The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2009-06-17 05:46 pm
thewhitelily) wrote2009-06-17 05:46 pm
Entry tags:
Lily and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Hello to all, this time from fabulous Belgium!
Yes, I know, this wasn't on the itinerary. However, plans change, especially when the French want to charge us ridiculous prices to hole up to relax for a few days in a winery, and so the breakneck pace of sightseeing must go on!
And although it's perhaps not technically first on the days and days of things I haven't got around to telling you, it's perhaps the most relevant: my poor laptop computer, my beautiful Poiro, is broken. Why, you ask? Well, in part it was simply a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, but for the most part I blame Frau Schmidt of the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof reservation office. (Yes, I'm naming and shaming. Come on, the woman was literally called Frau Schmidt!)
It started as a wonderful morning in Istanbul. We'd moved to different accomodation for our last night, as our first hostel hadn't had a bed for us for the entire duration - no matter, the first hostel had had rubbish breakfasts of cucumbers, tomatoes, boiled eggs, suspicious looking room-temperature with dried crusty bits on the edges meatloaf, and mouldy olives. We had been assured by our new hostel that their breakfast was raved about by all campers and were very much looking forward to it: and when the plates came out it was an appetising mound of... tomatoes, cucumbers, hard boiled egg... *sigh* Obviously it's a Turkish thing, because I don't understand it.
In any case, we took our expensive shuttle to the airport (the smaller one no one flies into if they know better because it's miles out of town), rocked up to the front desk with our massive backpacks which weighed in at a whopping 18.1kg (total incl hand luggage 22.6) which means I've put on approximately 3-4kg since we posted souvenirs home in Berlin. Hmmm. Maybe it's the unwashed clothes. :)
The lady at the booking desk, however, couldn't find us on the computer. We hadn't received a confirmation email for our flights, which we'd found slightly concerning, but not dealbreaking, as we nonetheless had the booking code saved... on an email, which we couldn't reach without getting online. No worries: it's a decent time in Australia, and one of our phones was miraculously working despite Telstra and Virgin's best efforts to keep us from contacting each other or anyone else, so we managed to ring home to get Hubby to check the code. No problem. Except the lady at the desk STILL can't find our flights and directs us over to the ticket purchase desk: our flight leaves in 50 minutes, we've still got to clear customs, would we like to buy a ticket?
Okay. We've got stuff booked, we need to be on the flight, we buy two ticket. The tickets were even cheaper than they were when we'd thought we'd booked them online, so really, it all turned out for the best. We flew (well, not literally) through customs and literally flew to Frankfurt, from which we were to take three trains to Brugge, in Belgium. (Don't ask - it made sense when we were booking it.)
So we managed to get to the train station, narrowly missing the train we'd hoped to be on due to the previous train running late (until we saw the clocks at the station, we'd decided our watches must be wrong - surely German trains wouldn't run late!), so we decided to go to the reservations desk to ensure the rest of our day ran smoothly.
Perhaps we were in the wrong line: we've got a first class Eurail pass, but I suspect German Rail doesn't count Eurail travellers as Real First Class ticket holders, because Frau Schmidt at the desk was... distinctly unhelpful. Sure, there was a language barrier, and I understand that could be frustrating all day every day, but if she couldn't help us, she should have directed us somewhere else or simply told us so. In any case, she definitely gave us to understand that there was no reservation necessary for the train trips we had planned, and thus we should simply get on the trains we wanted and leave her alone.
Okay. So we stopped for a little schnizel for lunch, then waited at the platform the handydandy printout she'd given us indicated for our train. The time for our train came, and went. One minute past time. Two minutes. A train comes. It's not going to Cologne, our change station - it's going to Paris. Crap. Do we get on? Is it a connection? This doesn't feel right...
We decided to get out of there, and have another look at the markings on the train platforms: lo and behold, our train leaves from the platform two over. Five minutes ago. But it's still at the platform! It's a miracle! So we hopped on, found ourselves some seats on the remarkably crowded train, and got ourselves all set up to charge laptop and mobile phone etc. on the power point in the armrest and so on as we relaxed in our first class comfort seats.
Until the next station, when a nice German man asked me to kindly get out of the seat he'd booked for this no-reservation-necessary train. Darn you, Frau Schmidt!
It turned from 'darn' to sickened shock when I realised that, in gathering up my electronica to move from the seat, the lid of my laptop had been closed on one of the earbuds of my headphones, and was now displaying a distinctive cracked black patch with lines emanating in the LCD in every direction. I know what broken LCD looks like: this was it. This is not an easy repair job that a strip of elastoplast can hold together. This is a complete firetrucking disaster.
People laughed at me when I said I was taking a laptop backpacking, but that thing has been the most useful possession in my limited pack space, and every day, at least twice, Emma and I would turn to each other and say "SO worth the weight!" Emma has been looking into buying one while over here, so we'd have two, because it's not just photos and net access and email and accounting and diaries, it's guidebooks and maps and backups and holy CRAP that thing is worth it's weight in gold.
Emma and I stood at the bag-racks, watching all the people who'd booked seats pour onto the train and find their seats, rebooting poor Poiro in the futile hope that maybe he just needed a little rest. No such luck.
Finally people stopped getting on, and we set off in search of empty seats, but there were none to be found. There were people standing in the aisles, sitting in the connections between the carriages, and even the bar was full. We eventually found a place to sit near one of the doors, and the small tear in my jeans I'd noticed opened up the rest of the way as I sat down, and I think that was about when I started the hysterical laughing/crying/sobbing that the nice German lady next to me pretended wasn't happening.
It came and went and came again, and by the time our train arrived in Cologne, it mostly went. It was done. We had no laptop.
We stopped to change trains and pick up a bottle of Apfel Schnapps in Cologne, when the cruelest twist of the knife came.
We've been on variable trains: in the first sleeper train we were in, we didn't discover how to turn the heat down from 'oven-like' or pull the blinds until we'd had an entire night of no sleep. In Hungary, we got onto the infamous Train With No Food and had to make do with half a bottle of water and vegemite sandwiched between milk coffee biscuits for dinner, breakfast, and lunch, while nipping from little bottles of vodka we'd picked up for a steal in Berlin. In Eastern European sleeper trains, the sewerage line is a hole cut in the bottom of the train straight onto the tracks.
All the time, we've talked about the perfect train, the train that we would find somewhere, somehow, that had been the train we talked about when we had to deal with no food, or plumbing, or train conductors that steal our tickets and don't give them back. It would have wide, comfy seats that recline all the way. It would have drinks, and a handsome, friendly waiter who speaks English to serve them. It would have power to plug in our appliances, it would have water to wash our hands after using the plumbed toilets. And the holy grail: it would have free wi-fi.
We knew it was an impossible dream. There could be no such train. It's not the way the world works.
But there it was, waiting for us, in Cologne. The Wi-Fi train. With power, comfy reclining seats, our bottle of schnapps, and two cups we'd scrounged from when we'd had Pina Coladas on Mykonos Island.
And we had no laptop.
THERE IS NO JUSTICE!
The sting in the tail of The Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad day is this: on this third leg of the journey, on the practically empty train Frau Schmidt had sent us to telling us that no reservations were possible, the train conductor came along. We gave him our Eurail pass.
'You have reservations?' he asked.
'No, we were told we didn't need them.'
'I'm sorry. Without a reservation, you will have to buy a full ticket. That will be 60 euro.'
Damn you, Frau Schmidt.
Despite your best efforts, we made it to Belgium. And we can and will apply chocolate to our wounds, regularly and plentifully. Perhaps we can even get the laptop fixed in Paris. And even you, even the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day can't stop this holiday from being the most awesome time of my life.
More and happier news some other time, but, without my own laptop, I have to follow the rules of the hostel and give up the computer to someone else for a turn eventually. I'm starting to get angry looks. :) I assure you, one day aside, the holiday is going brilliantly and I'm enjoying every minute!
Yes, I know, this wasn't on the itinerary. However, plans change, especially when the French want to charge us ridiculous prices to hole up to relax for a few days in a winery, and so the breakneck pace of sightseeing must go on!
And although it's perhaps not technically first on the days and days of things I haven't got around to telling you, it's perhaps the most relevant: my poor laptop computer, my beautiful Poiro, is broken. Why, you ask? Well, in part it was simply a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, but for the most part I blame Frau Schmidt of the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof reservation office. (Yes, I'm naming and shaming. Come on, the woman was literally called Frau Schmidt!)
It started as a wonderful morning in Istanbul. We'd moved to different accomodation for our last night, as our first hostel hadn't had a bed for us for the entire duration - no matter, the first hostel had had rubbish breakfasts of cucumbers, tomatoes, boiled eggs, suspicious looking room-temperature with dried crusty bits on the edges meatloaf, and mouldy olives. We had been assured by our new hostel that their breakfast was raved about by all campers and were very much looking forward to it: and when the plates came out it was an appetising mound of... tomatoes, cucumbers, hard boiled egg... *sigh* Obviously it's a Turkish thing, because I don't understand it.
In any case, we took our expensive shuttle to the airport (the smaller one no one flies into if they know better because it's miles out of town), rocked up to the front desk with our massive backpacks which weighed in at a whopping 18.1kg (total incl hand luggage 22.6) which means I've put on approximately 3-4kg since we posted souvenirs home in Berlin. Hmmm. Maybe it's the unwashed clothes. :)
The lady at the booking desk, however, couldn't find us on the computer. We hadn't received a confirmation email for our flights, which we'd found slightly concerning, but not dealbreaking, as we nonetheless had the booking code saved... on an email, which we couldn't reach without getting online. No worries: it's a decent time in Australia, and one of our phones was miraculously working despite Telstra and Virgin's best efforts to keep us from contacting each other or anyone else, so we managed to ring home to get Hubby to check the code. No problem. Except the lady at the desk STILL can't find our flights and directs us over to the ticket purchase desk: our flight leaves in 50 minutes, we've still got to clear customs, would we like to buy a ticket?
Okay. We've got stuff booked, we need to be on the flight, we buy two ticket. The tickets were even cheaper than they were when we'd thought we'd booked them online, so really, it all turned out for the best. We flew (well, not literally) through customs and literally flew to Frankfurt, from which we were to take three trains to Brugge, in Belgium. (Don't ask - it made sense when we were booking it.)
So we managed to get to the train station, narrowly missing the train we'd hoped to be on due to the previous train running late (until we saw the clocks at the station, we'd decided our watches must be wrong - surely German trains wouldn't run late!), so we decided to go to the reservations desk to ensure the rest of our day ran smoothly.
Perhaps we were in the wrong line: we've got a first class Eurail pass, but I suspect German Rail doesn't count Eurail travellers as Real First Class ticket holders, because Frau Schmidt at the desk was... distinctly unhelpful. Sure, there was a language barrier, and I understand that could be frustrating all day every day, but if she couldn't help us, she should have directed us somewhere else or simply told us so. In any case, she definitely gave us to understand that there was no reservation necessary for the train trips we had planned, and thus we should simply get on the trains we wanted and leave her alone.
Okay. So we stopped for a little schnizel for lunch, then waited at the platform the handydandy printout she'd given us indicated for our train. The time for our train came, and went. One minute past time. Two minutes. A train comes. It's not going to Cologne, our change station - it's going to Paris. Crap. Do we get on? Is it a connection? This doesn't feel right...
We decided to get out of there, and have another look at the markings on the train platforms: lo and behold, our train leaves from the platform two over. Five minutes ago. But it's still at the platform! It's a miracle! So we hopped on, found ourselves some seats on the remarkably crowded train, and got ourselves all set up to charge laptop and mobile phone etc. on the power point in the armrest and so on as we relaxed in our first class comfort seats.
Until the next station, when a nice German man asked me to kindly get out of the seat he'd booked for this no-reservation-necessary train. Darn you, Frau Schmidt!
It turned from 'darn' to sickened shock when I realised that, in gathering up my electronica to move from the seat, the lid of my laptop had been closed on one of the earbuds of my headphones, and was now displaying a distinctive cracked black patch with lines emanating in the LCD in every direction. I know what broken LCD looks like: this was it. This is not an easy repair job that a strip of elastoplast can hold together. This is a complete firetrucking disaster.
People laughed at me when I said I was taking a laptop backpacking, but that thing has been the most useful possession in my limited pack space, and every day, at least twice, Emma and I would turn to each other and say "SO worth the weight!" Emma has been looking into buying one while over here, so we'd have two, because it's not just photos and net access and email and accounting and diaries, it's guidebooks and maps and backups and holy CRAP that thing is worth it's weight in gold.
Emma and I stood at the bag-racks, watching all the people who'd booked seats pour onto the train and find their seats, rebooting poor Poiro in the futile hope that maybe he just needed a little rest. No such luck.
Finally people stopped getting on, and we set off in search of empty seats, but there were none to be found. There were people standing in the aisles, sitting in the connections between the carriages, and even the bar was full. We eventually found a place to sit near one of the doors, and the small tear in my jeans I'd noticed opened up the rest of the way as I sat down, and I think that was about when I started the hysterical laughing/crying/sobbing that the nice German lady next to me pretended wasn't happening.
It came and went and came again, and by the time our train arrived in Cologne, it mostly went. It was done. We had no laptop.
We stopped to change trains and pick up a bottle of Apfel Schnapps in Cologne, when the cruelest twist of the knife came.
We've been on variable trains: in the first sleeper train we were in, we didn't discover how to turn the heat down from 'oven-like' or pull the blinds until we'd had an entire night of no sleep. In Hungary, we got onto the infamous Train With No Food and had to make do with half a bottle of water and vegemite sandwiched between milk coffee biscuits for dinner, breakfast, and lunch, while nipping from little bottles of vodka we'd picked up for a steal in Berlin. In Eastern European sleeper trains, the sewerage line is a hole cut in the bottom of the train straight onto the tracks.
All the time, we've talked about the perfect train, the train that we would find somewhere, somehow, that had been the train we talked about when we had to deal with no food, or plumbing, or train conductors that steal our tickets and don't give them back. It would have wide, comfy seats that recline all the way. It would have drinks, and a handsome, friendly waiter who speaks English to serve them. It would have power to plug in our appliances, it would have water to wash our hands after using the plumbed toilets. And the holy grail: it would have free wi-fi.
We knew it was an impossible dream. There could be no such train. It's not the way the world works.
But there it was, waiting for us, in Cologne. The Wi-Fi train. With power, comfy reclining seats, our bottle of schnapps, and two cups we'd scrounged from when we'd had Pina Coladas on Mykonos Island.
And we had no laptop.
THERE IS NO JUSTICE!
The sting in the tail of The Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad day is this: on this third leg of the journey, on the practically empty train Frau Schmidt had sent us to telling us that no reservations were possible, the train conductor came along. We gave him our Eurail pass.
'You have reservations?' he asked.
'No, we were told we didn't need them.'
'I'm sorry. Without a reservation, you will have to buy a full ticket. That will be 60 euro.'
Damn you, Frau Schmidt.
Despite your best efforts, we made it to Belgium. And we can and will apply chocolate to our wounds, regularly and plentifully. Perhaps we can even get the laptop fixed in Paris. And even you, even the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day can't stop this holiday from being the most awesome time of my life.
More and happier news some other time, but, without my own laptop, I have to follow the rules of the hostel and give up the computer to someone else for a turn eventually. I'm starting to get angry looks. :) I assure you, one day aside, the holiday is going brilliantly and I'm enjoying every minute!
Visible Lurk
(Anonymous) 2009-06-22 12:10 am (UTC)(link)no subject
Best of luck with laptop troubles abroad. =P Know how it feels.
no subject
Hope you had better experiences with Germany, though. <3, though not as much as Ireland of course.
Travelling
(Anonymous) 2009-06-28 03:35 pm (UTC)(link)On a second note, I know what it feels like to break something. On my way to Canada for the first time, I slipped and fell down a flight of stairs that was roughly 2 stories high in Hong Kong (on the way to getting the airport train). As it just happened I had my nice brand new camera in my pocket and when I went to turn it on and take a photo of the offending stairs I found the screen had been broken quite well. Needless to say to get it fixed I had to send it back to Canon in Australia at my own cost becuase they couldn't do it for me in Canada, only to later received a 'fixed' camera back which wouldn't pick up sound on the microphone, and had an issue with the battery compartment.
Like I was saying the joys of travelling.