I should have taken a picture of the sign: Smile, you're in :D usseldorf! I did smile, as I have been quite a bit lately. I was really hoping that I would have more time to blog, but it turns out when I'm traveling around Europe blogging takes a backseat in my brain.
So in order to try and avoid a blog post too long to read I'll stick to two stories and hope I can get some more details in later on.
First off, taking a train in a foreign country would probably be a bit scary no matter what. I mean, it was Germany, and I don't speak German, and I'd never been to Europe before. But then my flight was delayed four hours and I missed my trains.
So I had to learn how to buy new tickets and probably paid way too much that the delayed airline really should have paid. If I was someone else I would have hunted them down and made them. But of course I just paid whatever without even trying to figure out how much. I even splurged on a Sundae from Burger King to try and make myself feel better.
Then came the adventure of trying to find a way to connect the family that was going to meet me at midnight to tell them that I wouldn't get on a train until 1:30, though of course the train was delayed until almost 2:30.
So I wandered into the internet Hot Spot room with possibly homeless people possibly waiting to steal all of my belongings. But I went in anyway and locked myself into a room with all of these strangers (okay, I wasn't locked in and I sat right by the window, but still...) and eventually I asked someone to help my connect, and while my computer never did connect to the internet the man who thankfully spoke English let me use his cellphone. Sorry, his mobile phone.
So then I sat in the Hot Spot room for a while and then left to explore until a creepy man started following me around the empty train station after midnight trying to talk to me. So I followed around the few people still there until I met the nice lady with a bike headed to Paris who happened to be sharing my train and helped me figure out that step. And then the man with the license plate helped me through the next two trains, where I helped the English speaking guy with the turban and accidentally sat in first class until the ticket checker kicked me out and I eventually made it to my final destination of the day.
Wow. That was longer than I meant. Oh well, you don't have to keep reading.
So fast forward to Konstanz and I'm with my friend looking at the locks on the side of a bridge and this guy comes up trying to talk to us and get us to fall for him or something. And then this other guy came up to ask why the locks were there, and he got really upset that they couldn't be opened again. "But the lock is like a covenant, so what if there is a breakage in the relationship? My question is, how do you get the key to open the lock?"
He kept repeating that over and over again, and our "you don't get the key back" didn't seem to be a satisfactory answer. So then he told us his sob story about the girl who ran off to the United States and came back pregnant and how he would never be able to trust another woman again.
Eventually we managed to get away without giving out our names and phone numbers and without going to "sit and talk". So while the first guy sat and felt sorry for himself that we both had boyfriends already the second guy repeated his story several times and wondered repeatedly why anyone would be so stupid as to eternally lock their love onto the bridge. I guess my friend and I are silly for thinking the locks are romantic, even though they definitely are.
So in order to try and avoid a blog post too long to read I'll stick to two stories and hope I can get some more details in later on.
First off, taking a train in a foreign country would probably be a bit scary no matter what. I mean, it was Germany, and I don't speak German, and I'd never been to Europe before. But then my flight was delayed four hours and I missed my trains.
So I had to learn how to buy new tickets and probably paid way too much that the delayed airline really should have paid. If I was someone else I would have hunted them down and made them. But of course I just paid whatever without even trying to figure out how much. I even splurged on a Sundae from Burger King to try and make myself feel better.
Then came the adventure of trying to find a way to connect the family that was going to meet me at midnight to tell them that I wouldn't get on a train until 1:30, though of course the train was delayed until almost 2:30.
So I wandered into the internet Hot Spot room with possibly homeless people possibly waiting to steal all of my belongings. But I went in anyway and locked myself into a room with all of these strangers (okay, I wasn't locked in and I sat right by the window, but still...) and eventually I asked someone to help my connect, and while my computer never did connect to the internet the man who thankfully spoke English let me use his cellphone. Sorry, his mobile phone.
So then I sat in the Hot Spot room for a while and then left to explore until a creepy man started following me around the empty train station after midnight trying to talk to me. So I followed around the few people still there until I met the nice lady with a bike headed to Paris who happened to be sharing my train and helped me figure out that step. And then the man with the license plate helped me through the next two trains, where I helped the English speaking guy with the turban and accidentally sat in first class until the ticket checker kicked me out and I eventually made it to my final destination of the day.
Wow. That was longer than I meant. Oh well, you don't have to keep reading.
So fast forward to Konstanz and I'm with my friend looking at the locks on the side of a bridge and this guy comes up trying to talk to us and get us to fall for him or something. And then this other guy came up to ask why the locks were there, and he got really upset that they couldn't be opened again. "But the lock is like a covenant, so what if there is a breakage in the relationship? My question is, how do you get the key to open the lock?"
He kept repeating that over and over again, and our "you don't get the key back" didn't seem to be a satisfactory answer. So then he told us his sob story about the girl who ran off to the United States and came back pregnant and how he would never be able to trust another woman again.
Eventually we managed to get away without giving out our names and phone numbers and without going to "sit and talk". So while the first guy sat and felt sorry for himself that we both had boyfriends already the second guy repeated his story several times and wondered repeatedly why anyone would be so stupid as to eternally lock their love onto the bridge. I guess my friend and I are silly for thinking the locks are romantic, even though they definitely are.
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