Myself and Olivia worked together on Sunday evening, this doesn't happen very often so is a bit of a novelty and we treated the few residents who were around reception to a fantastic rendition of Fairytale of New York and a rather over enthusiastic game of charades.
Then we were up at 6 the next morning to start our 'holiday'. We managed to get to the airport via metro and bus without any major issues. We had the usual panic at security where despite having packed our own bags and meticulously checking them before leaving we still feared we may have accidentally packed a bomb but all went smoothly and we had breakfast before heading to the gate.
Now previous to this trip I had only been on 3 planes in my 20 and a half years of life. Yes, 3, once I flew there and got the ferry back. So naturally I get very excited by the whole flying process. But I think as I never got a plane as a child, I never had a chance to ask all the questions in the world that I would have usually asked my Dad and he would have bullshitted his way through an answer that would suffice to shut me up. Olivia unfortunately took the brunt of these questions that I now at the age of 20 needed the answer to.
I'll give it to them, airberlin are doing it right. Free snacks and drinks on every flight. Bravo.
Finding ourselves in Germany was weird. It was so strange to be surrounded by a language that I didn't understand or speak a word of, except 'my hat it has 3 corners' I can recite that till the cows come home. Thanks Dad.
Despite this we managed to navigate the train system and find our hotel, that was right next to the station.
Now what follows is a rather humorous anecdote, which I think was a combined result of us having lived in a hostel for 3 months and traveled for 9 hours that day.
We got into the room, were naturally overwhelmed by the fact it was a hotel and there was a bath and actual duvets. We ate all the food in the room, what we didn't realise was we had eaten the mini bar. We opened the pretzels, neither of us like pretzels. It was a foolish error that was set to cost us around 6 euros. We decided to hide the packets and hope they thought they'd forgotten to provide us with any...*
We then headed out into the centre in search of the Christmas Markets. After a 45 minute circular walk we reached them, which turned out to be 5 minutes from our hotel.
We meandered around the markets had the best piece of chicken on a stick I have ever encountered, and managed to scout out the only French creperie in Cologne. It weirdly felt like such a relief to be able to speak French to them.
After a Baileys hot chocolate we decided to head back to the hotel as it was cold and we'd been up since 6.
I then took full advantage of the hotel's bath. I hadn't had a bath in over 3 months and considering I usually bath more than the Romans did, that's a pretty long time.
The next day, after an awkward mime conversation with the cleaner, we went in search of the Lindt Chocolate museum. It has it's own chocolate café and when on holiday it's practically obligatory to have cake for breakfast. So we obliged. Along with the greatest hot chocolate I have ever tasted.
The chocolate museum was as amazing as I remembered it 7 years previously, and I probably got more excited this time.
Our flight back was far more exciting than the flight there, I'd never flown at night before hence; more questions. To just make things even more exciting, they served free mulled wine on the flight, so the whole cabin smelt like Christmas.
On arriving in Berlin, we had 7 minutes to go through security and board our connecting flight, which turned out to involve us going on a bus for 10 minutes to actually reach the plane.
We ended up sat next to the most multilingual woman. She was reading her German paper, asked us to pass her a blanket in French and then explained to me in English that 'no they're not cleaning the plane, that's to clear the fog and allow us to fly'. I had found the woman who could answer all my flight based questions! After a delay of 30 minutes we were finally in the air for the final time of the day. We finally arrived back in Paris and had that coming home feeling.
I had such a good two days and it was so lovely to experience Germany at Christmas again, it does it so well.
*the conclusion to the mini bar related dilemma. We checked out, she asked 'did you have anything from the mini-bar' I confessed. Couldn't deal with pretzels on my conscience.
I've resisted uploading all the photos in the world and will put an album on Facebook but here's a snippet.
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| Breakfast! |
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