Travels to Saarbrucken, Germany

I’m writing this as I sit on the train from Mainz, Germany to my final destination of Saarbrucken, where I’ll spend the next week working at Saarland University. (Note: post written Monday 3/13, posted 3/14). The plan was fly Prague -> Frankfurt and take train(s) southwest to Saarbrucken, estimated 1.5+2 hrs. It’s been a much longer travel than I expected. My very first lone train ride (not counting the MARC to DC) and the rest of my traveling day hasn’t been the cleanest, but it looks to all work out in the end (of course, I’m not checked into the hotel yet…).

Yesterday, planned travel day: surprise snowstorm, and the city kind of choked. There were several inches on the ground and almost no roads were really cleared, but it didn’t even occur to me til I was almost at the airport that things might be shut down. Sure enough, soon as I arrive I see that my flight was cancelled, and soon after the airport was announced closed until late that evening. After 2 hours in a slow line to reschedule my flight, I picked a morning flight for the next day instead of taking my chances for the evening. As it turned out, things did open and I could have taken off at 7pm… but an extra 8 hrs at the airport without a guarantee just didn’t seem worth it.

The Prague airport was open today. I got there a little more than an hour before my 10:20 flight, but just checking in took almost 45 minutes so I was a little panicked. It wasn’t just me though -- everyone surrounding me was on the 10:20 flight, the desk people just seemed extraordinarily slow. It turned out that the airline woman yesterday didn’t actually switch my flight to today like she said she had, but the rush of getting everyone through the line worked to my advantage I guess -- the woman who checked me in just sighed and added me to the flight right then to keep things moving. The flight left Prague ~20 min late, prob because of the delay in checking everyone in, but it worked out okay.

There’s a small train station in the Frankfurt airport; I bought tix for a 1:23 train, but after waiting from 1pm, when a train arrived at 1:15, I got on assuming it was early or would wait. Of course, all signs were in Germany, but Mainz, the city I needed, seemed to be on the sign so I went with it. And of course… wrong train. It shared routes with my train til the 2nd-to-last stop so I didn’t realize til it was too late. I took an extra train to get from Weisbaren (??) where I ended up to Mainz, hoping noone would check my ticket to see what happened (they didn’t). The mistake of not waiting 5 min for the correct train has pushed my schedule over 2 hr behind though, on top of the day behind I already started from the snow. I just hope that the Saarland people didn’t have too much planned for me. It turns out my Vodaphone mobile service doesn’t work here either; a disappointment since Vodaphone is all over Europe. Having one service cover the entire U.S. has spoiled me I guess. Not worth it to buy prepaid Germany service for a week though, with the overhead of buying the card and the min minutes necessary to buy.

One thing to mention though -- the west Germany landscape has indeed been pretty beautiful; it’s been nice to see it by train. I’m going by train from Saarbrucken to Paris next weekend, so I think that will be even better. Prague is lucky its got the beautiful buildings and architecture and history working for it. I miss seeing mountains.