The Thirteenth Week

Week 13- Germany

            This week was the week before Easter, and in Sevilla it is one of the biggest celebrations of Semana Santa in all of Spain. The streets are not big enough to hold the number of people out there waiting to see the processions. The night before the celebrations begin, people sleep out on the streets and you can see the chaos beginning. Everyone is dressed in the Sunday best all week, and those responsible for carrying the pasos are covered head to toe in white or black KKK-like outfits. (I have a hard time explaining this word in English, but here it goes- A paso is a float like thing that belongs to a specific church. The top of it has a weeping virgin or Jesus on the cross.) These pasos are kept inside their church all year and planning this week is like preparing for the Super Bowl. All semester we could hear the bands practicing their Semana Santa ear splitting, trumpet-dominant songs. This week is talked about all year, and every non-practicing Catholic Spaniard squirms with excitement when the topic comes up in conversation. We had a whole week off of school for the holiday, so naturally I leave. I head to Berlin.

            When I book flights, I go with whatever is least expensive, and if that means I have to wait seven hours in an airport, then so be it. I left Sevilla at noon for Barcelona on a Ryanair flight that only cost seventeen euros. Then waited and waited and waited in one little terminal for close to seven hours. My trip to Berlin took half of a day, and if I had taken a direct flight it would have been four hours. I stayed with a friend, Jace, who is studying in Berlin for the semester. When we finally got to his home stay, it was already 1:30 am. I always wonder what I actually do during whole days like this one if I didn’t sleep, and usually the answer to that question is eat and go to the bathroom. I have this strange problem where I always buy something (usually snackums) in an airport, and if you leave me in a terminal with only one Duty Free store for more than five hours…I am going to end up buying Tucs and orange flavored chocolate because the wrapper is pretty. I don’t even remember being bored, which I should have been.

This terminal was full of a bunch of Italians and Americans waiting for a flight to Milan, and the plane was late. People were getting really rowdy and antsy, talking louder and louder, asking each other nonsense questions, “If the plane is late does that mean we are going to be delayed?”, “Oh my god. Did I pack my neck pillow?!”, and my favorite, “Why is the plane late?” No one knows lady. They haven’t said anything over the loud speaker and your ninety-year-old father and his suspenders don’t know either, so stop asking him. Finally the announcement is said first in Spanish, English, and then Italian, “The gate for flight number 442 to Milan has been changed.” One massive shocked groan that sounded like a question was heard, and people run off in all directions. Unlike my flight to Dublin, where everyone knew the general direction of the gate, people here had no idea where to go. People were going down stairs, running into walls, yelling at each other, it was chaos. No one had a clue where to go. The next announcement comes three minutes after the first, while everyone is still trying to figure out how to get out of this terminal maze. First the embarrassed flight attendant in English simply said, “Oops. Nevermind.” Then in Spanish he gave a little more detail, “Sorry. Stay here! I said the wrong thing.” Then in Italian he said something that could have been anything. The groan this time was basically visible, leaving the young flight attendant blushing and staring at his shoes. About an hour, or more, after that Milan flight had left, this extremely confident Italian Stallion and his sunglass-wearing, gum-chewing girlfriend walk into the terminal and ask me, “What gate is it for the Milan flight?” I responded in Spanish, although they were speaking Italian, telling him that the flight was gone already. I pointed to his boarding pass, showing him the time and pointing to a clock, expecting him to realize that the lunch break he took was over an hour too long. Nothing. Just a couple head nods. I took him up to the front and told the flight attendant to explain the situation to him. After standing up there for about ten minutes he comes back to all the chairs and sits down. They wait, and by the time my flight is boarding, he and his girlfriend are trying to board my flight. This is when he finally understands that he missed his flight…he yells at everyone and starts pointing to me as if I was the problem. The flight attendants ask me to come to the front of the line and ask me if I had told “this man and his friend that they could just get on the next plane and that it would take them to Milan.” Of course I did not, although I wish I could take credit for that. I thought they were joking. I was the last to board, and our flight was delayed because of the Italian couple that liked to play the blame game. I got out of it by saying, “I do not know how to speak Italian.”

The first morning in Berlin started off with a couple of warm croissants and a visit to the Brandenburger Tor, Reichstag, and the Holocaust Denkmal. We took the underground right to the Brandenburger Tor, so that when you walk up the steps of the metro it occupies all of your vision. A lot of people don’t like being labeled as a tourist, but I love it so much I might as well be wearing a fanny pack and white tennis shoes with jeans. I linger long enough to get all the photos I want and then linger longer, just because I can. One thing about that though is that you always get asked to take photos. Crossing the bridge in Triana (my barrio in Sevilla) can sometimes take me twenty minutes on a Sunday, just because I get asked to take so many photos of families, ladies and their dogs, and people pretending to be pondering life while gazing off into the distance with their rear facing the camera. At the Burger Tor, this one American couple realized that I spoke English so they asked me to take their photo. Directly behind them was a man wearing a bright red helmet, but he did not have a bike or anything. I took the photo and set it up so that it would look like the man asking for his photo to be taken would appear to be wearing a helmet. It was perfect. I gave him back his camera and showed him the photo with a very straight face. He says, “Oh can you take one more? It looks like I am wearing a helmet.” Yes. This time I was going to take a real photo, except the helmet wearing man must have read the other half of my mind and photo bombed so well, that I wish I had a copy of this photo. (Photo bomb- sneaking into other people’s photos and looking ridiculous). The couple realized what was going on, laughed heartily, and then invited helmet man to join them for a photo. It was a beautiful tourist-helmet union.

The Reichstag is a beautiful building that looks different from all the other architecture in Berlin. There is an amazing bright green lawn that stretches out in front of it. Earlier in the day, Jace and I had bought a huge bag of Flips for 49 cents. Flips are peanut flavored chips, but they are the kind of chips that are more like poofs made from a mysterious “corn” product. We sat out on the lawn munching on the Flips for as long as our gums could hold up (if you eat too many, they can make your gums bleed…even with this advice, you can’t stop eating them). Then next stop was the Holocaust Denkmal. From a distance this memorial looks like a bunch of concrete slabs and you think, “There has to be more to it”, but once you get there you realize there isn’t. It is just a ton of concrete. It is interesting though, because this denkmal is supposed to make you feel overwhelmed. As you walk deeper and deeper into the concrete garden, the rectangular slabs get taller and some angle ever so slightly. Finally, when you get to the middle you feel small and kind of like you are hiding, because you can only see straight down the row you are standing in. Below, is a museum with personal stories of Holocaust victims, letters written to families by concentration camp victims, and photos. After too much concrete and too many sad stories, we needed a pick-me-up. In Berlin that means beer and currywurst. Curry36 is supposed to be the best in town, so of course I insisted that we go there. Ordered currywurst with French fries and no mayonnaise on the fries, please! I got the look that you only get from Germans, “No mayonnaise? Why.” I had seen the mayo mountains on the other currywurst eater’s fries and I just couldn’t do it. So what I think needs to make its way to America from Germany are Flips and currywurst, but the Flips have to come with a warning label (Warning: may cause gum damage. Eating peanut poofs may lead to an unhealthy addiction).

I spent a lot of time wandering Berlin alone or with a family friend who lives there named, Noemi. I thought I saw a lot of Berlin, but by the time I actually looked at a map of the whole city, I realized I had only seen about a fourth of it. Nonetheless, I saw amazing things. I even saw a street named “Dickhardstrasse”. I took a nap in Treptower Park by the Soviet Memorial after having fallen down the steps at the top. Saw all of the important buildings that make up the Berlin skyline. Checkpoint Charlie was crowded with people, but still surreal to see. I was walking around in the open Templehof Airpark filled with jealousy as I watched people flying kites. Then while I was in the bathroom, my phone rings and it is a number I don’t recognize, but let’s be serious, I don’t recognize any European numbers. I answer it with me mixed language hello. In Spanish the woman says to me, “Ahhhhh! (excited scream- no hello or anything before) It’s here! It’s way bigger than I thought…(enter anything you want here, because at this point her voice was so high pitched and she was talking so quickly that I had no idea what she was saying)…So? Why aren’t you happy? You are never happy for me.” She never took a breath. I said, “I am happy for you! You sound so excited. But my name is Kathleen. I am in Germany right now and you have the wrong number.” “Well, why didn’t you tell me earlier!?” “Sorry.” Click. So I went from being this girl’s best friend in the whole world, to being in a permanent fight with her.

All of this site seeing was not done in one day, because Jace and I went to Munich for the weekend, then back to Berlin for a couple of days before I had to leave. Munich. So different from Berlin. It’s like comparing Barcelona and Sevilla. Berlin is a big city trying to compete with other big cities and is very modern versus smaller city that holds on to their traditional cultural identity by wearing lederhosen and drinking beer for breakfast. (Side Note:  I need to genuinely thank my Aunt Mandi’s family who took care of us while we were in Munich. All we needed was a place to sleep. We would have taken a couch or the floor, but instead, we were treated like royalty. They are the most hospitable people I have ever met.)

So how did we get to and from Munich…ride sharing. It’s basically like paying to hitchhike. Signed up online, paid some random German thirty euro to drive us all the five plus hours to Munich, and away we went. We met in front of what seemed to be the normal drop off-pick up area…McDonalds at seven in the morning, met him and his mini van, and piled in. The mini v was full, and I was sitting in the middle between Jace and an Asian German. Our driver, Darius, worried me only a tad. It was smooth sailing for a couple hours, then he got sleepy, and then the Red Bulls started making their frequent appearances. He drank four Red Bulls in three hours. His fingers didn’t stop drumming the steering wheel for one second, and we made bathroom stops every thirty minutes. One of our bathroom breaks was along a stretch of highway surrounded by empty rolling hills. We stopped at a gas station convenience store place, and all took a stretch break. After we had all gone to the bathroom we were standing around trying to communicate, then we realized my Asian German friend was not with us. It was like he had disappeared. He ended up being gone for thirty minutes and then just showed up out of nowhere. No one questioned it, we all got in the car again, and the next stop was Munich. This day was a very long day…

We made it safely to Munich and were picked up by Sara, Mandi’s cousin. She called me on my peanut sized Spanish phone and said, “Ok, I’m in the white BMW SUV.” I thought, “Oh my gosh, I smell so bad…I can’t get in her beamer!” So I put on my deodorant for the third time that day and it was only one pm. I am a disgusting being. We walked around Munich for a bit, tried the white bratwurst in a mini bun. The actual bratwurst is a foot long, and the bun is probably four inches long. Germans can’t do math, I guess. I saw my first lederhosen at the bratwurst store (I don’t think that’s what you call the place you buy bratwurst, but…). My first lederhosen…a man wearing forest green shorts that look like umpa lumpa overalls, a white button up short sleeve shirt with a little bit of a frilly collar, a hat with an extra tickly feather poking out of it, and a fake leg. Fake leg and lederhosen…a name for my German rock ballad that I will make someday.

Sara, Reza, and Ali are siblings and they own a restaurant and a nightclub together. We spent a significant amount of time in their restaurant, Café Mozart, but I had no problem with that. We were like bar flies and they were continuously feeding us. “Are you guys hungry?” (five minutes after we have finished a giant pretzel). “Ehh, no I’m ok.” Then a giant schnitzel, salad, and potatoes would show up in front of us. Let me warn any future Mozart guests. If you order the schnitzel, you will get Schnitzel Drunk. I was not that hungry, but I still ate some of the schnitzel that was the size of a small table. Jace ate all of it. After it had all been eaten, Jace could barely stand, everything was funny, and he desperately needed some water (and no alcohol had been consumed). I could have said anything and he would have laughed. Luckily a funny man was in our presence and all I had to do was point him out. Sitting behind Jace was an old man, so old that he looked like he was made of play dough. It’s fine if someone looks like they are made of play dough, but now put some white hair on him. Good, but only put it on one side of his head. This hair falls down like a normal person’s hair, the hair on the right side of his head… looked like he had purchased a bag of hair, rubbed glue on that side of his head, took the hair in a bundle in his hand and stuck it onto his head. At first I thought maybe he was one of those old men who was artsy and want-to-be-modern and down with the young ‘uns, he was definitely not. His hair, on only one side of his head, was sticking straight out in every direction. If he had just been asleep, then he gets a pass, but if not, he just gets a thumbs up for originality. I have never seen anything like it. I wanted to touch it. I pointed it out to Jace and said something like, “Do you think it requires magic skills to have hair like that?” Jace, being schnitzel drunk, laughed so hard he had to leave the restaurant. We left from there and did more touring. Later that night we went with them to open up the club, Living4. So Jace and I were there at 9:00 pm with them and left at 3:30 am. That is the longest I have ever been in a club and you could see it in my eyeballs, which were shut. We danced the night away until we could not move anymore. We then sat on a couch near the coat check, and Jace kept closing his eyes and falling asleep. I needed to stay strong for both of us, for our dignity, otherwise we could never wear party pants again! We would be a disgrace if we fell aszzzzzzzzz. I blinked my beet red tear-filled eyes once and they stayed closed. I fell asleep sitting up, in a club. Sara walks over to us and asks if we are ready to go. I wake up and convince myself that it only looked like I was blinking for a really long time. We go back to the house, fall asleep, and hope that we never have to wake up again. We were up at nine drinking coffee and eating breakfast, and another long day was about to begin.

Katja, Ali’s girlfriend, was like our personal tour guide the whole time. So it was now Sunday and I decided that we needed to go to Hoffbrahaus. Katja joined us. We sat at a table with four loud hefty German men. They convinced me to order a liter of beer. Being a tourist makes me blind to things. If a sign says turn right, I turn right. If someone tells me I have to drink a liter of beer because I am in Munich, then I order a liter of beer. Katja got a mini beer and lemonade mix. She enjoyed it thoroughly, while Jace and I felt extreme pressure to finish every bit of ours without using two hands. While we enjoyed a giant pretzel and other traditional German foods, we had the pleasure of listening to some pretty awful music played by men wearing extra fancy lederhosen. I think this music made people think that they were more intoxicated than they really were. I kind of whispered under my breath, “I wonder when they practice” and Katja says, “I think they are practicing now.” When it came time to paying the bill, Jace and I said that we would like to pay for her food this time. We were prepared to say the typical, “Oh no, it’s the least we can do. You have been so great…”, but she never gave us the chance. We said, “No, no, we’ll pay for yours. We are –“ and she says, “Ok.” If only everyone could make it that easy. There was no awkwardness and no pulling of teeth to get her to say yes. I loved it. She was so funny the whole time we were with her. At one point we saw a little red headed, rosy-cheeked toddler wearing baby lederhosen and socks with ruffles, and she says, “That kid is weird.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

When we had to head back to Berlin we did the ride sharing deal again. We left Monday morning, but Jace had class at noon. So we left at 3:30 am. Our ride this time was a little BMW hardly big enough for two people, but I managed to slip into the back seat made for people with no legs or head. The whole ride, my head was angled forward so that it wouldn’t hit the glass, and my crunched up legs had no feeling after a couple hours. I toughed out a neck cramp for three hours. Nonetheless, it was still the nicest car I had ever been in. Our driver this time, was a very serious businessman with no sense of humor. He traveled from Berlin to Munich every weekend for his girlfriend. Normally the trip to Berlin would take over five hours, but we got there in exactly four. The Autobahn is both wonderful and terrifying. The first time our driver got the car up to 200 kmph Jace and I made the cough clearing out your throat noises that clearly means, “Holy crow, I am nervous. Please slow down.” At one point we were traveling at 225kmph, but after awhile, it lulled me to sleep. He dropped us off as far away from the city center as he could have at an Ubahn station that wasn’t even open yet. There were no bathrooms open either. I don’t remember how we got back to Jace’s home stay or how long we waited or even if I went to the bathroom anywhere (I really had to go…I remember that).

The real story from this trip comes from me trying to get back to Sevilla from Berlin. I flew from Berlin to London Stansted to Sevilla. I left at 9:35 am and was suppose to be at the Sevilla airport at 9 pm. Once again, flying cheaply means it takes more time. I had a layover in London for seven hours. One of the worst things about traveling with really strict bag restrictions, is that I usually don’t have space to pack a book, so I couldn’t even read! In the airport I found myself sitting in the only restaurant with tables…a Burger King and wishing it was anything else but a Burger King. I scribbled, I people watched, I postcarded, I pretended like I didn’t speak English, I ate a whole can of sour cream and onion Pringles, and I brushed my hair twice. After all of that, I had six more hours to kill. I actually don’t remember being bored, which confuses me because I really didn’t do anything. I watched a man drop a twenty (pound) on the ground and it fluttered underneath the table to where is Santa Claus belly wouldn’t allow him to reach it. My table was on one side of him and a table with twin five-year-old girls was on his other side. As he dropped the money he said, “Eh I don’t need it.” Without thinking I bent over to grab the money, and was so close to having it in my hand when he says, “Oh they can split it.” The little five year olds pop into my vision, crawling on their hands and knees with food in their mouths and on their faces. The one reaching for the money looks at me and says, “He said it was OURS!”, then she puckers her lips and does the shoulder lift head tilt as she grabs the 20 pound bill. Fine, take it. I can survive on Pringles.

The flight from London to Sevilla was fine until we were above the airport in Sevilla. I was sitting at my window seat looking out at the giant clouds wishing I could play on one that looked like a rhino, and then five minutes later I was looking at the same cloud, and then five minutes after that I was looking at that damn rhino cloud again. Circles. We were flying in circles. The pilot announces over the loud speaker, “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, but there seems to be a problem on the runway. Another airplane’s front tire snapped off when it landed and they are working on getting it out of the way. We will have to circle for another 15 minutes.” Oh, fifteen minutes is not a big deal. “Sorry, they are having real issues with this plane and we need to circle for another fifteen.” That fifteen turned into thirty and then another fifteen and then, “They say it will be off in thirty more minutes, but we don’t have the gas for that.” That was the whole message. I sit there kind of laughing, wondering why the number of babies on the plane seemed to have increased since the first announcement. Crying babies everywhere, worried old people, no free drinks, and a laughing Leen…then the second half of the announcement, “We are going to have to land somewhere else.”

Away we went. To where, I had no idea. We land after thirty minutes of extra wiggly flying, and it is now 11:30 pm. We are at the Jerez airport. I get off the plane, walk inside, walk through “customs”, and into the airport lobby. I have no clue geographically where I am. No idea. It turns out I was about an hour and a half away from the Sevilla airport, which is another thirty minutes to the city center. We were told to wait fifteen minutes for buses that would take us to the airport. What’s another fifteen minutes… I wait and make friends with a German kid, who spoke no Spanish. We waited as other planes landed at Jerez too. Taxis were lined up outside the airport, and after waiting for two hours I decided to ask the cab driver how much it would cost to take a cab. 120 Euros. Nevermind, that’s a flight. I waited another two hours and decided that I would have to sleep in the airport. Just then buses pull up. Ryanair would board last. People in any other country would be freaking out, but the Spaniards here were totally together until one specific moment. Nobody had complained, wine had been consumed by most, and families with children were already on the buses. A woman got on a bus and had to give up her seat for a very pregnant woman who was breathing heavily. The woman that got off the bus just let loose, and everyone else realized how long they had been waiting. Pushing, yelling, furrowed eyebrows, heel stopping, cigarettes, hair flips, finger pointing…it was a madhouse, and I was beaming as I watched spit flying from one woman’s mouth as she yelled at the woman she appeared to be friends with five minutes ago. I didn’t know that crazy was contagious, but it is. It works like dominos. The lady in the front gets mad and yells at her neighbor, then the one listening in over the neighbor’s shoulder gets yelled at for breathing on the neighbor’s neck, then there is a screaming baby that didn’t quite make it on the last bus. Crazy is contagious.

The bus took us back to the airport, but I needed to go into the city. Usually there is a bus system that runs from about 5 am to 3 am, lucky for me it was 4 am. I begged the bus driver to take five of us back to the city center, and he did! I told him that I didn’t have enough money for a 22 euro cab, which was true. I had six euros. I ended up needed to take a cab from the train station where he dropped us off. I told the cab driver after two minutes in the car that I only had six euros. He stopped the cab and said, “No.” I gave him one of these, “Uhhhhhhh porfa!” He didn’t like my whinny please and told me that I had to pay. I usually hide money from myself while I travel, and I found a rolled up fifty in the hip belt of my pack! After being overcharged for a cab ride and eating a soggy bocadillo Manoli left me in my room, I went to bed. I was suppose to be home around 9:00 pm, but I got home at 5:35 am.