I’m in Berlin! On Sunday, 11.17pm, I arrived in Berlin central station. I was supposed to arrive at 11.30am, but nevermind.
The last two days, Saturday and Sunday, felt like one big chunk of time, unproductively spent while running around or waiting. Saturday started with lunch with M (he needs to move away from DC, so that’s probably the last time I saw him in the US), continued with packing, cleaning up my apartment and getting the metro and bus to the Baltimore airport, and concluding with getting on the plane to Rekjavik. Two hours to late. And then in Rekjavik, I didn’t catch my flight to Berlin and they sent us to Amsterdam. But then in Amsterdam, they didn’t offer any flight to Berlin, so I had to take the train to Berlin (after finding that out for 1.5 hours). Takes 7 hours and is actually a nice ride. And because I didn’t have any wifi, I ended up thinking about my goals for Berlin and what I should do and that was actually really nice and productive.
Now I’m 12 hours too late in Berlin. I can’t believe that my second trip to Europe during this fellowship (the first being the flight to Rome) is disastrous, again. Well, I should be happy. It wasn’t as disastrous as the 48 hours DC –> Charlotte –> Philadelphia –> Philadelphia –> Rome torture.
Input? 2
Output? 2
Learnings?
Purchasing a train ticket from Amsterdam Airport to Berlin is surprisingly easy.
Food in Germany/the Netherlands IS SO CHEAP. I totally forgot how good it feels to buy something here. It’s great.
If an airline tells you that they will have staff set up at your destination who will help you to figure stuff out, it’s not necessarily true.
If an airline tells you that you shouldn’t worry about your connection flight because they certainly, certainly will wait for you, it’s not necessarily true.
Low cost airlines have lower priorities on airports. And are actually, again and again, just not a good idea.
The Netherlands have far more segregated bike lanes than I expected. The cliché is true.
American 16-year-olds don’t use Facebook and one of them, Nick, had no idea what WhatsApp is. “Never heart of it.” Direct quote. I spent most of my Sunday with Nick; he and his brother and parents were also going from Baltimore to Berlin and had the same troubles I had. He said he sucks at math and chemistry and art (”It’s just too hard”) and he really, really wanted me to listen to a Justin Bieber song (”The old stuff is bad. The new stuff he’s doing is good.”). I refused.
Questions?
How do the dutch people handle their water? There are so many mini-rivers everywhere. How does farming make use of them, exactly?