might be an issue on this trip. See, I’ve been to Europe a few times, but only to England and Ireland, where I speak the native tongue (well, sort of). But I quickly discovered that in Germany, most people only speak German! Troubling. So, I spent a while on iTunes, filling AC’s iPod up with “how to speak German” podcasts. I had a brilliant plan to listen to these on the plane, and do the accompanying worksheets. Seriously. I think I managed to listen to the first 2 or 3 before I realized that, like with the French, there was no way I was going to teach myself anything beyond “please” and “thanks”. The backs of the worksheets were good for doodling on, though.
Anyway, now that I had a plane ticket, German podcasts, and a growing realization of the madness of the whole plan, I was ready to go to Germany…