Category: Around the world

Well, it was slightly less spectacular than crashing a birthday party. I was doing some day trips before my transfer to our office in Australia. I had been following my sightseeing book all day and I was starting to get tired and it turned out that one of my colleagues lived nearby. It was not completely clear to me where the interesting places for locals were, so I called Samantha. She was also getting ready for a big move and was tired of packing, so she showed me a bit of the old town and we had a beer.

However, all good things must come to an end. Sam had a birthday party to go to, but as we were having a nice time and she invited me along. The weather was nice, the food was good and actually there were a fair number of girls.

I spotted a couple of pretty blonds that I would like to meet, and with a bit of luck I did end up in a conversation with them. The pretty one and I spoke about a lot of things including my upcoming transfer as well as her singing in the choir. I showed interest for a lot of reasons, one of which being I work in IT. As professions go it isn’t that there aren’t any women but usually they are few and far between.

I needed to get another plate full of food and when I came back she was speaking with her friend in German, I was impressed. She was the first American that I had met that had what seemed to be perfect pronunciation. I found out later that I was mistaken – she was the first German that I met who spoke English as good or better than I did and with no accent.

It wasn’t a bad party at all. In the end I did manage to get a few phone numbers as well as a chance to hang out with some other Americans and eat a few burgers. I kinda like crashing birthday parties.

The only people who really enjoy air travel are probably the people who don’t really do any air travel.

• Take off your shoes
• Get rid of your softdrink,
• Small hand-baggage only – oops no space for even that.
• No leg room

Travel used to be better than that but even before September 11, airlines were taking extra special care of their customers.

My favorite was a small Irish airline that used to fly out of Frankfurt-Hahn that flew to Stansted airport. It was the last flight of the day which should have left about eight pm and arrive in Stansted about 10:00 pm. I guess that the airline didn’t really want to depress the people waiting in Stansted. They simply reported that the flight was on-time, up until the time that it should have landed. It was at this point that they mentioned that it might be delayed but didn’t even mention that it had yet to take off.

First a bit of geography. The Stansted airport is outside of London, so unless you have a car you really don’t want to get stuck there. A typical cab ride would be about sixty pounds or one hundred dollars to get you back to London. Eventually the plane took off and while I was waiting I did the math on the arrival. It looked like it would be a close call between when the flight would land and when the last train of the evening would leave.

I read some of my book and silently cursed the airline, but hey if we miss the train I am sure that the airline will help out. After all, we are in the middle of nowhere. Well, to make a long story short, the passengers and their luggage arrived about 30 minutes after the last train.

I don’t know how often this type of problem occurred but apparently it was not so infrequent. I went to speak with one of their representatives to be told that no, they don’t actually provide any transport (ie a bus) into the city, that is something that each person would have to sort out on their own.

Well, I can only say that I was extremely lucky. One of the other people waiting to pick up his girlfriend used to work for a travel company and so he took the matter into his own hands. He went outside and spoke with one of the bus drivers to see if their company could come back, pick us all up and drop us off at a couple of train stations in the city. The driver checked with his boss and indeed that was ok, but he had to first pickup a load of people and drop them off and come back.

My girlfriend had arrived and she would be staying with me for a while and so I was happy, but I was quite surprised to hear one of her comments from the flight. It seems that the airline staff were selling train tickets on the plane, and a few people were asking if it would still be running. The staff apparently without even a pause said that the train would wait for them.

The bus driver did eventually come back and we boarded the bus at about two in the morning. The bus was full, the cost was actually a very reasonable five pounds per person. It was a very long night, and we did arrive at liverpool street station about 4:30 in the morning. It was so early that there were no cabs at the cab stand.

Depending on your view there were two different lessons to be learned from this trip. The first being if the airline is using a single plane between two different destinations the delays are cumulative and you will be late, unless you take the first flight of the day. The second lesson was that this particular airline was not very concerned if they stranded their customers and should really be avoided.

I remember when I was young and perhaps a bit naive. My apartment was only a 40 square meter one room apartment and although tiny the location was great. It was just a couple minutes walk from alte-Sachenhausen – the old part of town in Frankfurt. There were a lot of bars and partying going on there especially on the weekends.

Well, my buddy wasn’t quite as single as I was, but he wasn’t that long married and so one night we tipped a few back and then we had a few more. His train home was leaving in about an hour and it seemed a pity to break up the party, so I had an idea. I decided to give his wife a call and ask if he could stay out longer. Well, this was back when having a mobile phone was a luxury so I hoofed it to the nearest pay phone and tried to make my case.

Well, I guess I was not that persuasive as I just remember her yelling at me and telling me to put him on the phone. Well, I couldn’t hardly do that as he was sitting back in the pub, but I promised to pass that message along. A few minutes later back at the bar I explained to Gary that my sales job wasn’t quite closing the deal and his wife requested him to contact her – so he trekked off to the telephone. I guess my buddy was not any better at selling that idea than I was.

The plan was to have only one more beer and he would go home. In the end, we somehow failed to follow the plan and after a few more hours he simply crashed on my sofa.

When you find Mr. or Miss right, and plan on getting married your “friends” are afraid that they will never get a chance to go out with you again. It is because of this that they go out with you one more time before getting married, stag night or hen party. For the men they proceed to drink enough in case they cannot go out with their friend for the next 10 years.

There are a lot more stag night stories that end with the moral being “never have a stag night the day before getting married”. Well, this is one of those stories and rather than to embarrass anyone with a lot of facts, we will jump to the end of the story.

It was a bad idea to have the stag party the day before but we were just going out to have a few beers with the groom. Well, one turned into two, and two turned into four, and it is safe to say that we easily had more than we should have.

So, to make sure everything turned out ok, we put the groom into a train but not before we took most of his clothing, and took a few photos. We figured that he would get out at the next stop on the other side of London and take a cab home. Oops. There were two problems, the first was that this was a train and not the subway, and the second was he was a bit drunker than we anticipated.

Rather than getting off the train, he sorta passed out and thus woke up in Scotland and missed his wedding.

This isn’t an urban legend as it was my friend who ended up getting uninvited to the actual wedding ceremony a few months later.

Of all the personal recollections I think that this is probably the one that shames me the most. It was the time that I found out that babies do not come from the stork nor are they left under a cabbage leaf, well at least not in Germany.

Anyway, my buddy was going to be a daddy and it would be any day now. He was trying so hard to be responsible and with that in mind, we stopped going to the pub about a month before his son was due to be born. Well, babies are not the trains or planes and although the doctor plans when the birth will be, it is just a guess. Either that or pediatricians are the greatest optimists in the world. The early delivery time came and went, the actual due date came and went and now it was about two weeks late and still no babies in sight.

We went out just a for a quick taste after work. Unfortunately, a beer is like potato chips, you cannot have just one. Thus we had more than we should and his trains came and went, and finally he was going to miss the last train so I sent him towards the train station and went home.

Well, things seldom work as smoothly as that. If I remember correctly he needed some cash for the ticket and so he popped into a bank with an open lobby to get some cash. For some reason he could get in but he couldn’t get out. Well, that isn’t a permanent problem within 10 minutes somebody walked by and let him out but by this time he had missed the last train of the evening that went to his little village.

The village was fairly far away from Frankfurt but he did get a taxi home. Well, instead of an extremely angry wife his apartment was empty, except for a note. It seems that his son had decided after all that tonight was a good night to be born. It was the middle of the night and the village had no taxi’s, so he called his friend from a neighboring village to drive him to the hospital. My friend wasn’t very specific what reception he received from his wife but he did mention it was not a warm one.

Perhaps you have heard of the story about the college student who just kept studying. This semester it was mathematics, last semester it was modern art, and well I don’t even remember what last year. It is probably difficult to justify the perennial student given the current costs of education [in the United States].

Well, other countries do it a bit differently. In Germany the costs are actually much cheaper, well in fact almost free. Student fees usually cover some sort of public transportation ticket but they also convey the right to claim to be a student. Being a student may get you into the opera at reduced rates, allow you to get a student copy of Microsoft Office or even get into some nice student housing.

I was always surprised when I first showed up in Germany younger than most everyone else but with actual business experience. Perhaps I was just jealous. They are just starting in the work world and they are 29 years old. This might also be the downside to the Germany education system that I was not previously aware of.

During lunch we were talking about how my colleague had to prepare a new test for the eight students who failed the first final. I pointed out that where I went to school you either passed the test and the class or you failed. It was explained to me that if a student failed his or her test it could be taken over, a second and possibly even a third time. I was a bit shocked and made some sort of a joke about the fourth test.

Well, it turns out if you fail a mandatory class too many times you fail. But you don’t fail that class you actually fail that degree and you are finished. If you fail, you may have to make a big move. If you really loved that particular profession you may be able to start all over at another university. If you are planning on failing you should do it early on, otherwise, you will just be another student who took a decade to finish your studies.

This story is most assuredly not the position that Samsonite takes, but rather the feelings of a someone who sold me a suitcase at a big German retailer in Germany.

My old Rimowa suitcase, trolley actually, needed to be replaced. It was not that it was so old but actually it had been abused by me. The suitcase was over 5 years old so I didn’t feel that it was unreasonable that it broke. So I wandered downtown to the mall to purchase a new one. Knowing that this suitcase may also be over packed and generally abused I decided on a soft sided. My first carry-on was a soft sided Samsonite which also held up well so without looking too hard at the other models I picked out a nice Samsonite and went home.

I don’t have a lot of vices but the one thing that I do indulge in is to get my shirts cleaned at the dry cleaners. As I travel a lot it does get old to drag the trolley everywhere you go, so while at a fairly long term job I decided I could simply leave the trolley in the closet at work, just simply drop off the dirty shirts on the way to the office on Fridays and pick up clean shirts before checking into the hotel on Monday

Given this situation, my trolley only has to move perhaps 700 yards each week. Broken down perhaps 50 yards to the bus stop from work, and then another 300 yards from the bus station to the hotel. Simply reverse at the end of the week.

It was almost exactly two months later that on a rainy day I was looking at the wheel of my new trolly when I noticed that it was falling apart. It was as if someone had done a small cut down the middle of the wheel and then the layers of rubber were flaking off.

Well it was well under the 5 year Samsonite warranty, under the general 2 year European warranty and not more than 6 months old. In this case, standard operating procedure is that the company who sells the product has to take care of getting it repaired. So I grab my receipt and toddle back to the store.

The lady who was working there was amazed that the wheel could look so bad, while the rest of the trolley looked factory new. It turns out that this particular suitcase shop was connected to the <redacted retailer> just across the hall and that I should go speak with her colleague Joachim.

I went over to speak with Joachim about this and I did find him quite quickly but once he knew that I was there to get something fixed and not purchase something he pointed me to the boss. As luck had it, she was actually just making a quick phone call at the far end of the suitcase display.

Once she was finished with her phone call she put on a stern demeanor and looked at the wheel and asked me how often I use the suitcase. I was trying to formulate a really witty answer when she continued. She said that these suitcases weren’t intended to be used every day. I had to try hard not to laugh, but I was able to assure here that my travels are weekly and I would only be using it Mondays and Fridays. She seemed quite content with that and informed me where in the basement I had to go to so someone would send this off to Samsonite for repair.

I was however, pleasantly surprised when she did ask if I needed a replacement suite case while was being repaired. Yes I did and she brought me one down personally – I have been using the loaner trolley for a few weeks and it’s wheels appear to be fine. Perhaps that Delsey gets their trolley wheels from a different manufacturer.

Oh, the new trolly wheels worked great. I used the suitcase every week for a few years and the wheels are fine.

One of my favorite German words is geisterfahrer. This term is used to describe someone who drives the wrong way down a one way street. The reason it is my favorite word is not because there are not Americans who drive the wrong way either on purpose or by accident, but that this problem occurs often enough in Germany that the language has a special word for this situation.

So we unpack in the hotel and go out on the town. We didn’t make it very far when we ran into a hotel that had a casino. I am not much of a gambler but Allen liked to take a shot at it. So we paid our 10 dollars entrance and go on in. It seems to me that Allen is actually doing pretty well so I get 10 more dollars in chips and sit down at his two dollar blackjack table. Allen is behind me giving me advice when to stay and when to hit. I am not doing that fabulous but after awhile I am actually about 30 dollars ahead and as I am now on a cold streak and consistently losing I decide to stop.

Allen continues but lady luck has fled the scene and he loses his stake. At this point, we are wandering around and he is explaining about the different games of chance. I cash in my chips but Allen wants to take another shot at fame and gets 15 dollars in chips. Well, he puts it all down and after two hands it is all gone. Fun eh?

Well, it honestly has been a fairly big day and longish evening so we decide to go back to our “floatell” and when we got there we decided to get a beer. I have visited a few questionable bars in my life and this was a sleazy looking bar. I tell Allen that I think one of the girls in the corner is a working girl, but hey I guess that is just a bit of the entrepreneurial spirit.

There were a few tables of people sitting around but we just marched over to the bar to try and order a beer. Later we find out that our bartender is from Russian and cannot speak English or German. She does, however, get a girl who is dressed more like a hostess to try and help out. Our hostess speaks German and only a few words of English, so she does help us to communicate with the bartender.

Allen and I don’t see much of our hostess after that and just hang around to have a few beers. When we arrived our eyes didn’t adjust too well (yeah, right) and so we didn’t really notice that the dance floor looked a bit strange, had a few lights around the edges. I guess somehow we also overlooked that the dance floor was sort of heart shaped and had a pole in the middle of it. Allen proposes that perhaps the bar does a conversion part way through the evening to “dancing”. I tell him that he is full of it – but I am required to eat my words a bit later when he tells me to turn around and see for myself.

It turns out that our hostess is actually a dancer – time passes and we are drinking our beer wondering a bit about the floatell we are staying in. The hostess comes over and is really friendly and places her hand on my leg. It was only later that I found out she was a bit more forward with Allen.

It is about this time that we have a bit of a communication problem. The hostess apparently wishes to be friends with Allen but she cannot talk to him. I don’t want to be her friend and I think that the whole thing is too funny, so I am translating for her. The real funny thing is that my German skills are actually very weak as I didn’t think I would need a foreign language when studying, so my skills are based on a few classes as well as watching television.

The hostess believed that time was on her side so she spends time with some of the other customers. A bit later, when Allen starts to get drunk he asks me to do some translating. He has a question about some of the alcohol that the bar has. I thought that my German skills were up to the task of trying to get a comparison of these two types of schnapps on the shelf but I guess not. Quick as a cricket Allen now has two shots in front of him. He only wanted to know if Jagermeister was similar to olucum. Allen takes a sip but the hostess and the bartender tease him. I translate that this is not a sipping alcohol and he gets the idea.

Very very shortly after all this the bartender and one other employee starts singing Russian songs. I am thinking that all is well again, but after the bartender cannot sing any longer so the other man plays some dancing music. Both Allen and I are drafted to do Russian dancing with the bartender and the hostess. It is about this time that I am really quite happy that I am not Allen. We dance for about 10 minutes and sit for 10 minutes.

Now the hostess comes over and announces that she is quite thirsty and would like a drink. I am sorry but I have not had nowhere near drunk enough to start buying 25 dollar drinks. The girl is bothering me until explain to her, in German, that I cannot afford to buy you a drink. Even though Allen has had a few shots and a fair few beers he comes up with a very interesting line. The reason that we couldn’t buy her a drink was because we were selling ‘shower curtain rings’. I couldn’t quite translate this so I tell her we sell shower curtains.

Quitting is not in her style so she starts to list off drinks that we might wish to purchase for her. Of course she starts with the most expensive drink …. we continue this game for about one more beer. She isn’t happy with us offering to buy her a beer so she leaves us. We then pay up and leave. The bar tab was about 40 dollars even though we didn’t have that much to drink.

When we get to our room Allen thinks that the whole day has been so funny that he will call his girlfriend and tell her about it. He was drunk but he had a good time explaining it.

The next day we did sight seeing all day, and although interesting we did unfortunately build up a huge thirst. We took a nap and headed back into town, destination ye olde Irish pub. This pub may not have actually qualified as an Irish pub anywhere else in the world but it did here. It was here that we found out that the beer cost about half as much as the previous evening so we took advantage of the savings by drinking twice as much. But the music was really quite loud and besides it was about to close anyway as it was about midnight.

So Allen orders one more beer and starts to chat up the waitress. To my dismay he is actually breaking new ground on communication for this trip and finds out that there is a disco called “Music” around the corner that is open until 5:00. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time so off we go.

We get there to discover a real Hungarian techno disco. It was cool in a loud sort of way. The dance floor had a strobe that flashed to the music and periodically stage smoke came out from somewhere. It was a blast and I guess up to this point was a learning curve as it turns out that the disco had beers that cost between 70 cents and a dollar, considerably less than the four to five dollar beers we had been slurping the night before. This could be seen as an advantage or it could be seen as trouble in the making. So we partied there until 3:30, and the main reason we stopped is because we ran out of money. To be honest we were lucky that the cab driver would take US dollars as that is all we had left, and we made it back to the boat by 4:00 but not before setting our alarm for 7:15. No, it didn’t wake up anybody.

The manager phoned to inform us that the shuttle was here to pick us up, as it was 7:40 we hastily threw everything into our bags and left. Allen’s job was to pay our bill and I was to hold the shuttle. Perhaps the only reason I could hold the shuttle was because nobody understood me, but by that time Allen had arrived and off we went. But he looked really upset, and I soon found out the reason why. The telephone call to his girlfriend was only 27 minutes long but cost one hundred and sixteen dollars.

Lessons learned: Don’t drunk call your girlfriend from a floating brothel.