Category: Paderborn

I’m writing this now in my first morning in Paderborn, but it is my sixth day in Germany. I came a bit early and spent some time with a family friend in Cologne, where I did a lot of sight seeing and exploring. Navigating the country through subways, street trains, and cross-country high speed rails has been confusing, but I haven’t gotten lost yet! My high school German education has helped me out a lot, though most people I’ve spoken with knew plenty of English.

Paderborn is a lot smaller than Cologne, but in my less than 24 hours here, I have already come to appreciate it. There’s a beautiful park in the center(?) of town with water running through and around it and with lots of ducks. I’m already sold!

Here are some Choice Pics™ from my travels:

For my very first flight alone, and my first international flight (as far as I remember), things went amazingly smoothly. The plane me and Sam were on was not uncomfortable, aside from the usual, unavoidable trappings of airplanes. I even managed to get an hour or two of sleep, and the plane had USB ports under the armrests, allowing me to charge my phone for the trip. Little did I know I would sorely need every single percentage point upon getting off the plane.

I expected the plane ride to be the difficult part, if anything. I figured the train ride would go smoothly, save for maybe a little confusion as to where my train would be. There was plenty of that, but the train, when I found it, was three hours late. Thankfully, I had a flexible ticket, meaning I could take any other train on the same route with that ticket. All of those, however, were also incredibly late, and those that weren’t came in on the wrong side. The only way to get from one side to the other was to go up a floor and walk over up there, and the trains that showed up on the wrong side didn’t wait for passengers as long as the others. Fun times. When I finally got on a train, late for my connecting ride for which I originally had two hours of leeway, I got off at the wrong stop, because I wanted to stop at the main station of Frankfurt, Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof / Frankfurt Central Station, not Frankfurt am Main Stadion.

I finally managed to find a train with Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof as a midway stop. When I got there, I had to buy a new ticket to Paderborn, which also ended up having a connecting trip. The first trip was very comfortable, but like every single other train I had seen that day, it was late, and so I missed the connecting train. Finally, I found a way to get to Paderborn from there with, wouldn’t you know it, a connection. This connection, however, I made, and after fumbling a bit with the bus system at about 1:00AM, I finally got to In Via.

I’m confident the rest of this trip will go far better, and save for a bout of post nasal drip I just recovered from today, it has, so far. But the trip hasn’t even techincally started yet, so we’ll see!

My flight was at 10pm and I was upgraded to premium economy at the very last minute. I was happy about it. For those who know me, I absolutely hate international flights, especially in economy class. I slept my entire flight and skipped both meals, which helped some with my jet lag.

I was a little worried about my visa since it’s a Swedish Visa instead of Germany but they barely checked anything nor gave me a hard time. The line for customs was surprisingly short compared to getting into USA, which usually takes 3 hours. After successfully getting into the country, I treated myself with a Starbucks and then met up with Josh. Patrick told us trains always get hella delayed here, so I think we were lucky that our connections went smooth. Neither Josh or I knew there was a taxi station near the train station, we ended up dragging our suitcases around for 20 min to our hotel.

At the hotel lobby, a large group of German students were waiting for us… I was not ready for that… Quickly dropped of my luggage, we walked to a Pizza place together. I’m lost in words to describe how large the pizza was, it was like the size of a table. The Germans invited us to a local carnival but I had to pass on the offer due to jet lag.