Okay, so its 10:30 and we’re in a small Lufthansa CRJ900 somewhere over Germany. I’m tired, and grumpy and have probably had too much of that shit airport coffee that you get at the gate in Munich. We were supposed to fly out yesterday, but the flight was delayed by a strike. Its probably a good thing though, as Anna picked up some kind of stomach bug over the last few days and is only just getting better now.
Yesterday morning we got up at some silly hour and lugged out heavy baggage to the airport. It didn’t take too long as the airport is only twenty or twenty five minutes by train from us. It is also a direct train, so we don’t have to go through the hassle of changing three times like we did in London. So we got there and went to check in at the machines and there was a notice that the flight had been cancelled. Fuck! So we talked to some attendant who sent us upstairs to a different desk where we queued for about 30 minutes to talk to someone. While there a film crew came around reporting on the ongoing pilot’s strike that was affecting Lufthansa City Airline.
Unlike other countries, there seems to be a tradition here of official planned short-period strikes. It is very well organised and they usually make contingency plans for when it happens, but that wasn’t much help to us. They were offering train connections to anyone travelling within Germany or to neighbouring countries, where the rail connections are excellent. Unfortunately for us there wasn’t a quick way to get to Götheburg by train. It would have involved going around the Baltic through Finland and would have taken just too long. So we organised another flight for this morning and took that instead.
Do you know what the real pain in the ass was? I cancelled our travel insurance with American Express a couple of months ago when I cancelled our Platinum cards. In seven years of having that awesome travel policy I have never had to use it. If we had been covered by it yesterday then we could have gone shopping with our Amex cards to the tune of £2000 EACH and they would have covered everything. Awesome? Yes. Untimely? Definitely. Annoying as all hell? Fuck yes. But hey, we did get some vouchers for very nice Thai food at the restaurant so we took that home with us.
Anna started throwing up late on Sunday evening. We had been to her company summer party on Saturday and ate and drank a lot (who knew light Weissbier was SO awesome?). We had originally thought that there was something wrong with the food at the party, but I ate some of the same things that she did, and it all seemed to be very well cooked so I don’t think that was it. She has starting to feel better now (we’re in Sweden and its 22:30 now) though, and has eaten some food.
Emma and Helgi (let me know if I have spelled Helgi correctly, and if you don’t want your names published), and their daughter Lillia have all made us feel very welcome and comfortable. Emma used to go to university with Anna, and now lives here with Helgi, a professional footballer from Iceland that she met years ago. He plays for a team near Götheburg so they moved here a couple of years ago. Their place is lovely; its a small hamlet of houses outside the town with nothing to do except enjoy the fresh air and walk around the ground-skiing / walking / roller skating trail through a local forest.
It was interesting to catch up with them. For one thing, I thought Helgi was blonde, but he isn’t. I accurately remembered his face and… him from the one time I met him in the past (at some dimly light UCL party in London a few years back), but somewhere along the way I forgot that he wasn’t blonde. I don’t know why I thought that he was; maybe some biased opinion I have of Icelander men or something? Either way he actually has far darker hair than I remember. Emma has since had a child too, which was pretty interesting as the last time we saw her was in London a couple of years ago when she was pretty heavily pregnant. All change!
Okay, so I’m really tired now and need to get some sleep. To illustrate that point, I just spelt “some” as “smoe”, so its all going downhill now. I can’t post this now because they don’t have a wireless connection (though they do have fast broadband, can’t wait to try that out), so I’ll publish tomorrow.