Being together for a bit more than one year, working for Jan De Nul with the 2 months working and 1 month holiday schedule, and still it would be the first time we had not been together for longer than one month, due to the fact that my vessel was laying idle in Zeebrugge, Belgium for most of that first year together...
When it became clear that my first full contract abroad since getting to know Vero would be ending in the small German northern town of Lubmin at the end of December, we started checking out whether or not it would be possible to meet up somewhere in Germany. Hamburg was an option, flying to Copenhagen was an option, but in the end we opted to go for Berlin. Vero’s Christmas holidays would just start and I was wrapping up my contract. So on second Christmas day I drove my Volkswagen Beatle (yeah, right, it actually was...) from Lubmin to Berlin Tegel’s airport, handed it back in at the Sixt car rental return and started waiting in the surprisingly old and lived-down arrival hall of Berlin’s used-but-still-good-till-the-new-one-actually-starts-operating airport. Luckily it was already late evening and not that many flights would be arriving or leaving anymore.
No, especially not since one after the other flight was delayed or rerouted to other airports in the vicinity due to a persistent fog clouding Tegel and Berlin in general... Especially since I received message after message and in the end even phone calls from Vero relaying departure delays of her plane in Belgium... I started sweating. I started swearing (silently). I started pacing. I started going through contingency plans which I hadn’t drawn up yet, let alone thought about. I started thinking about that other time when she flew to Taipei and had to sprint to get her connection in Bangkok. I started sweating some more. The airport police was starting to look funny at me... But luckily, with almost an hour delay, she texted she was taxiing. Soon back together after all! Oef!
After an frustrating and nail-biting hour and a half waiting, finally she came out of the baggage area. Reunited! Finally!
A taxi brought us for about 45 EUR from Tegel Airport to the hotel, Andel’s Vienna House. Although not smack in the city centre, the connection to both S- and M-bahn are perfect to take you anywhere you want quite fast. But it was already quite late, so we checked into our spacious fifth-floor room and enjoyed our night rest.
After a fulfilling and leasurlous breakfast we headed out on the S-bahn to check out the best sight in Berlin: the Rammstein Shop… Hop on the S-bahn and some walking to an industrial and suspiciously silent complex north of Berlin further, we (or at least I) hit my first (and what would be later the only) disappointment: the shop was closed. Insofar even that after some whining, I noticed the small and
inconspicuous plate with the opening hours. And dates, apparently, of which there are almost none… Noooo. Why, oh why? Quickly and sulken we left again to catch a S-bahn train to Berlin’s centre.
