Old Man Winter

Salzburg was cold. Berlin was freezing. Brussels is also pretty chilly.

We’ve decided our next European excursion will be in the summer instead of the dead of winter.

(Salzburg was all dressed up for Christmas)

(Nutella everywhere… Freaking awesome)

(us with our packs, on Christmas, in Salzburg, and it started snowing. Beautiful.)

(in Berlin. The history lessons there, amazing)

(just in case you’re wondering which direction to turn)

(awesome store in Berlin)

Our last night in Berlin provided us quite the adventure. It was about 8:30pm, so we decided to make our way back to the main train station to catch a regional train (like frontrunner) down to the airport where our hotel was. We got on a metro train and arrived at the main train station. Then we barely missed the airport express train, so we found the next train that went that way. What we didn’t realize was we got on going the wrong direction… Ugh. Our supposed-to-be 26 minute ride just got longer, and we were already so tired. We fixed our mistake and got off at a station where we could transfer to another train which would take us right to the airport. …then we got on the wrong train. We got greedy and jumped on a train that said airport express all over it. It was 2 minutes earlier than the train we were supposed to be on. Once we realized our mistake, we discovered we were back on the same train we took to get there. Double ugh… Well, it would take longer, but at least we know we’re headed to the airport for sure.

As it happened, it was Sunday night on a holiday weekend, so that train wasn’t going all the way to the airport that day. Wow. We made it back to the central station to find that there weren’t anymore regional trains headed to the airport. Thankfully, we could take a couple metro trains (like the subway or trax) to get to the airport. As we were trying to decipher the train schedule, the German lady who kicked us off the train ran over and shouted S9! We weren’t sure if that referred to the train #s9, or the S train on the #9 platform. Anyway, we found the train. We made it to the stop where we had to transfer, and asked a German lady where in the world the next station was. It was about a block away. When we arrived there, there was another lost American hounding some locals, who spoke a bit of English, for information about which train to take to the airport. One dude told him/us to get on the train that was coming (even though the metro maps told us otherwise), and then transfer to the train that would get us there. We did as he suggested. We didn’t know that we would have to book it to the next train to catch it in time. We actually made it.

(this is Adam on our last train, looking so homeless)

Once we got to the airport, we had to wait another 40 minutes or so for the shuttle to arrive to take us to our hotel. Our hotel was very nice, and we both took long long showers….

(before our glorious showers. …so greasy)

We finally made it into our beds and asleep by 1:30am. Sleeping was short lived as we needed to be up by 4:30am to catch our flight……

Yesterday was our first day in Brussels. We wandered around killing time until we were able to check in to our hotel, and then proceeded to sleep for the rest of the afternoon… It was great.