bitte

I'm in Germany! And I'm safe! Finally! I miss knowing how to communicate, but I do know bitte (please), danke (thanks), schnell (faster, from die hard), and guten tag (hello).

Finding the right train at the Frankfurt airport was a nightmare because some tracks were closed. They don't tell you that you can go to any track and eventually get to the one you want, so we were sitting there trying to figure out how to get to track 5 when it was cut off. One man even laughed at how lost we must be. If I knew a German swear word I probably would have used it.

Finally we got on a train and I rolled my two huge and heavy suitcases on to the train with my huge clunky walking shoes I got before I left. They're german looking (they're german shoes), black, pretty heavy. They are also quite ugly, but they are so comfy I don't think I can complain that much. Brooke saw them and tried to tell me that they weren't 'that bad'. But then we agreed that she was lying, and I'll do best to wear long pants with/over them. Bot for now I'll pretend I can blend in with the locals. And I do, they are hella european shoes. hella.

I got to the Mannheim train station where I had to switch to a local train. My mom caught another train back to the Frankfurt airport for her flight to Bremen (she's on a business trip, I'm visiting cousins for a few days).

Then I got to the Heidelburg train station, which was as far as I was supposed to go before my cousin Rachel would pick me up. Problem: how do I tell her I'm here? My mom didn't have a SIM card yet, so I didn't know if she had called Rachel. I tried to use a payphone and failed miserably, and the machine ate all my euro coins. I had her address, but I didn't want to take a taxi in case my mom had called and she was coming. So I waited for a little while outside the train station. And then it began to rain, and then I began to cry.

Because I was in a foreign country where I can only say please and thank you, I didn't know who was picking me up if at all, I didn't know how to get anything to drink and I hated to pull around my suitcases (which weigh 100 lbs together... i know because I weighed them. twice.). When I think of 'cry' I usually think of a lot of noise involved, in which case mine was a 'weep' because there was little to no sound. So I sat there and wept for a while, and got out of the rain, and thought about my options. None of which seemed to be working. But then crying/weeping didn't make me feel any better because I was still tired in the middle of Germany. So I stopped.

I stood up and walked back over to the curb to sit down and wait again after the rain stopped. I got up to look at oncoming cars (another mistake... she also came on a train because she doesn't have a German license yet), and I realized the following: my feet feel fanTAStic.



postlude: she did come, my mom had called her, I played with her new baby while we waited for the train. I had some white bean chili at her house and took a long nap. Now I'm gonna try to go to sleep to get on German time. but I will def have to learn German, today was a nightmare.