Interlude: When shit happens...

... it comes by the truckload. Or in my case, by train and airplane.

Here's a breakdown of the past 16 hours:

1. 5/22 night. The City Night Line train should have left Heidelberg at 23:34. Instead it was 170 minutes late when I arrived at Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof. Sometime near 1:30 it briefly became a 120 minute delay, and I rushed to the platform, only to see it become 180 minutes just 10 minutes later. Someone else who was waiting for another ICE to Frankfurt said that this was one of the jokes of some famous German comedian: Deutsche Bahn is the most wonderful and considerate company in the world. You only need to pay for a 2 hour journey, and they will automatically give your 4 hours!

2. 5/23 morning. When the CNL arrived at Berlin, they somehow managed to shave off a good two hours off the delay, so it was less than one hour late coming into Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Because of this, I could only get a 25% refund... into a German bank account! Can someone lend me their account?

3. I still had quite an amount of time to kill before my flight, so I took my suitcase to the locker room. Turns out the locker I chose was broken, and I had to wait a good 20 minutes to get someone to help me get my €4 back. He said that when I retrieved my luggage in the afternoon, I should also let them know, since the locker still said that I owed €4. In hindsight I should have just paid another €4 when I retrieved my luggage at around 3 in the afternoon, because I had to wait for another half hour for someone to get a master key and open the lock.

4. 5/23 afternoon. I thought I fully deserved the €5 shower at the train station after all I had been through the previous night, but it turns out I was wrong. When I finally got to Tegel it was just after 4:30, and theoretically I had just enough time to complete all the check-in and boarding procedures. That is, unless you manage to run into the airline staff's coffee break... so even though there were only two people ahead of me in the line, I had to wait more than half an hour while the person in charge of the economy class check-in went off for her break, and the one in charge of business class just sat there chatting and laughing on the phone. I finally went and asked just how long it would be before I could check-in, and she then told me I had passed my check-in time 20 minutes ago. Of course, by this time (5:00, my flight was supposed to be 5:25) the economy class lady still hadn't come back. So I had to spend another €132 to reschedule my flight for tomorrow.

5. Right now I'm at the Grand Hostel Berlin again. The hostel is really excellent and clean, and all the staff speak excellent English; if anyone wants to come to Berlin I would highly recommend this place. But even so, I would much rather be on the plane right now, if only because of the €132 I had to spend. After breakfast tomorrow (and I am going to fully stuff my €5 worth of breakfast buffet!) I will head straight out to Tegel and wait out the five hours there.

I wish I could be like Douglas Adams and dream up the entire Hitchhiker's series while lying drunk on a road in Berlin. I just don't have that talent... nor the aptitude for getting drunk...

-- from NK Wang's iPad

Location:Tempelhofer Ufer,Berlin,Germany