Germany Day 0
I’ve never been off this continent before, which is surprising considering my mom has lived in Germany for the past year. But over the course of the next two weeks, I plan on rectifying that situation by taking a tour of Europe.
I took off all of Friday because the flight for my two week excursion to Europe (which I will now and always refuse to call my “Eurotrip”) left from Dulles airport at 9:58 PM, and I had things I had to get in order, like packing. I hear clothes are nice for trips.
I spent the day doing about what you would expect me to do the day before a long trip – I watched a movie and played some video games. I also managed to fit two weeks worth of clothes into a duffel bag I’ve had for the last decade or so that looks like it should be able to fit about 4 days worth of clothes in it. Since this bag was literally filled to the brim, I decided to bring another small duffel bag as carryon to take a few extra clothes and leave space for anything I bring back from Europe (as well as be a safety net incase they lost my luggage). Of course this was in addition to my first carryon bag which was a backpack containing my dSLR camera and all of my plane-time entertainment items (e.g., iPod, e-book reader
, etc.).
I do have to apologize, because these next few paragraphs are going to talk about the most cliché thing you can imagine – complaining about a bad flying experience – don’t say I didn’t warn you.
So Girlfriend and I get dropped off at the airport by her parents. We are there 2.5 hours before departure and her parents give us some money for the bar before the flight. That’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself.
We had already checked in online ahead of time, so we just needed to check our baggage. We go to the United counter and start looking for the baggage check. There is a super nice and friendly United employee who asks us what we are looking for, and I inform her we are looking for the baggage check, she asks if it is for a domestic flight, and I tell her it’s international. She directs us from the area where we were standing, where there was literally no line, around the back where there was what looked like at least a 90 minute line.
Luckily we only ended up standing in that line for 20 minutes. During that time, I kept thinking something wasn’t right, since we had already checked in and all we had to do was check our luggage. I asked Jenny to check and see if we were in the right line, so I trodded along with all of our luggage while she did some recon work. She came back and told me that we were in the correct line for international flights. Some more time passed and I still had the feeling we weren’t in the right line. Then Jenny asked me exactly what I had asked the United employee before, and I told her I asked her where to check luggage, and she replied that international flights have to go around the corner. Jenny picked up on the miscommunication there (I never specified that we had checked in and the lady assumed that’s what we needed). After her second recon mission, Jenny stole me out of the line and we walked back to where we first met the United employee who sent us around the back. It turns out if we hadn’t seen her at all, we probably would have found the place to check our bags, which was right next to where she was standing. Five minutes later we had our bags checked.
Next we had to get through security, but we knew about this cool trick in Dulles for a secret security check point. We walked all the way there only to discover it was closed – apparently nobody flies after 5pm.
Except for the hundreds of people standing in line at the main security checkpoint. We waited in that line for about an hour and a half. Our 2.5 hours of leeway was now 45 minutes. We took the shuttle to our terminal, and walked right past a currency exchange place. Even though you get a horrible exchange rate at the airport, we decided that we would use that one because my bank decides it needs three days advanced notice for foreign currency, and I only gave them two.
However, we didn’t stop right then – we had to make it to our gate because the boarding pass that I printed out wasn’t actually a boarding pass at all. They had yet to assign me a seat. Girlfriend had hers, and we booked our flights at the same time, or rather, I booked both of our flights at the same time, through the same United agent over the phone. You would think that they would assign both seats together, next to each other. Not only were our seats not together, but I didn’t even have a seat.
It wasn’t a huge deal, it was just going to be assigned at the gate and I didn’t want to get there late and miss my name being called and my seat be assigned to somebody else. So we decided we’d come back to that currency exchange.
At the gate (which was literally the last one in the terminal, and thus furthest away from the currency exchange), there was a line, so I decided to stand in it since I hadn’t stood in enough lines yet at the airport. 15 minutes later I got to the front of the line only to be told that they would call my name when they had my seat.
Of course, the air conditioning was broken on this part of the terminal, so it felt like it was about 90 degrees, which did not help the situation.
I sat down with Girlfriend, and she decided that she would go to the currency exchange to get some cash. I gave her my wallet and told her to get me some too if they would let her use my card. Of course, they didn’t, which may have been a blessing in disguise since my credit card gives me a better rate than any currency exchange.
Ten minutes before the flight departed I still did not have my seat assignment. I was getting a little nervous – I went from wanting to get a seat next to Girlfriend to just wanting to get a seat at all. It turns out I did get a seat, but it was the middle seat directly behind the bulkhead for the lavatory. Girlfriend’s seat was about 10 rows closer to the front and an aisle seat. We thought that we might be able to convince somebody next to me to switch with Girlfriend, after all, who wouldn’t want to go from a middle seat to an aisle seat? I’m sure you can guess that nobody on my row wanted to switch.
The first was the man on the aisle. He was black and overweight. He was ex-military but you never would have guessed by looking at him. My seat was next to his, which is kind of like my worst nightmare – I hate it when other people spill over into my space.
This man liked to complain a lot – he made sure to let me know that he had reserved this seat specifically two months ago and would not be changing it for anything. The woman next to my seat decided against it for no good reason, the seat next to hers was empty for the time being, and the last seat in the row was occupied by somebody that either didn’t speak English, or pretended not to so that she wouldn’t have to switch seats.
Eventually the person in the empty seat came back and decided he would switch, one game of musical chairs later and Girlfriend and I were sitting next to each other – just in time for the flight to almost start taking off. It’s at this point that the flight attendant informs me that I can’t have my carryon bag with all of my in-flight entertainment in front of me – the aisle had to be clear. So I had to put all of my stuff in the already filled overhead compartments. Awesome.
I ended up never accessing my stuff, relying instead on the airline issued entertainment. The movies on weren’t bad, the food was stereotypical airline food, and there was the obligatory crying baby. But we made it in safely at 11:45AM and thus started our first day in Germany.
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