Yesterday was an eventful and exhausting day. It started with me going to bed, at 1:30 am. I had stayed up very late studying for my final. When I woke up, I knew I would need extra time to study so I rushed through my morning stuff (coffee, tooth brushing, and most importantly, groaning and whining to myself about how much I didn’t want to wake up.)
I got to the school thirty minutes prior to the test and the other students arriving and flipped through my flash cards and prayed for the best. I think I did alright on my four page test in German…YIKES!!
The plan was to finish the test, go home, pack quickly and meet Flor, Jacob, and Zach to get on a train around 3:30 headed to Berlin’s SXF airport and be prepared to catch our early morning flight to Milan to start our adventure in Italy. God laughed and said ”You made plans!”
What was such a simple plan went wrong from the very beginning. Jacob and Zach went to a long lunch, so 3:30 wasn’t happening. Jacob’s ERail pass (ticket to use the rail system) hadn’t arrived yet, it was supposed to arrive at 6PM. So the plan got adapted. We would leave at 6:30PM and catch the trains necessary to get to the airport.
The tickets were rerouted. Evidently the delivery person rang the wrong doorbell and when Jacob wasn’t there, he/she/it/they turned around and headed back to Leipzig and the Fedex station. He wouldn’t receive them until 6PM today. 
It was then decided that we (Flor, Zach and I) would catch the 8:30 train to Berlin and catch all subsequent trains to the SXF airport in Berlin. Or not.
We got to the train station which is only a few blocks from Jacob’s house and there were Sam and Stephen ready and waiting to go on their spur of the moment trip to Munich and then Switzerland. They decided maybe thirty minutes prior to this that they were going to travel. They had hostel reservations, travel plans, tickets for a night train (sleeper seats,) and most important, they were organized.
While standing around waiting for the train, we discovered that Zach had left his ERail ticket at Jacob’s house so he wouldn’t be able to travel until nearly midnight. He grabbed his backpack and headed back to Jacob’s house and Flor and I boarded the train.
Five to ten minutes into our trip, the woman who punched our tickets came to us and told us the train needed repairs so we would be stopping for five minutes to switch trains. Fun stuff! We reboarded the new un-in need of repairs-train and the same woman told us that she had called the connecting train that we were in danger of missing so that they would wait for us. That was very sweet of her and also it was the last place where the train employees were nice to us the rest of the night.
On the train to Berlin (when we ran to make our connection) we finally relaxed a little. It was an hour and a half until we were scheduled to arrive at the Haupbanhof in Berlin so we were planning to doze and to arrive slightly refreshed to continue our journey. This was not to be. Evidently Flor is a creeper magnet. 
We were only on the train about 15 minutes when he found us or more appropriately her. He sat down in a seat opposite us but behind me so he could clearly see her and started smiling and laughing in his creepy creeper way, which I assure you, was incredibly creepy. He even went to the lengths of making squeaking noise with his shoe in order to get her to look at him. We ended up where I sat in her spot and she sat in mine in the guise that I needed to use my computer. He moved to the seat behind her. Creeper. We were talking about which location in Berlin to get off on and mentioned the Zoologishergarten stop, he stood up to leave, even putting on his backpack at that stop. He took it off and put it back down when we didn’t get off the train. He did end up getting off the train at the same place as us, but he left through a different exit.
Speaking of the Berlin Haupbanhof…what is with service employees being not nice at all to customers and people who need assistance (which is their job to provide?) We didn’t know where to find the airport or the connections to the airport so we asked for help for the, you guessed it, help desk. We were greeted with a brusque unpleasant man who did help, but was lacking any customer service skill. He acted like we were the biggest intrusion in his lonely sitting down doing nothing existence. We came into that once more in Berlin before the night was through.
So, let’s converse about Ostkruez. That means East-something. We were required to get on this train as part of our trip to the airport that housed our airline. It wasn’t listed on our list of stops so we got off one stop early and screwed up the night. We ended up running like mad to the train the 80’s had forgotten. The walls were pink and the seats were a brightly colored amalgamation of what looked like big paint strokes. This train took us to the deep ghetto (or what felt like the deep ghetto)of Berlin. Keep in mind that it was pretty darned close to one in the morning by this point. Following that lovely accostive train, we transferred to the train that was supposed to be all the way to the airport. Except it stopped running at one. While the few passengers that were on the train got off the train, we sat waiting for the train to restart, not knowing that it wouldn’t.
Thank goodness there were couple of very nice people who had gotten off, who noticed we hadn’t gotten off and they came back and told us. This train station was almost as creepy as Flor’s creeper. The nice couple who told us about the train walked us outside and helped us figure out which busses and how to get to them. If they hadn’t helped us, we would have been sitting in that train for the hours until it started again.
We walked to where the busses were still running and had to wait A LONG TIME. 
We were pretty loopy at this point, so it was random photo time! This neighborhood was less than savory and we were two women at a bus stop alone and we were obviously not from around these parts. There was broken glass, bad lighting, graffiti, and all the pluses of a poor neighborhood. For some reason, we were so loopy that we didn’t care.
We finally got on the bus and were once again on our way to the airport. We had been on our way to the Airport since Quedlinburg at 6:30pm. It was almost two AM. This bus took us to another connection OUR LAST ONE! YAY! While waiting for the next connection, Flor treated me to her happy dances. There are a few. She has a We’re 
Going to Italy Dance for each genre of music. I am so glad I am not the only person who gets loopy and who is that excited about going to Italy. OMG I AM GOING TO ITALY!!!
We finally got to the Airport and of course had to pay for internet to check on the boys. Then, we headed to our gate and took cramped naps on little tiny couches. The journey to the airport had taken us seven hours and we had been up early because of our test. We were exhausted.
We woke up from our naps and it was daylight. Our flight wouldn’t bbe ready for another couple of hours so we chilled and spoke with a friend that Flor made. (She has a gift for making friends.) We went though security (and I didn’t get checked for additional security measures) and then boarded the plane. Woo Hoo! Our arduous journey to get to our flight was complete.
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