Day 325: Another Travel Day--Paris to Berlin

Today was pretty much a travel day, so we didn't see a lot of exciting sights or anything. We got up at 10 am and were out the door by 12 noon. When I said goodbye to the desk clerk, he seemed much nicer to us. He called a cab for us, and he even helped us carry our backs out and shook our hands. Nice! We also left a gift for the maid: a small jar of peanuts and 20 euros. I hope she gets it okay.

It took about 45 minutes to get to the airport. When we got there, it turned out that we had to go to a kiosk and get our own baggage tags and THEN go into a line to drop our bags. That's kind of a new one; there was no real explanation for this. We were directed into a self-weigh bag area. My bag was a bit overweight at first, but we put some of the books into my carry-on, and then everything was okay.

Security wasn't bad at all! Pretty quick, actually, even for Kerry, who normally has all kinds of issues with his CPAP, battery chargers, and computer slowing him down. Immediately, we noticed that our flight had been delayed 15 minutes: tragic foreshadowing #2...we suspected another trial like we had in Ireland, with the four-hour delay. So we went to a French restaurant for lunch: I had a caesar salad (with breaded chicken and bacon) and Kerry had a cheeseburger and fries. I'm so sick of fries; I couldn't stomach anything with fries. However, we both managed to stomach two chocolate mousse desserts, which were SCRUMPTIOUS.

At that point we headed to our gate, but it really didn't look like anything was going on. So we looked online....to discover the flight had been delayed not 15 minutes, but TWO HOURS. Damn. During this time, we decided to go over our finances for the trip a bit, and see what we have left in our bank accounts. We've really been spending too much in Europe, which isn't a shock to me, even though I've tried to be careful. I feel a bit disappointed, but it's hard to do Europe--Paris especially--on a budget.

We discovered--again, via the Internet--not by any announcement in the airport--that they changed the gates on us twice (from F52 to F56 to F55). Finally, we boarded. But when we did, they made us sit on the plane for another hour. They served us water to compensate, which I declined. The flight was fine once we were up in the air: from take off to touch down it was only about 1 hour, 15 minutes. The woman in front of me was annoying: she pushed her carry on UNDER her seat (taking away my leg room), not in front of her, and she took about a million pictures of the landing, sticking her chubby fingers in my window view. Sometimes people act worse than children.

We had to take a bus to the terminal. I was surprised how OLD the Berlin-Tegel airport looked. Fortunately, it took us right to baggage claim, and then we went to the taxi area. The taxi manager pushed us aside for a few moments, but he managed to find us a taxi guy. In the middle of the ride, he "claimed" he forgot to turn his meter on. However, at the end of the ride, he said, "Normally, a ride like this is 22 euros." So that's what we paid him. It was better than the 50 euros we paid this morning.

The woman who checked us in was very nice and even said she could give us info about the Hop On, Hop Off Bus Tour. (Later, when we went back for info, the guy behind the counter said he'd "never heard of it.") So we went back to our room for a bit. It's a bigger room than what we had in Pairs, but no refigerator, and the air conditioning is lousy. We decided to walk to a nearby McDonald's for dinner; it was in the train station area. There's also a Dunkin Donuts there and a Burger King. All the comforts of home. :) 

When we got back, we noticed that the TV did have a couple English stations, including a music station and CNN. Phew! Also, we noticed that some of the commercials are VERY sexual, showing women with no tops on, and almost no bottoms. Oh my.

More tomorrow....

Chocolate mousse in the airport!  Magnifique!