As I write this, I’m sitting in the waiting area of the Heathrow airport. British Airways is on strike, so we got bumped to the next flight on standby. If we don’t get on the flight, we get to spend the night in London. I very much want to get to Germany, but a night in London wouldn’t be a bad deal. Our flight from Chicago to here was fine. We had to sit at the gate for 30 minutes due to 6 late people, but once they arrived, things went perfectly smoothly. No turbulence, thank God. The trip felt much faster than last year; perhaps it is because I knew better what to expect this time. I even slept for about 5 hours on the plane. It is currently 8:50AM Indiana time, but 1:50PM here where we’re at. I’m not nearly as exhausted this time as I was last year…. I recall feeling like a total zombie when we arrived and was in a daze as we trained to our hotel. For now anyway, it’s like I’ve been in this time zone forever. Perhaps I am just living in the wrong country. :)
Now, I finish the entry several hours later.....
After several long hours in the airport, they were able to get us on a flight. That was the good news. The other good news was that these kind Brits served us tea and “savoury snack”. Which ended up to be pretzels and dehydrated celery, yum yum. The bad news is that we didn’t get to Berlin until 7PM, so we were starting to get pretty tired. The woman who is hosting us met us at the gate holding a sign that said “Heidi and Emmy”. I must confess, I’d seen people in airports with signs before and always thought that was cool, and I nerdily enjoyed being the one on the sign this time. Rosemarie introduced herself to us and greeted us warmly and we took 2 bus rides back to her place. She is probably in her 60s and very kind and gracious and so easy to talk to. The German people are so unbelievably friendly and we were quite surprised when she showed us her apartment, then told us ours was upstairs. Yes, she has a little apartment upstairs for guests, so Heidi and I have a mini kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom area… AND it has a super sweet balcony. Not gonna lie. When I saw the European light switches and toilet I got pretty excited. The stuff here is just so cool. I got even more excited when I felt the slightly crunchy line dried fresh towels because of course hardly anyone has a clothes dryer here. After we got settled, we went down to her apartment for some dinner. She served us some traditional potato soup and also some sort of sausage, which of course I didn’t eat. Her eclectic decorations made me feel like I was in a world museum, and we learned over dinner that she has done quite a bit of traveling…. To India and Israel and Africa and the US just to name some., so the things in her house are souvenirs from all of her world travels. Also, she hosts travelers pretty frequently. After dinner, she asked us if we had gotten enough to eat. When we told her we had, she said “Good, then it’s time for the ice cream.” Well we certainly did not argue that one and soon the dinner conversation continued over bowls of cherry amoretto ice cream. After this it was about 10PM here and we were exhausted so we went up to bed. I then wrote this blog entry (Which I will post as soon as I can find a hot spot) in the bed which has no top sheet (These Germans are so smart… what’s the point of top sheets anyway?” and big fluffy duvets. Yay Germany. Yay for being back. Yay for good food. Yay for the organs that will son come. Yay for it staying light until crazy hours of the night. Yay for being ecstatically happy and in the most wonderful place in the whole world. I’m on cloud 9 million. And the minute my fingers touch some old keys and my feet get to dance on a short octave pedal board and my ears hear that glorious meantone I’m pretty sure I will plain drop dead of sheer happiness.
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