Germany, Day 1: Of Airports and Engineering Trips

(My college engineering department organizes a trip to Bremen, Germany that brings along its own prof's for Statics and Dynamics, and gets a U. of Bremen prof for a German Language and Culture course.)

Oh, the troubles of flying! As planned, we left the local airport for Detroit, from which we would fly to Amsterdam and then on to Bremen. The first flight went well, but the second flight most certainly did not. The small airport had free Wi-Fi, which I used to set up this blog. The Detroit airport has not-so-free wireless, which was rather upsetting.

The flight out of Detroit was in a completely-full 747. That's a lot of people, especially when your plane isn't working. After everyone had gotten on, the usual announcements, instructions, and such went on, until the command, "Flight Attendants, arm doors for take-off and cross-check." As it turns out, one of the doors wasn't closing properly, which meant that we had to stay around for another half-hour or 45 minutes. Once the door was fixed, we taxied back and warmed up the engines, only to find that the far-left engine wasn't starting! We taxied back to the gate, where the plane would be fixed, and had to wait another hour or so. Great. Also, passengers can't stand up until the plane is either at the gate or flying. Like we were going anywhere dangerous. So, at this point, we're two hours late for take-off, which put our connection time to the Bremen flight into the nearly-impossible range. The pilot tells us that the flight will go faster than advertized, which means that we might have a shot at the connection. He then proceeds to go through the worse take-off I've ever had.

Fast forward one boring flight to our arrival in Amsterdam. We got off the plane, and I'm told that my appearance was something akin to a Google cowboy, given my hat, shirt, and what the people were saying in Dutch, by my prof's interpretation. Ah well. Now, the Amsterdam Schipol airport has very few monitors, which means it took us a while to figure out that we had to go from the E terming to the B terminal in half an hour. No, that might not be hard enough -- let's add customs and another security check for the sanity of the EU. Woohoo. Murphy's law: our last member had to go through the full pat-down, so we had to have someone hang behind to collect and direct him. We made it to the bus that brought us to the spot on the tarmac where our tiny Fokker-50 (turboprop) city-hopper plane awaited. It was rather empty, and maybe even quieter than the jet.

We landed in Bremen, only to find that our luggage hadn't made it. Great. All of our stuff for showers, plug adapting, etc, were in the checked bags! Fortunately, we had enough money-changing and grocery-shopping to occupy us. We had supper at 5-ish local time: spaghetti, bread, and salad. And it was delicious! The bread here is very good, but the exchange rate sucks. The prices, generally, are numerically similar to in the US, but the dollar is weak. I traded $500 from my trip fund into E-303 after E-1.50 conversion fee. (Sorry, Blogger isn't being symbol-happy.) I now have E-15 worth of provisions, which might last a while. After dinner, we started watching a movie, during which our luggage came! Ah, what a relief it was to have clothes, shampoo, etc. again! My camera, through some lapse of judgement, was in my luggage, so pictures from Day 1 are very few.

But there was no Internet for us.