Arrivals

Before I left on this trip, my officemate Ian told me about Zopiclone sleeping pills. Ian is a genius and thanks to him most of the flight from Singapore is unremembered. The parts I do remember were watching Rebel Without a Cause (brilliant!) and eating really disappointing airline food (less brilliant). My prof has asked for pictures of delicious meals I am consuming. Maybe he isn't aware I'm going to Germany? So far I have eaten the aforementioned airplane meals and this donner kebab:

It was okay, I guess.

There was an unspecified MEDICAL EMERGENCY at the start of the flight that meant we arrived in Frankfurt really late and had to RUN through the ENORMOUS airport (there were several times I thought "puff puff must be there ohgod" and turned a corner to be faced with another huge corridor of perfume and booze shops). Turned out when we collapsed wheezing against the Lufthansa ticket desk, we'd been rebooked on another flight an hour later and everything was fine and there had been no need or anything above a leisurely saunter.

I was thirsty from the running so I had my eyes on the refreshment trolley on the flight to Frankfurt. It started down the other end of the plane and I occupied myself by watching its slow approach and imaging how good drinking a cold glass of coke would be. When it got to the last two rows, the woman explained that since we were last minute additions to the flight, all the alloted refreshment had been used up and gave us each a dry biscuit. DESPAIR.

The bus to the hostel had a library! You could take and leave books. Too cool! I did not take or leave books because they were all in German.

The library on the bus, special little shelves and everything!

My first act upon entering my hostel room in Hamburg was to put my keys down in the room, step outside the room and watch the door swing shut. With the keys inside. My next move was to tell my travelmate Konstantin I would see if I could find someone to get a spare key and come back if I couldn't, and leave the hostel building. As I stood in the rain and watched the door shut I realised I needed the keys to get back in to the building as well.

Luckily this kind of thing has happened to me many many times before so I have honed my charmingly shamed smile for the security men. My room is a shape that makes it tricky to photograph, but if you imagine a desk, a bed, a wardrobe and some pristine and lonesome white walls that's it! It has a big window that overlooks an oak tree.