487 words on Travel
This weekend was involuntarily dedicated to travel again. About 14 hours of sitting on 2 delayed planes, passing 9 time zones an losing 10 hours that way (dumb is he who traveleth on the day of switching to summer time) and then riding a train with a broken coffee machine back to Göttingen with my luggage still being in Chicago and not being delivered here before Tuesday.
Luckily my notes and my Powerbook were in my carry-on luggage. Unluckily, my office keys are still in my 'lost' bag. The sentiment on the plane has been that American Airways may not be a particularly good choice of airline (which is strange as the last time I used a U.S. airline it was United and a lot of trouble – so I was happy to have another one). They did have two suprisingly tolerable and up-to-date music channels for entertainment, though – even including a song by The French. And while the commentary seemed knowledgeable – the speaker didn't really have the credibility to go with it. It's strange to which extent this matters.
Frankfurt airport was horrible again as well, letting us wait a while until they had a space free for our plane to park.
SFO wasn't particularly good either – AA's check-in counters were kind of extremely old fashioned and dodgy, with passengers having to check-in their baggage first and then give it to yet another person at an X-Ray machine. I think all this 'terror' stuff is just there to inconvenience people and doesn't help a bit. They even tell you to not walk around in the plane, now.
Chicago airport was fun, though. Boarding time for my flight to Frankfurt was 18:55 while the plane from San Francisco arrived only at 19:15. That made for a smooth walk between planes without any waiting in departure lounges. On the downside, this meant I couldn't have a proper dinner, couldn't get duty free cigarettes for my friends and they didn't manage to move my bag from one plane to the other.
On arrival in Göttingen, I couldn't reach any of my flatmates, which meant I couldn't get into the new flat. So I stopped for a coffee at Moritz and Carola's place, which was nice. Even nicer of them, that both of them must have done a tremendous job helping to move most of my stuff while I was away. Much more than I asked for! That was very nice and meant there were only very few things left to move over. Which in turn meant that I still had the time and energy to start re-assembling a few of my shelves, my bed and – most importantly – hooking up my stereo before passing out which will happen any moment now.
While walking to the new flat I also ran into my advisor and started telling him about the workshop – the joys of small-townas.f.asdkjfzzzzzzzzzzzzzz