Germany, Mallorca, and one hell of a morning in Barcelona

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I know it’s been about 2 weeks since my last entry, but unlike my last hiatus this time I was really busy and had limited access to the Internet. Ok enough with the excuses…I have a lot to tell you.

The ferry ride to France was interesting. At first I thought “man it will be so cool to spend 20 hours on this massive boat” and I ran around exploring all accessible areas. There were 3 restaurants, a bar, a “casino” (this was just some slot machines and 1 blackjack table), a dance floor, and a stage where a band was preparing for the night. Oh there was also a movie theater, a duty free shop, and some reading rooms looking out over the water. My cabin was a tiny room with no window and bunk beds, but it was the first time since I left home that I got my own bathroom so I took advantage of this new founded privacy and primped. I ventured back out for dinner and then went to the bar to find one of the worst bands in the world covering popular songs (don’t worry I took some videos of it with my camera…I just can’t post them to my blog). This is when I decided ferries aren’t so cool and are just really cheesy. Suddenly the band starts playing Sweet Home Alabama and this guy in a red t-shirt across the ship gets up and enthusiastically starts the middle age white guy dance. So I wonder- red t-shirt and loves Sweet Home Alabama- maybe this guy is from Alabama. So I walk up to him and ask, “where are you from?” Of course he was just happy that someone walked up to him dancing so I shouted “are you from Alabama?” He did not speak much English, but definitely understood the question and said, “Alabama? Alabama? NO!” I replied, “Oh I thought you might be from Alabama” before walking away. He followed me half way across the dance floor before realizing I was not going to dance with him and then went back.

The next day around noon we landed in Cherbourg, France. My original plan was to walk to the train station and make my way to Germany, but the station was a pretty long walk and there was supposed to be a bus that ran to town (closer to the train station). Some people from Ireland kept going back to the harbor building and asking about the bus until someone finally remembered that the bus doesn’t run on Sundays. So I start thinking about renting a car to find most companies are closed on Sundays too. I also noticed all car rental companies close for 2 hours everyday for lunch. You can only imagine my first impression of France; it’s like the world stops on Sundays and from noon to 2 o’clock everyday for lunch. This really cannot be good for their economy. I ended up sharing a cab with this obnoxious Irish couple to town. When the cab driver picked us up the Irish man asked, “do you speak English?” The cab driver’s face filled with disgust and he replied, “I do not speak English.” I guess he should have said “much English” because the Irish couple thought his reply meant he does speak English and proceeded to ask him questions VERY LOUDLY in English until the cabbie just ignored them. Finally I got to the train station and bought a ticket to Paris and then an overnight one to Frankfurt.

Unfortunately I only had about an hour in Paris and most of that time was spent looking for another train station. Oh, I forgot to mention that this whole time I was lugging around a huge red suitcase up and down stairs; I developed callosus on my right hand! So I got a cheap ticket on the overnight train to Frankfurt, which means I was in a compartment with two rows of three chairs facing each other. The man to my left only spoke French and looked like he was in his 60s. I think he was trying to intimidate me with his age because he purposefully stuck his knee and elbow in my space! I’m not talking about just using the armrest; he was literally spreading into my chair. So I played elbow war and won! Now I am the master at elbow war because I had to fly a lot in high school, and will tell you the secrete to elbow wars. If you are ever in a situation where someone sitting next to you is breaking social rules- like you are resting your elbow and they put their elbow right next to yours so you instinctively move it away. Sometimes it’s hard to pick out right away but usually the person tries to intimidate you and then starts moving into your space…this situation calls for an elbow war. I like to elbow war with a smile because it throws them off guard, so make polite conversation like nothing is happening. If they don’t speak your language make sure to give them a big genuine smile before and a while after the battle like you’ve forgotten the silent struggle. Then next time you get a chance, put your elbow on the armrest and tell yourself not to move it NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS! If you don’t see an opportunity arise in a while distract the person by looking behind you like something interesting is going on; if the window is to the far side of the arm rest then maybe look out the window and say “wow, that scenery is beautiful.” When they turn to look they will usually move their arm because they think they have already claimed that space, but put your elbow there and stay put like it is completely natural. Now this is where it gets tricky because they will try to use the same tactics they did before, and it will be kind of uncomfortable for a while with both your elbows touch. When that doesn’t work they will push, and this is where you push back but only with enough force to keep your elbow in place (some times I’ve had to push really hard to keep the other person from sliding my elbow off the rest). Finally they will give up and once you’ve held your ground for a few they will start following social rules.

After I established myself as a person who will not be pushed around with the man next to me, I struck up a conversation with a girl from Germany and a guy from France across from me. I knew the conversation was going to be bad when they explained that they just went to this Green Peace convention about organic vegetables and how they learned that all corn is genetically modified with a poison. So every time you eat corn you are eating poison no matter where the corn comes from. Oh, I think there was also something about big American corporations making lots of money from spreading this poisonous corn around the world. I also got to hear all about the French guy’s ideal world where everyone would be born into a position and there would be some people bred to be stupid for common labor jobs and other people bred for higher skilled work; because this way there would only be enough people for all the jobs available and they would be happy doing their job. Finally he said the most shocking racist thing I’d ever heard! He said America was evil for giving drugs to Africa because it extends their horrible life and it would be more humane to give them weapons so they can kill each other off. At this point I just wanted to end the conversation and get some sleep so I said, “well I don’t agree with you and am getting kind of tired”. I think everyone reading this knows my philosophical views, so there is no need for me to explain how repulsed I was the entire time.

I arrived in Frankfurt about 7:30 AM, and caught a train to Ober-Ramstadt where Elicia was staying. Elicia didn’t know when I’d be arriving, but I had a phone number and thought I would just call her from a payphone. Well I ran all over this tiny German town with that huge suitcase looking for a phone. I can only say “hello” and “thank you” in German and hadn’t showered since the first night on the ferry. This nice woman in a bakery pointed me to a T-Mobile pay phone, but all the directions were in German and it would not take coins. I tried using my credit card anyways but it kept barking orders in German and I was starting to feel desperate and hopeless. I just broke down and started crying because of the lack of sleep and because I couldn’t make a simple phone call! I told myself to calm down to solve the problem, took some deep breaths, and started walking again until I saw a policeman. I asked him where there was a payphone and he pointed me in the direction of a coin operated one. I got out a couple Euros and tried to call the number, but ended up with just as much luck as the first time. Of course that desperate feeling came back and here I was in the middle of a small German village with my massive red bag propping the door of the phone booth crying uncontrollably and smelling like a homeless person. Then I tried to ask people walking by if they knew how to call the number Elicia gave me, but most of them didn’t understand me and one guy must have thought I was asking him for money because he yelled, “NINE” and kept walking (nine is no in German, but I don’t think that’s how it’s spelled). Finally I found an Internet café and Elicia picked me up from the train station at the top of the hill.

Seeing Elicia was awesome, she is the most fun person to be around and it is impossible to be in a bad mood around her. I laughed out loud about 4.5 hours a day on average with her (but our last morning in Barcelona skewed the average). Elicia’s apartment is in this tiny town called Roarbach and is attached to a family’s house (3 generations live in 2 connected houses) and a barn with horses. She has no kitchen, refrigerator, or TV and her landlord, Elksa, comes into her apartment everyday to clean and collect her laundry. I truly admire Elksa's work ethic. She is a grandmother and everyday she cleans, does the laundry, cooks 3 meals (however many of the meals are just bread, cheese, and salami), and cleans out the horse stalls (Elicia and I helped clean out the horse stalls one day, and that’s hard work)! Being the guest, I didn’t want to give her more work so I tried to do my own laundry in the tub. But Elksa caught me and was not happy, however, everything ended up ok.

In the next few days I was lead around on a stubborn horse, we went to Heidelberg, and we planned a trip to Mallorca, Spain. Mallorca is an island off the east coast of Spain in the Mediterranean Sea, and instead of getting sunny weather (like what we left in Germany) it was pretty much rainy the whole time. But we spent our last day at Playa de Palma swimming in the freezing Mediterranean, warming up in the sauna, jumping back into the water, and so on until the sun went down. Oh, we also had the most amazing goat cheese I have ever tasted…Barbara, even you would love this cheese!

Our flight back to Frankfurt was out of Barcelona, so we caught a ferry and did Barcelona in a day. We saw Gaudi’s house, a perfume bottle museum, the Dali museum, 2 cathedrals, and then I went on an obsessive mission to find live music. My Lonely Planet’s Western Europe guide only listed 3 bars with live music: one does not have live music anymore, another is now a strip club, and the third took about 2 hours to find and only had a cover band! We saw the opening act, which lasted till about 2 o’clock, but we missed the headliner that played until 5 in the morning. Apparently the party doesn’t start until 2:30 AM and most clubs are open until 5 AM!

The next morning we had a flight at 10:20 AM and left the hotel practically delirious from the long day and late night. The Metro connected to the airport, but we left at 6:30 just in case. We studied the metro map and decided to take the lime green line to the pink line and then transfer to the grey/blue line that goes to the airport. Sounds pretty straightforward, we had successfully navigated the Metro the day before using the same logic. Well our first transfer didn’t go to smoothly. I guess because not many people travel at 6:45, the Metro doors open and close in lightning speed. Elicia stepped out rolling her small green duffle bag behind her and the doors slammed shut on her elongated bag handle. Inside the train I tried to pull the doors open, but they wouldn’t budge. We looked at each other on either side of the jammed door in complete shock and I said in a pathetic voice, “Don’t leave me.” So she immediately stuck her arms and head through this 4-inch gap and started squeezing herself through like a mouse. Everyone in the train was staring with the same stupefied look and one guy said “oh no” in a low concerned voice. Somehow she made it in the train and before we had time to say anything, the doors opened wide. We looked at each other and I said, “let’s go”. We jumped down onto the platform and as the previous events started slowly unfolding in our minds we broke out into hysterical laughter barely able to stand.

After a moment we started following the signs to the pink line, but they led us to a completely different train line that needed a new ticket. We asked some attendants why we needed a new ticket and they tried to send us back to the station we came from. But after a while they told us to take the pink line way out of the way and then catch a bus to the airport. We kept pointing to the grey/blue line we originally planned to take and discovered that some how in the commotion earlier we had managed to rip off and loose half our map. So we got on the pink line and studied the map in the train and decided to keep following our original plan. We got to the transfer station around 7:45 and followed the signs to the grey/blue line to find they led us outside to a very dead suburb of Barcelona. There was not even an open business in sight that we could call a cab from. We went back into the subway and found two older women with their sons waiting for a train and I asked “Habla Engles?” They said no so I said, “Aerperto?” with a look of desperation. One of the women really wanted to help us and started giving us orders in Spanish but when she saw we were totally not getting it she presented her 11 or 12 year old son to translate. But he just told us everything is a more animated Spanish, and all we caught was we had to go back out side. As we walked outside we saw another attendant and he walked us outside and pointed in the direction of the grey/blue line station, which was up a load of stairs and on the other side of a bridge. We ran up to the counter in this new station panting and said “Aerpuerto?” and the woman felt so bad for us she let us in for free. Our train ended up coming at 8:30 and once finally able to relax, we slipped back into hysterical laughter. At the airport we ran to check in and slept through take off and landing. We also slept the train/bus ride home and then we took a nap until 4 PM.

Right now I am in Prague, but will write a new blog about that later.

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