Hey guys, sorry it has been awhile. Just getting settled back into my Colorado lifestyle which has been quite interesting so far. I think the last time I wrote I hadn’t really started talking about the fact that I was probably moving out of Germany, and quickly. Well, I did.
I really loved my family in Germany. Honestly, I had the best experience possible while I was there. But sometimes I just felt like I was walking on eggshells at the house while Alexandra was there with me. Sometimes I think she resented me solely for the fact that I wasn’t really doing a whole lot towards the end. But who can blame me? I was on a budget, trying to save for my last big adventure in Prague with Christina. I had next to no money left over…And planning on leaving. Needless to say, with all the new terrible baggage requirements I was a little stressed out to be traveling with 2 huge bags and a cello. I really hope one day we can look back and laugh about the awful awful airline requirements of ’08. Honestly I don’t see how the travel industry can survive with all of these new regulations. Anyway, so I’m frantically trying to save what little money I have left and looking at kayak.com for a cheap flight out of Munich airport. Munich is in the top three most expensive European cities right after Paris and London. And the airport isn’t much different. It isn’t really serviced by any discount airlines…I always flew with Lufthansa whenever I traveled because they have some great 99 Euro deals to big cities. But wow…trying to get a cheap flight from Munich is like trying to find vegetarian food in Spain. It just doesn’t happen. Couple that with flying to Denver (which for some reason seems to be really expensive to fly to directly because it isn’t New York, Chicago, Boston, or San Francisco...) and I was losing my sanity day by day. The cheapest flight I could find was over $2000! I decided to be creative and search from other European airports…I didn’t really see a lot. But finally found a flight from Dublin to Denver for only $600. I almost wept. Especially when I found out that the pricing was pretty much standard through even the Christmas season. I hope god is smiling down on Delta airlines right now for sparing me a heart attack. Seriously compare 600 to 2000 or more. Even at Christmas! Wow…so if you are flying to Europe from Denver, check flying into Dublin first. You can always find a cheap inter-European flight…which I found a decent flight with Aer Lingus.
Well the only concern I had now were the baggage requirements. Thank god the guy at the Aer Lingus counter spared me a big fee when he found out I was continuing on to the US for my bags. He could have charged the shit out of me…He surely didn’t act very German. Aer Lingus was also really lenient with my cello. They only charged me 30 Euro for it! Delta was close to 200 Euro! While the guy checking me in surely wasn’t the typical rule-obsessed German, his kollegin (work colleague) on the other Aer Lingus counter sure was. I reached across the desk for a baggage tag because one of my bags didn’t have one. The woman FREAKED OUT. And swiped away the box of baggage tags from me and started shrieking in German about how I had to pay for it or something. I (in a rather bitchier moment) pointed across the way to a full box of baggage tags for another airline and offered to take one of those whilst staring her down. I honestly couldn’t believe she would freak out like that! Who the hell cares if I take ONE baggage tag on the airline I am traveling with?! It was funny…just left a bad taste in my mouth about some Germans. But I did walk away laughing…
We’ll get back to my trip back home in a second. First I want to do a quick update about Praha (Prague).
Christina came directly into Holzkirchen from Munich after a ridiculous sounding day of trains. I think she had been on a train since 5 AM the previous day or something crazy like that. So we decided to just hang out at the house that night. The Puhlmanns were gone, which was a good thing, because I wanted to make sure Christina had ample time to unwind at a house instead of a hostel. We opened a bottle of my new favorite white wine in German its called Gewurz or something…really sweet but super tasty and talked a little bit about Christina’s travels thus far. Sounded like she had a great time especially in southern Italy and Greece, two places I haven’t yet seen, and am super envious that she got to see! We decided to drive the next day to either Verona or Prague and settled on Prague as Christina had been in Verona that same day at the train station.
We ended up leaving a little bit too late, and the autobahn was jammed all the way to Regensburg, but after switching autobahns at Regensburg the way into Prague was pretty clear. We struggled at gas stations to figure out the currency…Which was pretty funny. And overall just had a good time with plenty of laughs. And gummy bears and red bull for the car ride. Well as soon as we entered the city Clotilda, (the name Sara gave to my navigation system that has a female voice) stopped working entirely. So luckily the word for ‘Centre’ is roughly the same in Czech as it is auf Deutsch (in German) so we made our way blindly somewhere into the city center with no idea where the hostel was. We found a clearly communist-era train station (complete with barbed-wire) and found directions to the hostel. We drove a little farther into the city, and parked the car right near the hostel. We checked in and asked for a good place to park the car…came back outside, and BAM. The car was gone. I saw my sugarfree red bull can lying OUTSIDE in the gutter. Sure that someone had gotten INTO the car and stolen it Eastern Europe style while throwing out the can I almost had a stroke. Luckily Christina had just used the can for cigarettes and had thrown it herself outside into the gutter. Phew. Well…that begged the question of where the car was. We went to another hostel and asked the receptionist the number for the police. She luckily had her car impounded just a week before, and told us exactly where to go. Maybe a 10 minute walk which was also lucky. Of course I was a stressball at this point…How was I to pay for this crap?? How much would they even charge? 200 dollars? 300? Christina, being an angel, calmed me down. ‘Let’s just get a beer before we walk over, and relax.’ Turned out to be a great idea. We went to a cute little rooftop bar and got a beer. Felt great, and totally relaxed me again. Alcoholics? Maybe…haha. We ended up passing a grocery store and got another beer…Oops. But it did the trick. We found the impound lot and picked up the car from two weird Czech guys who didn’t speak very good German at all but spoke worse English. (German turned out to be VERY useful in the less-touristy zones of Prague might I add.)
After getting the car, Christina and I (both hypoglycemic, although Christina to a much greater extent) were both starving and ready to pass out. We also both had to use the bathroom like no one in the vast expanse of time has ever had to use it. So we are now desperately searching for a restaurant in Prague with some decent food and a good bathroom. We finally find one with a huge sign displaying “RESTAURANT” starting at us across the river. We make our way across the bridge, ready to explode, had to stop at an ATM first, and then finally get into the restaurant. We did our thing, got some more Pilsner Urquells, and got a delicious dinner. I had a great pasta, and Christina had her first experience with Euro fish. And by that I mean they bring you the whole fish. Head, skin, and all…for you to manually dissect. Well after our rather expensive dinner we decided to get really drunk! We looked for several bars…texted Alena for a gay bar recommendation (we didn’t end up going but it was some place called Termix)…found a huge array of whacko bars one of which was this awesomely fun African bar where we were the only white people, and then just some weird dives. At the end of this expedition which consisted only of beer (only Urquell for that matter) and one tiny flask of marijuana vodka (revolting, but we had to) we ended up at some strange casino bar…both wasted…haha. Somehow we found our way back to the hostel and crashed. After waking Christina up which was not easy, we had a nasty breakfast at the hostel, and went on a day of sightseeing. Prague was gorgeous and absolutely to die for! We had great weather, although a little on the hot side. It was a great day even though I got a terrible case of the afternoon sleepies. My favorite part was walking through the gardens at the foot of the citadel and cathedral of Prague. They are perched up high on a hill and overlook the entire city. It was fantasic. After a day of sightseeing (I got some coffee…actually like 3 cups) we left back for Germany around 4 PM…
I left Germany a few days later! It was really sad…I will never forget saying aufwiedersehen to my awesome Deutsche Familie. Our dear neighbor Lies was also outside to say goodbye, and I will miss her a lot too. After a tearful goodbye, Matthias and Robin drove me to the airport. The travel day was looonnnggg. I had a flight to Dublin in which I somehow met up with two of our wonderful new Irish friends Barry and Eoin. So I got to hang out with them in the airport for a bit before the short flight. I landed in Dublin, with a 12 hour layover…hoping dearly that I would be able to LEAVE the airport and check my bags in for my flight at 9 AM to JFK airport in New York. I wanted a night out in Dublin! Unfortunately there was nowhere to check my bags, and the airline wouldn’t take them until 3 hours prior to my flight. Sheisse! So I literally had to lug around my bags and cello…trying to find a place to sleep on a starbucks chair…and gave up. I was freezing, there were crazy French hobos running around….I had to whip out my French to tell this guy to “Va t’en!” (go away) from these two girls when he started YELLING at them in French out of the blue. He was psycho.Well 9 AM finally came around, I got on the plane and was FINALLY sitting next to someone thin. A beautiful Italian-looking girl. And we had the 2 seater row instead of the 4 in the middle. I was ready to pop 5 benadryl and pass out! I was unsuccessfully loading my bags in the overhead bin when I hear “Sean!”. Turns out it’s another Irish friend from Munich, Shane, who is quite literally sitting in the row next to me. How weird! So I gave Shane some of the benadryl and he fell asleep the whole flight which was really funny. The girl I was sitting next to was named Sandra and was absolutely the coolest friend to have on the plane. She’s from Rome but has lived in Dublin for 5 years, and we had the best time together on our 10 hour flight. Said goodbye to Sandra and Shane, and had to wait another 7 hours at JFK. I got some pizza since I was in New York for the first time, and just tried to relax at the airport. I finally rolled into Denver at 10 PM and was finally home! Yay! My mom didn’t recognize me!
Now I’m back in Arvada, trying to make 10 grand before school starts so I’m working a lot. But I need to keep reminding myself that going to medical school in Sweden will be damn expensive so I really need to get my shit together! School starts back up on January 12th and I’m sort of looking forward to it.
Hej Hej/Hej då
från Arvada, Sean
I really loved my family in Germany. Honestly, I had the best experience possible while I was there. But sometimes I just felt like I was walking on eggshells at the house while Alexandra was there with me. Sometimes I think she resented me solely for the fact that I wasn’t really doing a whole lot towards the end. But who can blame me? I was on a budget, trying to save for my last big adventure in Prague with Christina. I had next to no money left over…And planning on leaving. Needless to say, with all the new terrible baggage requirements I was a little stressed out to be traveling with 2 huge bags and a cello. I really hope one day we can look back and laugh about the awful awful airline requirements of ’08. Honestly I don’t see how the travel industry can survive with all of these new regulations. Anyway, so I’m frantically trying to save what little money I have left and looking at kayak.com for a cheap flight out of Munich airport. Munich is in the top three most expensive European cities right after Paris and London. And the airport isn’t much different. It isn’t really serviced by any discount airlines…I always flew with Lufthansa whenever I traveled because they have some great 99 Euro deals to big cities. But wow…trying to get a cheap flight from Munich is like trying to find vegetarian food in Spain. It just doesn’t happen. Couple that with flying to Denver (which for some reason seems to be really expensive to fly to directly because it isn’t New York, Chicago, Boston, or San Francisco...) and I was losing my sanity day by day. The cheapest flight I could find was over $2000! I decided to be creative and search from other European airports…I didn’t really see a lot. But finally found a flight from Dublin to Denver for only $600. I almost wept. Especially when I found out that the pricing was pretty much standard through even the Christmas season. I hope god is smiling down on Delta airlines right now for sparing me a heart attack. Seriously compare 600 to 2000 or more. Even at Christmas! Wow…so if you are flying to Europe from Denver, check flying into Dublin first. You can always find a cheap inter-European flight…which I found a decent flight with Aer Lingus.
Well the only concern I had now were the baggage requirements. Thank god the guy at the Aer Lingus counter spared me a big fee when he found out I was continuing on to the US for my bags. He could have charged the shit out of me…He surely didn’t act very German. Aer Lingus was also really lenient with my cello. They only charged me 30 Euro for it! Delta was close to 200 Euro! While the guy checking me in surely wasn’t the typical rule-obsessed German, his kollegin (work colleague) on the other Aer Lingus counter sure was. I reached across the desk for a baggage tag because one of my bags didn’t have one. The woman FREAKED OUT. And swiped away the box of baggage tags from me and started shrieking in German about how I had to pay for it or something. I (in a rather bitchier moment) pointed across the way to a full box of baggage tags for another airline and offered to take one of those whilst staring her down. I honestly couldn’t believe she would freak out like that! Who the hell cares if I take ONE baggage tag on the airline I am traveling with?! It was funny…just left a bad taste in my mouth about some Germans. But I did walk away laughing…
We’ll get back to my trip back home in a second. First I want to do a quick update about Praha (Prague).
Christina came directly into Holzkirchen from Munich after a ridiculous sounding day of trains. I think she had been on a train since 5 AM the previous day or something crazy like that. So we decided to just hang out at the house that night. The Puhlmanns were gone, which was a good thing, because I wanted to make sure Christina had ample time to unwind at a house instead of a hostel. We opened a bottle of my new favorite white wine in German its called Gewurz or something…really sweet but super tasty and talked a little bit about Christina’s travels thus far. Sounded like she had a great time especially in southern Italy and Greece, two places I haven’t yet seen, and am super envious that she got to see! We decided to drive the next day to either Verona or Prague and settled on Prague as Christina had been in Verona that same day at the train station.
We ended up leaving a little bit too late, and the autobahn was jammed all the way to Regensburg, but after switching autobahns at Regensburg the way into Prague was pretty clear. We struggled at gas stations to figure out the currency…Which was pretty funny. And overall just had a good time with plenty of laughs. And gummy bears and red bull for the car ride. Well as soon as we entered the city Clotilda, (the name Sara gave to my navigation system that has a female voice) stopped working entirely. So luckily the word for ‘Centre’ is roughly the same in Czech as it is auf Deutsch (in German) so we made our way blindly somewhere into the city center with no idea where the hostel was. We found a clearly communist-era train station (complete with barbed-wire) and found directions to the hostel. We drove a little farther into the city, and parked the car right near the hostel. We checked in and asked for a good place to park the car…came back outside, and BAM. The car was gone. I saw my sugarfree red bull can lying OUTSIDE in the gutter. Sure that someone had gotten INTO the car and stolen it Eastern Europe style while throwing out the can I almost had a stroke. Luckily Christina had just used the can for cigarettes and had thrown it herself outside into the gutter. Phew. Well…that begged the question of where the car was. We went to another hostel and asked the receptionist the number for the police. She luckily had her car impounded just a week before, and told us exactly where to go. Maybe a 10 minute walk which was also lucky. Of course I was a stressball at this point…How was I to pay for this crap?? How much would they even charge? 200 dollars? 300? Christina, being an angel, calmed me down. ‘Let’s just get a beer before we walk over, and relax.’ Turned out to be a great idea. We went to a cute little rooftop bar and got a beer. Felt great, and totally relaxed me again. Alcoholics? Maybe…haha. We ended up passing a grocery store and got another beer…Oops. But it did the trick. We found the impound lot and picked up the car from two weird Czech guys who didn’t speak very good German at all but spoke worse English. (German turned out to be VERY useful in the less-touristy zones of Prague might I add.)
After getting the car, Christina and I (both hypoglycemic, although Christina to a much greater extent) were both starving and ready to pass out. We also both had to use the bathroom like no one in the vast expanse of time has ever had to use it. So we are now desperately searching for a restaurant in Prague with some decent food and a good bathroom. We finally find one with a huge sign displaying “RESTAURANT” starting at us across the river. We make our way across the bridge, ready to explode, had to stop at an ATM first, and then finally get into the restaurant. We did our thing, got some more Pilsner Urquells, and got a delicious dinner. I had a great pasta, and Christina had her first experience with Euro fish. And by that I mean they bring you the whole fish. Head, skin, and all…for you to manually dissect. Well after our rather expensive dinner we decided to get really drunk! We looked for several bars…texted Alena for a gay bar recommendation (we didn’t end up going but it was some place called Termix)…found a huge array of whacko bars one of which was this awesomely fun African bar where we were the only white people, and then just some weird dives. At the end of this expedition which consisted only of beer (only Urquell for that matter) and one tiny flask of marijuana vodka (revolting, but we had to) we ended up at some strange casino bar…both wasted…haha. Somehow we found our way back to the hostel and crashed. After waking Christina up which was not easy, we had a nasty breakfast at the hostel, and went on a day of sightseeing. Prague was gorgeous and absolutely to die for! We had great weather, although a little on the hot side. It was a great day even though I got a terrible case of the afternoon sleepies. My favorite part was walking through the gardens at the foot of the citadel and cathedral of Prague. They are perched up high on a hill and overlook the entire city. It was fantasic. After a day of sightseeing (I got some coffee…actually like 3 cups) we left back for Germany around 4 PM…
I left Germany a few days later! It was really sad…I will never forget saying aufwiedersehen to my awesome Deutsche Familie. Our dear neighbor Lies was also outside to say goodbye, and I will miss her a lot too. After a tearful goodbye, Matthias and Robin drove me to the airport. The travel day was looonnnggg. I had a flight to Dublin in which I somehow met up with two of our wonderful new Irish friends Barry and Eoin. So I got to hang out with them in the airport for a bit before the short flight. I landed in Dublin, with a 12 hour layover…hoping dearly that I would be able to LEAVE the airport and check my bags in for my flight at 9 AM to JFK airport in New York. I wanted a night out in Dublin! Unfortunately there was nowhere to check my bags, and the airline wouldn’t take them until 3 hours prior to my flight. Sheisse! So I literally had to lug around my bags and cello…trying to find a place to sleep on a starbucks chair…and gave up. I was freezing, there were crazy French hobos running around….I had to whip out my French to tell this guy to “Va t’en!” (go away) from these two girls when he started YELLING at them in French out of the blue. He was psycho.Well 9 AM finally came around, I got on the plane and was FINALLY sitting next to someone thin. A beautiful Italian-looking girl. And we had the 2 seater row instead of the 4 in the middle. I was ready to pop 5 benadryl and pass out! I was unsuccessfully loading my bags in the overhead bin when I hear “Sean!”. Turns out it’s another Irish friend from Munich, Shane, who is quite literally sitting in the row next to me. How weird! So I gave Shane some of the benadryl and he fell asleep the whole flight which was really funny. The girl I was sitting next to was named Sandra and was absolutely the coolest friend to have on the plane. She’s from Rome but has lived in Dublin for 5 years, and we had the best time together on our 10 hour flight. Said goodbye to Sandra and Shane, and had to wait another 7 hours at JFK. I got some pizza since I was in New York for the first time, and just tried to relax at the airport. I finally rolled into Denver at 10 PM and was finally home! Yay! My mom didn’t recognize me!
Now I’m back in Arvada, trying to make 10 grand before school starts so I’m working a lot. But I need to keep reminding myself that going to medical school in Sweden will be damn expensive so I really need to get my shit together! School starts back up on January 12th and I’m sort of looking forward to it.
Hej Hej/Hej då
från Arvada, Sean
