I’m going to start with this: I’m very tired.
Starting in Rochester, I had a nine hour train ride to Penn station, where the handle of my new (expensive) luggage promptly broke off, and I had to treck the six blocks to Grand Central with a precarious and heavy luggage bag during peak travel times. A stop at the Cinnamon Snail was not enough to raise my spirits. Once in Grand Central I failed to understand what the app was telling me on how to get to my train, but I was lucky enough to wander into the right place for a nice business man who couldn’t hear a single thing I said to point out the train to me. Thus, surrounded by tired business people who weren’t putting up with my questions or my luggage, I made it safely (albeit with a year taken off my life from stress) into Norwalk, Connecticut where my boyfriend – Alex Wisdom – was there to pick me up and assure me that the rest of the trip wouldn’t be as stressful. Spoiler alert: it was pretty stressful. I spent a day and a half in a very fancy house surrounded by visiting Swedish family. Now, I’ve been learning swedish through duolingo for three years (on and off, but from what I heard from other duolingo users, I was one of the few who managed to keep up with daily lessons far longer than most). However, being confronted with native Swedish speakers who were told that I was pretty proficient in swedish, I remembered all of four nouns and “Jag talar Svenska en lita gran” (I speak swedish a little bit). Although I had a good time, I was eager to start our journey. Using Uber because no one was able to take us to JFK, we took two hours to drive fifteen miles stuck in traffic with a driver who was concerningly wearing headphones the entire time.
The security through the airport was surprisingly easy, although I nearly passed out because I hadn’t eaten enough and it was very hot surrounded by lines for half an hour. On the plane, we squeezed in between two other people, our backpacks on our laps and our knees crushed up against the seats. Miraculously, Alex managed to see two seats on the upper level that were empty and asking nicely was all we needed to do to get upgraded. We had so much more room and an empty seat next to us, and although we were still uncomfortable, it would have been 100 times worse if we hadn’t moved. Hopefully we can do the same thing on the flight back home, but I’m not trying to jinx us.
Then came the seven hour layover in Manchester. We couldn’t get any sleep on the plane, so we we’re both very tired and could only manage to find a bar with outlets and overstay our welcome as we played video games the whole time. I had a small can of gin and tonic so that we could use the restaurant, but I foolishly didn’t eat anything else except a couple fries from Alex’s lunch.
Oh boy, let me tell you about the flight from Manchester to Dusseldorf! I’m not easily pissed off; I worked at Cracker Barrel for a while and delt with a lot of different people that would try to get under my skin, so I was pretty tough. However!! A bachelor party was on the plane with us, and a very drunk man wearing a cheep wedding dress was yelling and singing the whole time. Alex and I were both so tired that we managed to get fitful sleep anyway, but everyone in the plane was ready to turn around and punch the guy. You can’t win with those types of people; they thrive on attention and confronting them about it would only encourage them. Also, I lost my blizzard sweatshirt at some point, so the journey through the Dusseldorf airport frayed our nerves.
I’m narcoleptic, so functioning while I’m tired is something I do daily, but Alex was very tired and getting irritated. Still, after all this, we still had a trek through the airport and to the train station, where we struggled to figure out the ticket machine until a man clicked all the buttons for us and we just stuck our credit card in. Of course the train was standing room only; we spent a while trying to avoid falling into the people around us, and there were no windows or air conditioning to dampen the smell of body odor and the feeling of hot breath permeating the train. It got better as we moved out of the city, but on the last stop before an hour straight to paderborn a belligerent homeless man joined us, yelling at everyone and forcing us to breath through our mouths through the rest of the journey.
A short taxi ride from the station to our hotel seemed like the longest part, and I had to read my card number over the phone to the taxi office because we didn’t have cash on us. I don’t recommend that. I don’t know what I was expecting of the hotel, but the concrete walls and lack of all employees was a bit off putting. We had slept through breakfast, but didn’t familiarize ourselves with the map enough before we went out and eventually followed the shining beacons of direction signs to McDonald’s, and ended up across the street eating Subway for breakfast. The area we walked to felt like home. Highways, concrete, overcast skies, treterous sidewalks; you know, typical Rochester. There were a suspicious amount of sun tanning studios, (like, alarmingly), and at one point we managed to wander into an empty casino where one guy was sitting at a machine at 11 on a Saturday. It was my turn to get cranky from lack of food, and I nearly passed out again just getting to the Subway.
The food raised my spirits, and after a long journey to find an ATM machine we were finally able to leave the Rochester like outskirts and enjoy the carnival that was in the park next to the hotel. Alex and I enjoyed looking at all the rides and attractions, trying to guess what signs were saying and not being correct about a single one. After ice cream, we returned to the hotel because my converse had started to cause blisters on my feet and spent the remaining time playing video games by ourselves before we went down to meet the German students for dinner.
I was worried I would be intimidated, but they were very friendly and helpful when the servers at the restaurant got angry about how little German we were able to understand. The server we had at the beginning just stopped even coming to the table, and I had to wait a half an hour for someone to even notice I didn’t have food when everyone else did. I still enjoyed my time talking to the other students about games and school and what we had in common, and I am so excited to start working with them and seeing what kind of insight they will offer. As I was leaving, a dirty look to the server that was unbelievably rude to us prompted him to follow me out the restaurant, shouting something in German that was probably an invitation for a fist fight. I shook my head and said some nonsense about talking to a friend, diffusing the situation and avoiding an arrest in a foreign country because he had absolutely no idea what I was saying but saw I wasn’t looking for trouble. I’ll try to avoid any confrontations in the future…
Bonus find at the carnival:
