We were supposed to go to Italy today, but I’m in a farm in the countryside somewhere near Munich, or so they tell me. Shall I tell you the story? It goes a little something like this.
I woke up this morning nice and early so I could meet Vanya at the train station by 8:30. Our train was scheduled to depart for Italy at 9:30. We were well aware that there may be some delays because of the whole storm thing, but it’s pretty much impossible for the train station to cancel all trains for two days in a row and still keep any semblance of order, so trains were running.
The train station was pretty crowded, but I found Vanya eventually and we ran off to go figure out our tickets. We stood in line for a good twenty minutes, unabashedly speaking in our touristy American accents. When we got to the front the guy told us that 1) the train would not be leaving until at least 3:00 that afternoon and 2) he couldn’t print out Vanya’s ticket from there. (We had bought it online and been told we could print it at the train station). Now let me tell you something about this train. We had specifically gone through extra hassle, time, and expense in order to have a view on this train. A train through Germany, Austria and Italy via a pass through the Alps, I mean come on, that’s the kind of ride you want to be able to look out the window on. So we specifically got a train that left in the morning and arrived in the evening, thus giving us all day to gaze at scenery (how Waldorf, I know). Yeah except now the train’s not leaving until at least 3:00 pm, so throw that out the window I guess.
Nevertheless we still had Vanya’s ticket to figure out. We went back to the little automatic kiosk thingies and found what seemed like a knowledgeable station attendant to help us out. He managed to show us how to print out our seat reservations but said that to get Vanya’s ticket we’d have to go down the escalator to the desk down there. This turned out to be the wrong direction (are you sensing a pattern here?).
We went down to the desk and explained the ticket situation to the guy, who puttered around on his computer for a bit until we rephrased the question and it dawned on him that he didn’t know how to do it from there. He pointed us in the wrong direction.
So we went and stood in a different line for another five minutes before another guy puttered around and became baffled as to what to do with our ticket, and so he pointed us back in the direction we had gone when we first arrived at the train station. This had been the wrong direction when we first arrived, and incidentally enough, was still the wrong direction.
We followed it nonetheless. The lines had now doubled from what they were an hour ago. We stood in it, continued unabashedly speaking in American, unabashedly listened to the pair behind us unabashedly speaking in French (but when has a Frenchman ever been abashed about speaking his language?) and finally made it to the desk. The lady puttered about on her computer some and then announced that Vanya’s ticket had been cancelled.
My brain: “Wait, what? WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?!?”
She also decided to further announce that there was no way the train would be leaving by 3:00 in the afternoon. It was much more likely that it would leave around 5:00 or 6:00, but quite possibly later than that. It was now about 11:00 in the morning, the whole thing was a fiasco, and we quickly made an executive decision to get out of the train station as fast as humanly possible before we lost our minds once and for all. We would go back to the house where Vanya was staying, call the station later to find out what time the train would actually be leaving, and then return a little closer to that time.
We hopped on one of the local trains, rode it for about an hour, missed our stop, had to call our ride to inform them that we had missed our stop, but of course we didn’t have their cell phone number, had to call the daughter of our ride to inform her that she should inform her parents that we had missed our stop, and then we finally stood in the blustering freezing wind until the van pulled up and we clambered inside. Pretty soon I found myself being driven down a winding rode through some absolutely gorgeous countryside and quaint little German villages until we pulled up at an old remodeled farmhouse. It was absolutely fantastic. The countryside was incredible, the house was amazing, the fish ponds were awesome… well, one of them anyway. As we were driving we had been informed that all the giant fish in one of the ponds had spontaneously died last night. That one wasn’t so great to look at. The rest was nice.
I decided to check my email and look through all the notices from the German train company to see if I had missed something about Vanya’s ticket. What can I say, they kept sending me messages in German, you expect me to grasp all these details?
It didn’t take long actually. I found one in English (where had that come from?) that explained that all we had to do was just go online and log in and we could print the ticket out from home. Which is exactly what we did. Psh, cancelled. Yeah whatever, that was about as easy as blinking.
My dad then sent a text to find out how things were going. I informed him that all that train with a view hassle we’d gone through had turned to be pretty pointless in the end. He didn’t like that. He wasn’t going to take that one lying down. Ten minutes later he called me back to tell me that the lady with the train company had told him that tomorrow would be about a thousand times better of a day to leave, and he had already booked us two seat reservations on tomorrow’s morning train. They would still be honoring the tickets from today, he said, in order to encourage less people to try and leave today I suppose.
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