I got my ticket, checked my bag (1.5 lbs short of the free check limit I might add), and made it through TSA without incident. The 2 hour trip to JFK was equally uneventful. Then came the fun of figuring out which Terminal my next flight would go through. The men and women I asked helpfully directed me to terminal 3, and since I had no way and no real need to know my gate so early in advance, I plopped down on a bench and began to read. Thank goodness for Nooks. I spent nearly 10 hours straight taking turns between Game of Thrones and the Disappearing Spoon. The other hour I used to chat with a man who was intent on explaining how punch-card computers worked. It might have been a very interesting conversation if he had actually known. As is, it was simply endearing.
The time came to board. Fortunately, despite having read that one could only have 1 carry on, I was allowed to board with both my overstuffed roller and tightly packed backpack. I had no idea how enormous an airbus was. Two stories, ~80 rows per story, 10 seats per row on the lower deck. Furthermore, since I flew with Singapore Airlines the flight attendants wore attractive but tasteful shirts and skirts with a print my mother would have adored. It gave the flight a slightly ritzier feeling.
The food was filling, edible, and warm, and that is really all I can remember about it. The in flight entertainment was extensive. There were perhaps 700 programs to choose from with multiple dubbing and subbing options. I watched Star Trek Into Darkness in German. However, I eventually realized that even a good dub for Benedict Cumberbatch is still an inexcusable malign to his voice and reverted to English.
Crowd psychology somehow ensured that everyone on the flight turned off their lights within a few minutes of each other so that we could go to sleep. This proved...difficult. For one thing, I am a side and stomach kind of girl where sleeping is concerned. Neither position is particularly practical in a chair. For another thing, the seats reclined no more than perhaps 20 degrees. The shallow angle made for shallow sleeping. I doubt I ever reached REM. To make matters worse, the couple sitting next to me liked to get up and walk around, and I had the aisle seat. However, the strangest disruption in the night was when a woman started to wail. Imagine a dull discomfort. It hurts but not enough to really interfere with your life. Then it grows. The pain swells and deepens. Eventually every part of you throbs and writhes with a slow but heavy aching. That was the woman's voice. Eventually she calmed down again and tension bled from the cabin.
Finally we arrived in Frankfurt where I waited an hour to receive my checked bag. Curse those First In Last Out systems. With a collective 70 pounds in tow and another 25 or so on my back I took my first train and then transferred to an Inter-City Express (ICE). This leg of the journey had the distinct advantage over the others of being pleasant.
When I boarded, I saw strange electric banners above each seat displaying two city names. The woman beside me explained their cryptic meaning. Some passengers reserve seats. The first city on the banner indicates the station at which the passenger who reserved that seat will board. The second indicates their departure time. Moments later I saw this put into practice when a man claimed the seat beside me. We traveled in silence for a time. It finally occurred to me to look up from my book and out the windows. I was blown away. To our right a river flowed by. Large hills and small mountains rose on either side. White-walled and red-roofed buildings dotted the riverside in painfully idyllic villages. Higher up rows of crops sloped down the hillsides. As a native of the famously flat mid-west it had not even occurred to me that one could plant on a slant. Best of all though, every so often an honest to goodness castle would crown a hill. At last, curiosity got the better of me and I asked the man sitting next to me which river the tracks followed. My suspicion was confirmed. It was the Rhine.
From that point on, the man and I talked pretty much continually. He had a wealth of knowledge about the area, at least compared to my general lack of it. For one thing, what I had mistaken for orchards turned out to be vineyards or Weinberge (literally wine mountain). The name started me wondering. If they were on mountains here, and the name had mountain in it, did that mean that they were placed so precariously intentionally? The answer is yes. Unlike sunny France, Germany has to fight for its light. Planting on a hill exposes more of the plant to the sunshine. The vineyards we had passed likely grew Riesling, a type of grape that produces a superior white wine.
At one point, in the middle of answering some question of mine, the man broke off and pointed to a dramatic stony outcropping on the other side of the Rhine, the Loreley. It has lived in infamy as a marker for a treacherous stretch of river. The name has a ridiculous number of possible origins. Ley is celtic for rock, but the Lore could mean anything from screaming to humming to lurking to elf. The humming would make sense due to the fact that the river and a now dried up waterfall created sounds that the rocks reflected. The reverberations seemed to come from the stones themselves, or the dwarves that supposedly lived within them. Only in 1800 or so did the romantic Clemens Brontano and later Heinrich Heine attach the now well known myth of the woman Lorelei to the stone. I am not surprised that a gorgeous siren pushed out the dwarves as mythical king /queen of the mountain.
On my final train, my lack of sleep and jet lag started to catch up with me. Then, I noticed a house with solar panels. Partly out of curiosity and partly to keep myself awake, I decided to count every solar panel I could find see between Köln and Aachen. I had a fair bit set against me. Trees often blocked my view; I sat on the lower level, and the tracks were somewhat sunken down; worst of all, I can't exactly look to the left while looking to the right. Despite all that, I counted 13 houses with solar panels and a solar farm. They say that Germans are green, but I would not have guessed that green.
At last, I arrived in Aachen. The hostel I had booked, preStep, was just half a block away. That was a true mercy given the volume of my luggage. I soon received my fob, my pass code, a map of Aachen and an escort to my room. My roommate was out at the time. When she appeared, it seemed that no one had told her she would get a roommate today. Once she knew why a stranger person had opened her door she proved to be both friendly and helpful. A German herself, she helped me locate a cellphone and SIM card, the one at Mediamarkt and the other at Aldi. She even used her internet to activate the SIM for me. At 8:30 pm local time, 34 hours after getting up on Wednesday, I finally lay down and slept.
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