Hectic Travel to Berlin

Hallo aus Deutschland!!! I have been in Berlin for the past 4 days and I am loving absolutely every second of it! However, the process of arriving here I did not love so much. What was suppose to be a 14 hour trip from when I left my house turned into a 22 hour trip.

Once Dan and I arrived at the airport, Dan is the other CMU student studying at Freie Universitat with me, and said our goodbyes we were all excited to get our boarding passes and then make it to our terminal. As we were walking to check in the handle on my carry on purse snapped off. I laughed at it and said I would fix it later and said that I hoped this wasn’t a sign of what our trip was going to be like. I think I definitely jinxed us there. When we went to check in we thought this was going to be a simple process, but we soon found out we were mistaken. As we were trying to check in ,it would not let us, so a lady came over to help us. We came to realize that we were not allowed to check in because our flights back in July had been cancelled because the airport we were suppose to be flying out of will not be open by the time we leave. Therefore, we had to book a different flight back before we could get our boarding passes. This process took forever and by the time they had figured this out and printed Dan’s tickets we had less than an hour until our flight and we were informed that there was no way our luggage would make the flight. This was a bummer, but we could deal with it. However, the difficult times still were far from over. When they went to print my ticket off, they realized that I did not check in early enough so my seats for this flight had been given away and thus there was no way I would be getting on this flight. Personally I just laughed because there really was nothing else to do and Dan just sat there all frustrated, which made me laugh harder.

Two hours after we had originally tried checking in we finally got everything figured out and now had tickets for the 9:50 flight out of Detroit to Paris rather than the 6:05 flight to Amsterdam. Once we were on the plane everything was fine and we thought we were good to go. Yet, once it was getting time to land we look at the time and realized that we were landing a half hour later than we were suppose to and therefore we only had an hour to make our connecting flight. Once we got off the plane we were instantly confused on where we were suppose to go. We figured out what gate it was, but we had no idea where that gate was. After asking, we found out that we had to go down the elevator, then walk through the parking garage to the other side of the road where there was another part of the airport, and then go back through baggage checks. So after all of this happened we rushed to our gate and the guy looked at us strange and was like are you guys trying to board? And we said yes and he was like no its too late, but let me call. So he calls and then informs us that yes we had missed the flight…. Of course! So once again I just laughed and Dan got all frustrated. However, as soon as we missed this the other handle on my purse broke! I figured the purse was a bad omen so I just switched everything over to a new bag and threw it away.

So once again we had to go get new tickets. We know had to wait 3-4 hours in the Paris airport for the next flight to Berlin. This was horrible because at this point we both just wanted to be there and we knew we were so close. I felt bad to because I am staying with a host family and the only way I could contact them was email, so I kept emailing them hoping that they received them in time.

I am proud to say though that we did make this flight! Woo! We ended up arriving in Berlin at roughly 5:30 p.m. when we had been thinking for the past month or so we had thought we were going to arrive at 11:20 a.m. We definitely thought wrong. Once we arrived though everything went smoothly. Our luggage was there and once I walked out of the gate my host sister, Luise, and her friend were there waiting for me. From that point on I knew everything was going to be okay.