This has been a very long, very strange day and a half. I woke up yesterday morning at 6am eastern time in Washington, D. C. It is now 10 pm in Heidelberg, Germany, and I will likely be in bed by 11. We left D. C. on Lufthansa Airlines at 6:10 pm yesterday and arrived in Frankfurt at 7:30 am this morning. A seven and a half hour flight, at the conclusion of which I discovered that security had broken the lock on my luggage and ripped the luggage as well. Lufthansa replaced my damaged bag with a new one. We then took the metro to the train station and, after a nearly two hour train ride, ended up in Heidelberg.
A member of our party had an accident on the train platform. She slipped trying to board the train and fell down in between the train and the platform, catching herself with her arms. Two of the guys in our group quickly assisted her, so other than banging her leg, she ended up ok. But it was a scary moment—thinking the train might shut its doors and start to move. Coming out of the train station there wasn’t enough taxis for all 19 of us, so we packed all of the luggage into two taxis and everyone was going to walk the mile to the hotel. I—however—was one of the two people who volunteered to rode along in a taxi and unload the luggage and guard it until everyone else arrived. Mistake. The taxi driver took me to the wrong Hotel Leonardo Heidelberg! Neither our tour guide, nor our group leader realized there were two hotels with the same name. I was stranded for 30 minutes until our tour guide realized what had happened and another taxi was sent for me and the luggage.
This afternoon we took a riverboat cruise up the Neckar River. This was described to us as a “three hour tour”. English teachers would call this “foreshadowing”. (*Hint* You should be humming the Gilligan’s Island theme right about now.) About two-thirds of the way through our cruise we hit the right bank of the river, crashing into some trees, which broke out the windows on the level on which I and about 7 other study tour members were sitting.
Two of the windows came crashing in. Luckily we weren’t sitting at those tables. Thankfully, the people who were moved really quickly and no one was hurt. Glass flew everywhere, branches were hanging in the windows. Our tour guide came running down the stairs to make sure we were okay. Turns out the people on the top level who didn’t duck quickly enough got smacked in the head by some branches. So at the point where we were supposed to turn around, we actually had to disembark and board a different boat for a (thankfully) uneventful ride back to Heidelberg. Our night ended at Café Rossi, where I thoroughly enjoyed a hamburger. (If you’re going to eat a hamburger on vacation, you might as well eat it in the country that invented hamburgers.) We didn’t leave the restaurant until nearly 9 o’clock at night, but surprisingly the sun was barely setting. Turns out it doesn’t get dark until 10. Tomorrow we’ll be touring the castle and downtown Heidelberg. Hopefully the day will be educational, but not quite as eventful!
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| Heidelberg Castle |
(Btw, this post was originally going to start with the sentence “I’m really envious of people who can sleep on airplanes.” But that was before the damaged luggage, the taxi ride to the wrong hotel, and the riverboat crash.)
