My month has been a little all over the place. Two weeks ago, I jumped on a flight in Stuttgart to the US. I got back to Stuttgart late monday night this week, and picked up Tay ar the airport wednesday night.
That was a small adventure for everyone involved. Tay had booked a cheap flight to Germany through Turkish airlines, flying out of Chicago. Tay lives in Indy, and decided to save some cash by taking a bus. The problem was that Tay timed it exactly so that he would arrive in Chicago a little over two hours before his flight.
Late tuesday night my time, Tay texted me that his bus was going to be delayed- by an hour and a half. There was a slim chance he was going to make his flight, and Tay was wondering if they would just put him on the next flight or reroute him. I replied that he probably would lose the ticket.
There was a flurry of activity on Tay and dad's end, who was also working on the logistics. Tay finally got through to an agent who told him that if he missed his flight, they would credit him the cost of the ticket for the next flight he wanted to take, which of course, would have been close to double at the last minute what he bought it for on sale months ago.
Dad managed to book Tay on the next flight out of Indy to Chicago, so Tay booked it to the airport from downtown. That flight was delayed too, due to weather in Chicago, but at the end of the day, Tay made all his flights.
At the airport in Stuttgart, he didn't pop out of the international arrivals like I expected. An hour after the flight landed, still no Tay and all the baggage had been unloaded and people were clearing out. Had he been detained by customs? Did he leave his passport on the plane? Was he stuck, for whatever reason, in Istanbul? I calmed down and reasoned that Tay was a seasoned international traveler, a grown man, and a trial attourney. He would be ok. I found him at the domestic EU terminal exit waiting for me, for which I was very glad.
When he came through customs and immigration, they were grilling him about what he was doing and who he was going to see. He didn't have paper tickets for his return flight or my phone number or address since it was all on his phone and of course his phone was dead. Tay told the immigration officer that I was waiting for him outside, so she walked him out the waiting area. No Alec. Tay attemped to make some small talk with her for about ten minutes while his phone was charging, and finally was able to show her the ticket info and my info.
Before she left, she concernedly asked if he was sure I was coming, and I found Tay shortly after. We caught a cab back to my apartment and set up a pallet for Tay to sleep on under the dining room table, which we covered with sheets to make a little sleeping fort.
Saori cooked us up some sausages and a fixed a salad, so we happily munched on that. We dug up an old iPhone and a sim card, and roughtly outlined a schedule for the next day before we all went off to bed. We were all exhuasted.
Thursday, I met Tay for lunch at the beer garten by the hauptbahnhof, the same place where I met dad a little over two weeks earlier. We ordered spatzle and sausages and fleishkase and some beers. Tay liked the Schwabian food ok, but he was not such a fan of the radler beer I was drinking. Actually, I even hesitated to order a mix of beer and lemonade- despite the hard drinking culture, Germans do not like to mix business and pleasure in this way. They want to do their work in a working environment and drink in a drinking environment. The whole concept of an office happy hour where you drink at would would be a strange concept for them. Actually, the longer I work over here, it doesn't really make sense to me either. Why not just quit work early and go to a bar?
Anyway, Thursday night, my coworkers invited us to Palast for a drink beacuse the weather was one of the best of the year, one of those days where everyone in the city comes outside to enjoy. So I swung by the house and picked up Tay and some bottles of beer, and we went to Palast together. We caught up with my coworkers and plopped down on the concrete to make our own little drinking circle. It was a really novel drinking and socializing method for Tay, but I think he got a kick out of it. Saori came out too to join us and she brought a few more beers as well. We all ended up drinking a bit more than intended, although I had some good conversations with a young Italian guy about the risks of giving lifts to hitchhikers.
There is a system of hitchhiking in Germany which extends into other neighboring countries, called the BlaBla car(d?) and what it is you register online, and say where you want to go and when you want to go. Then drivers looking for someone to help with gas and passing the time, can go on and contact people to ride with them. I was skeptical at first, but apparently the system works pretty well. Saori and other people I know have used this system without any problems, other than a few last minute cancellations but I have heard it's pretty rare. Anyway, the Italian guy is a driver, and he usually tries to find passengers on his trips to Italy and back. The problem is if he takes someone who is an illegal migrant, if he is caught, he can be charged basically as a human trafficker. So he has to be scrupulously careful about checking the documents of people he's picking up.
Anyway, it was getting late when we left, so we stopped by one of the best kebab shops in town nearby and caught a late metro home.
Friday was really rough. I was hungover, ill, exhausted (remember, I still havn't had a good nights sleep in about two weeks at this point due to jet lag, travel, late nights, drinking, etc.) and I had to finish a model at the office before I left for the day. The problem with the model was that the floorplans kept changing which changed the facades, so I wasn't able to really model the building until around 5pm. I ended up working until about 8pm, alone in the office, until my boss came back from his trip to Italy. I explained what I was working on and he said we could discuss it on monday. I realized at this point that nobody had told him that I was going to be taking three weeks off in the middle of a very heavy competition schedule. He was not happy about it, understandably. "Who was so irresponsible to give you the time off?" He asked incredulously, in his joking-but-not-really way.
He quickly recovered, however, and wished Saori and I the best on our trip and to enjoy Japan, and especially to enjoy soaking up the Japanese architecture so that I would be charged up when I came back to the office.
When I got home, Saori was setting up the grill with Tay. I got the fire going and we planned out the rest of the trip. We decided that it was going to be too expensive to try to hit Amsterdam that weekend, and too expensive to combine with Berlin. Instead, we opted to compromise with a day at Fruhlingfest in Stuttgart, an overnight stay in Munich, and three nights, four days in Amsterdam after I found some screaming tickets on Germanwings.
I slept really well friday night.
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