My flight from Berlin left at 6:00 AM Berlin Time Sunday. I figured I should be there by about three, just to be really safe. So, I figured it didn't make sense to sleep, and went to a friend's host's apartment to watch a movie (he's still in Berlin because he's going to Spain for awhile with a friend). After a showing of Pan's Labyrinth, I went back to my host's apartment at 2:00, ate some food, and finished packing. Uwe was nice enough to wake up to see me go, and offered to drive me to my first Ubahn stop, because my bags were heavy. I really appreciated that, especially after carrying my bags while transferring trains.
Uwe's son Paul was around Saturday, which was also the day that I learned that Paul liked me, even though I never had a ton of interaction with him. I hung around with Uwe and Paul pretty much all Saturday afternoon. That night, Paul made signs with sayings in German like "Stehen bleiben! Ich wil nicht, dass du gest!" and "Halt" and "Stop" and "Du darfst nicht gehn! Du soltst nicht gehen!" and pasted them on the front door. They each mean "You may not go!" or "I don't want you to leave!" or "You shouldn't go!", except in little kid handwriting and with little kid spelling errors. It was super cute. In fact, Paul in general is a super cute 8 year old, in the way he acts and talks. Anyways, it was genuinely heart-warming to know that Paul cared enough about me going to make little kid signs. I kept them, and I think I'll hang them in my dorm room back at school.
At Kottbusser Tor Ubahnstation, I said final goodbyes to Uwe. It was a little strange waiting for trains at 2:30 a.m. with two large luggage bags and a backpack full of valuable things and the 2:30 AM types who hang around Ubahnstations, plus minimum 10 minute waits for trains. Also, Kottbusser Tor is notoriously a hangout for various unsavory types. But I made it fine. At about 3:30 I made it to Kurt-Schumacher-Platz, where there's a bus to the airport, but in the middle of the night it only comes rarely. It would've come in 45 minutes, and I didn't want to stand there with bags for that long, so I was forced to take my first ever taxi. All in all, I made it to the airport way early. I was the first one there, and they didn't even open the check-in until 4:30. The flight to Amsterdam was about an hour and a half, during which I slept. After a three hour layover, I got on the flight back to America. It lasted eight and a half hours, during which I watched Transformers (The Movie, which is possibly the worst I've ever seen, and a true disgrace to former Transformers fans, which I can't call myself, but if I were to pretend that I'm one of them and then watch that movie, I would cry or punch something, because it decides to be a bad action movie with constant slapstick and cheap jokes that completely ruin any authenticity the action would have and instead just make it a bad comedy with some high tech animated robots that fight and spout cliches), and Casablanca, which was just good, and didn't try to insert awful jokes into every line, which was essentially the equivalent effect in Transformers. I got to eat cool airplane food, and was subject to this conversation just after we took off, and I had just fallen asleep while reading a German book.:
Flight Attendant: Is he a U.S. citizen?
Lady next to me: I don't know...he must be pretty smart or something, because that book there is a foreign language, I think.
I heard those while waking up, after which I had a sleepy, confused conversation with the flight attendant about a customs form. After learning I was a U.S. citizen, she said "Yeah, I thought you were reading a foreign language" as if to say "how silly of me!" The lesson here is that absolutely everyone who doesn't speak English is smart, and no Americans, by rule, can speak foreign languages.
After a 90 minute wait in Minneapolis, I took a 20 minute flight to Rochester, because the entire flight package cost less if I flew to Rochester than if I had just ended in Minneapolis. There, I met my parents. It's good to be home. Today, I called Kohl's to talk about my impending re-employment in the soul-eating line of clothing folding. Luckily though, my life is more than Kohl's. It's truly good to be home.
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