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About an hour from landing, usually somewhere over Ireland, they’ll serve breakfast. 99.9% of the time, you have a choice between cereal with fruit or a cheese omelet with sausage and potatoes.
A few years ago, we had an extraordinarily loud flight attendant on a flight to Paris that during breakfast, all we heard was “FRITATTA? FRITATTA? FRITATTA? All out of cereal, FRITATTA?” Aeigh. Obnoxious!
The airport in Duesseldorf is modern and efficient. The long distance trains are seperate from the airport so we have to ride a shuttle bus to the DB station.
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A lot of the automatic ticket machines only take electronic cash cards so you’ll probably have to use the reservation desk in order to purchase a ticket.
This was our first exposure to this trip’s “Ugly American”. There were older gentleman that we upset that that the line was so long (well, there were four people in front of him, two of them were us) and was telling his travel companion that he was going to leave the line in order to find someone to complain to.
People are often cranky getting off of an airplane and I really got the impression that these two gentleman were looking for more of a “Disney” experience. Large, easy to understand signs in English. Large populations of western Germany do, in fact, speak English, but sometimes people forget that they’re in a foreign land with their own sets of customs and language — If you want things to work in Europe the way they do in Michigan, well, do yourself a favor and stay in Michigan.
There are interesting assortments of people. Old, young, tall, short. Some look like the stereotypical German you’d see in the movies and Volkswagen commercials, others resemble the quiet neighbor down the street that you occasionally see at the grocery store.
The train ride is fast and quiet. There are people in groups traveling together, but they speak very softly. Pretty much the only sounds on the train ride to Cologne are the rails, the light grumble of the engine and the “WHOP!” noise when the air pressure bangs against the doors when doing through a tunnel.
It’s raining but luckily we have been to Cologne before so the need to hit a bunch of tourist spots is low so we’re able to check into the hotel and head back out for some basic lunch.
Today is actually a German holiday which more or less translates to “Ascention” so most of everything is closed for the day except for a “Doner Kebab” shop. It is basically a Turkish gyro sandwich with a lot of strange pickled vegetables on top of it.
A little later on in the day, we fell into the “nap trap”. Around three some of the jet lag started to rear it’s ugly head so we made a decision to take a short two hour breather. Now a short, two-hour breather on your first day in country always, without a doubt, becomes a five hour event which will screw up your sleep pattern for days on end.
That, of course, lead to a late night meal with lots of Kolsch beer at a pub named Paffgen where I ordered a Schweinhaxen and Kristie decided to be adventurous and order something else. Our table mates tried to explain to her what she was ordering and we both interpreted that as “rump roast” but it turned out to be stewed kidneys.
But she was a trooper and actually ate it.
We ventured out to the Paulaner Brauhaus for a few after dinner beers where Kristie had a few Paulaner Salvators and I weissbier. But the crush came a little later on where we met a group of Canadians that were wandering about Europe on an extended bachelor party with their brother. That ended up being a laugh, joke, drinking fest until about 4am in the morning.
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