Journey Complete: Quick Reflections

Me in the Taxi taking a selfie.

LEIPZIG- So I’ve made it to Leipzig safe and sound. I departed from OKC at 3:12 pm local time (10:12 pm Leipzig Time), and arrived here in Leipzig at approximately 12:30 local time, and arrived at the apartment I’m staying at sometime just after 1. All in all, everything went smoothly. I had no mad-dash rushes to try and catch a connecting flight. Had zero trouble finding the gate I needed (seriously, these airports have all been meticulously labeled so you’d have to almost try to get lost before you were able to do so). Found a Reisebank (travel bank) at the Munich airport and exchanged all my remaining dollars to Euros, and am all set. I also purchased my first train ticket on my own and hired my own taxi for the first time. Small and nothing to get excited about but it’s still a new experience. The only real problem for all this travel: I almost never am able to sleep when I fly. Either I’m too nervous, or too excited, or too uncomfortable in those tiny sardine cans the airline passes off as economy class seats. And this trip was no exception to my “rule.” I didn’t sleep a wink on any of the flights. Which means by the time I finally go to bed on my first night here in Leipzig, I’ll have been awake for nearly 30 hours. Hoping to sleep like a rock.

A few other random things I noticed while traveling:

• Airplane intercom systems are almost always impossible to comprehend. Even when the words being said are in your own language. It always seems like the captain or flight attendants are trying to whisper, or talk to fast, or both. This problem just becomes more acute when you’re trying to listen to the instructions being given in a foreign language.

Leipzig Hauptbanhof

• Seeing man-made objects from the air never gets old. Whether it’s the familiar layout of your home state as you take off (I saw Luther and Lake Arcadia, btw), or the excitement of being over one of the big US hubs (Chicago, saw Lake Michigan), or when you finally descend over Europe and look at how relatively “strange” the landscape looks compared to our gridded planned cities that we have in much of the USA. And it’s always fun during take of and landings to watch cars and houses shrink away into tiny dots or suddenly grow back to “normal size.”

Inside the Leipzig Hauptbanhof

• My mother isn’t the only Farmville iPad app player J (the lady sitting next to me on my last flight today was watering and harvesting her crops as I sat down in my seat. Was a nice if amusing reminder of home)

• Traveling by rail, when compared to by plane, always feels like a free-for-all. There’s no ticket check in so you just buy a ticket and hop on board. Technically, you could try and get on without one. Just hope the Bahnpolizei don’t find out.

Well that’s all for this post. Stay tuned for more to come!