Travels in Europe--an unexpected and rather nightmarish adventure

I made plans with my friend Haika (from my Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center days) to visit the Christmas market in Dresden Germany, something she's always wanted to do. We planned the trip for the early part of December, a time period which is usually best given our usual Christmas schedules and preparations. We decided to meet in Dresden on December 8th and leave on December 12th, which would give us three whole days in Dresden to explore the market and perhaps see a bit of the city. I looked online for direct flights to Dresden from Oslo but there were none. The next best thing was to fly via KLM from Oslo to Amsterdam and then get a connecting flight from Amsterdam to Dresden, which I booked. 

December 8th arrived and my husband drove me to Oslo airport. The weather was cold but otherwise fine. Snow was predicted but not until late in the afternoon. Except for a slight delay, our flight to Amsterdam took off as scheduled. But while I was sitting at the gate waiting to board, passengers got the news that the Amsterdam to Dresden flight was cancelled. No reason was given, although the KLM website attributed this to weather conditions--thick heavy fog at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. I later found out another and more likely reason--a baggage worker slowdown and chronic understaffing. That was probably the major reason for the cancellations, because as it turned out, many flights leaving from Schiphol airport had been cancelled on December 7th, and those passengers were rebooked for December 8th flights. Many December 8th flights were cancelled and rebooked for December 9th (my flight to Dresden being one of them). 

I was informed via a text message from KLM that I was rebooked on the December 9th flight, and that I had to retrieve my luggage in Amsterdam, but it was not on the carousel. I went to the baggage service desk and was told that it had been moved to a storage area for my rebooked flight on the 9th (that I had not yet agreed to). Since it was now at that location, I was not allowed to get my luggage back. The woman at the desk was most unhelpful and rude, and I told her exactly what I thought of her and her airline. I filed a lost baggage claim form online on the off chance that my luggage was lost and not relocated, and asked that if it was found, that it be sent to the hotel where I was to stay in Dresden.  Considering the absolute mess that Schiphol airport became on the day I arrived, I had zero belief that my suitcase would be with me on my rebooked flight. I also had begun to disbelieve that the flight to Dresden would actually happen. Schiphol airport (I have another name for the airport that sounds like Schiphol, but I won't write it here) was inundated on that day with passengers who had been stranded in Amsterdam for one and even two days. I met several people who had plans with family and friends that were disrupted due to the cancellations. I fell into that category since my friend was flying from Michigan and had planned to arrive in Dresden on Friday afternoon. Our flights were supposed to get into Dresden around the same time, and we had planned to travel to the hotel together. It was not to be. 

Thank God for WhatsApp. I was in continual communication with Haika, so that she knew what was going on. Her flight from Michigan to Frankfurt to Dresden arrived in Dresden on Friday afternoon on time, so she got to the hotel in the mid-afternoon of December 8th, which was good because she was tired and needed to sleep. But she was experiencing a problem of her own; her luggage had not made it onto the plane from Frankfurt to Dresden, and it didn't end up arriving at the hotel until Saturday evening, so she was without a change of clothes (as I was) from Friday afternoon until Saturday evening.  

At this point, I stood in the airport, knowing I had several options: accept the rebooking for the following day and find a hotel to stay in at the airport overnight; try to find a train from Amsterdam to Dresden; or try to find a bus from Amsterdam to Dresden. And had I wanted to wait on line for four or five hours with hundreds of other stranded and displaced passengers, I could have argued with KLM customer service about getting my suitcase returned to me (I wisely chose not to do that after waiting one hour in a line that did not move forward at all). There was no bus service from Amsterdam to Dresden, but there was train service (an overnight train that would have been perfect). So I booked a train ticket online; the trip was to have taken about 10 hours and would have gotten me into Dresden around 8:30 am on Saturday morning. But when I got to the train station in Amsterdam, I was told that the train workers in Germany were going on strike as of that very evening. So I could not take the train as the trip was cancelled. I decided at that point to accept the KLM rebooking and to find an airport hotel for the night. All of the searches, bookings, cancellations and communications were of course done via my cell phone, which was gradually losing battery charge over the course of Friday afternoon. There were no charging stations that I could see at Schiphol airport in the general area (in 2023!). One of the salespeople told me I could charge my phone in the ladies room using the electrical socket there. So I did. That allowed me to book the Ibis Budget hotel located at the airport. Luckily, there was a shuttle bus to take me there, and once I was ensconced in my hotel room, I charged my phone and then set about trying to find something to eat. That proved to be possible, thank God. The hotel was very nice. At least I had a place to charge my devices as well as relax and get a decent night's sleep. At this point, I had used most of Friday just to travel to Amsterdam, and I knew that I would use most of Saturday to get to Dresden one way or another. 

The rebooked KLM flight was however not flying to Dresden, but to Berlin. So I had to find a way to get from Berlin to Dresden. Luckily, there is bus service (Flix) from Berlin to Dresden, so I booked a ticket after cancelling my train ticket and requesting a refund. I reserved an 8 pm bus trip for Saturday evening that would have gotten me into Dresden at around 10 pm on Saturday evening. I had to get myself from Berlin Brandenburg airport to the Flix bus station, which was about a thirty-minute taxi ride, and needed enough time to do that. I got a taxi to the Flix station at around 7:30 pm, but as it turned out, my 8 pm bus trip was cancelled and rescheduled to 9:30 pm the same evening. That was at least something. I waited two hours in a crappy bus station for the 9:30 pm trip. As (bad) luck would have it, my reserved seat on the 9:30 pm bus was broken, and none of the Flix employees including the driver were at all helpful in trying to find me another seat or in trying to fix the broken one. I waited until all the passengers had boarded at all the scheduled stops and then found a vacant seat. Luckily there was one. I arrived in Dresden at 12:20 am on Sunday morning and got a taxi to my hotel. Haika was still awake when I got there. Once I got there and once we were together, I managed to unwind and was hopeful that I could put the entire travel insanity behind me. I did decide however that I am never flying into Schiphol airport again. As in ever. I simply lost all faith in KLM and that they wouldn't cancel my return flight from Dresden to Oslo via Amsterdam. As it was, I saw that more flights had been cancelled at Schiphol on December 11th, which did not bode well for the 12th, the day I was to leave Dresden. This meant that I had to find another airline/flight to get home on the 12th. Luckily, I found a direct flight from Berlin to Oslo on Norwegian Air and I booked it. I also booked a Flix bus that left Dresden at 7:30 am on the 12th that traveled directly to Berlin airport; it did not get cancelled and it was on time. Thankfully, my return home was problem-free and easy. As it should have been for the trip to Dresden. It took me two days of traveling to get to Dresden, and less than half a day to return to Oslo. What's wrong with this picture?

It amazes me in this day and age that we are expected to accept living in a paperless society where all sorts of boarding passes, reminders, etc. are sent to our phones as texts or emails or apps that have to be downloaded. Yet a busy major airport like Schiphol makes no effort to have several hundred charging stations spread throughout the airport and not just at the gates. I find that very strange and totally unacceptable. I feel the same way about the Amsterdam Central train station--no charging stations anywhere, and that was confirmed by one of the train station employees. What is wrong with Amsterdam? I thought it was a progressive city. I have so many viewpoints to share and I'll do so in my next post. I also want to write about my visit with Haika and the Dresden Christmas market, since we had a wonderful time there. It made up for the travel nightmare and it gave me back my Christmas spirit, which I had just about lost. 

Street performers in Berlin

Enjoyed watching these street performers when we were in Berlin recently. Pretty talented guys who drew quite a crowd. A throwback to my days in New York City and San Francisco, where these types of performances, accompanied by urban music, were not uncommon. 

Tiergarten in Berlin

Tiergarten, a large public park in Berlin, is translated as ’animal garden’ because it was originally designed as a hunting area for the king in the 1500s. At present, it is a lovely urban park for the citizens of Berlin, and about the only (visible) animals that frequent the park are rabbits. In fact, there are so many rabbits (and apparently they are so destructive to the flower gardens in the park) that several of the park’s small gardens are closed off with barriers to both the public and the rabbits. When we were walking around in Tiergarten recently, I noticed mounds of earth here and there, and wondered what they were. Now I know. Rabbits are energetic little creatures, God love them, but their activities are destructive to flower and vegetable gardens. I wonder if the barriers do manage to keep the rabbits out. The flower gardens appeared to be in good shape, so perhaps the barriers are working. But for how long?

Tiergarten is well-described on Wikipedia at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fer_Tiergarten, so I won’t include much more in the way of descriptions in this post. I am posting some photos I took in the garden. The day we were there was a hot sweltering summer day, and the sunlight was very strong. The photos have an unusual, almost shimmering look to them—you know it’s summertime when you take a close look at them. But the heat wasn’t unbearable, and it was in fact nice to walk in the shadows of the many trees in the garden. 

Berlin poster ads

Berlin's East Side Gallery

I mentioned in my last post that I would be posting some photos of Berlin's East Side Gallery, which is a 1.3 km long section of the Berlin Wall that consists of 105 paintings by artists from all over the world. All of the paintings are unique and beautiful in their own way, so the fact that I have chosen ten of them in no way suggests that these were the best. But they were ten paintings that have a dramatic flair about them, many of them are colorful, and they get their message across very clearly. 

If you are in Berlin, visit this wonderful outdoor gallery. As I wrote previously, it has to be experienced in person in order to get the full effect of the immensity of what the wall represented and what the fall of the wall opened up. I normally copyright my photos, but have not done so this time, as these paintings are not mine. They belong to the world, and it was a privilege to experience them. 

Sunday evening in Berlin

11 pm in Berlin—sitting in our room at the Hotel Palace Berlin and listening to the celebrations in the streets outside—cars honking and people cheering. Spain just won the UEFA soccer cup; they beat Italy 4-0. The other night it was the Italians cheering in the streets after having beaten Germany. Now midnight, and the celebrations continue…….

Dinner tonight was pasta at a restaurant called Noah’s, where our friendly waiter, after noticing that I had finished a particularly spicy penne all’ arrabbiata dish, commented that I had done a ‘good job’ since I had finished it despite its numbing effects on my lips and tongue. It was very good, even though it was probably the hottest version of this dish that I have ever consumed. Sat outdoors and just breathed in the scent of the linden trees, and enjoyed the warmth of the summer evening.

Spent some time sorting through all my photos of Berlin and Leipzig (about eight hundred or so). What would we do without digital cameras these days? I cannot even remember what it was like to use film, although I do remember some trips in the 1990s when I took a few hundred photos using film. Many of my photos of Berlin this week came out really well, especially photos of the East Side Gallery—a 1.3 km long section of the Berlin Wall that consists of 105 paintings by artists from all over the world; it is located on Mühlenstraße in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district. It has to be experienced—the paintings are incredible. I’ll be posting some photos from this exhibit shortly.

Reflecting on our stay here in Berlin. We’ve done the Berlin Wall walking tour; what struck me was how this part of history was also a part of my generation—we grew up hearing about the Berlin Wall and reading newspaper articles about the misery associated with its existence, and then experiencing the fall of the wall in 1989. Visiting the Chapel of Reconciliation was particularly moving; this chapel was built on the site of the old Church of Reconciliation (Versöhnungskirche) on Bernauer Straße in the Mitte district of Berlin. The chapel had a black-and-white photo exhibition until the end of June (we caught it just in time) called Mauerkinder (translation ‘Wall Children’) by Thomas Hoepker, which was emotionally-wrenching to see, mostly because the children, photographed during the early 1960s, seemed so unaware of what horrors were going on around them--innocents in a world that had become hell.

Thinking about the sparrows that are in abundance in this city; like sparrows everywhere, they are nearly tame, and will take a piece of bread right out of your fingers. We watched a number of them help themselves to one young man’s French fries while we sat eating our hamburgers at Burger King. Then there was the caged crow at the Berlin Zoo, who ‘talked’ to me while we stood there and watched him, and who followed me in his cage as I walked away, cawing loudly. It’s tough to see birds and animals in cages; I have mixed feelings about zoos, more so now that I am older. You wish for them what you would wish for yourself—the freedom to live an unfettered life. I know it’s not always possible, and yet, it’s still a wish. A wish for animals and birds, and a wish for mankind too, especially for those individuals who suffer at the hands of dictators and totalitarian regimes. 

A New Yorker in Germany

This week I am A New Yorker in Germany. After many years of driving through Germany on the way to visit and vacation in other European countries, I decided it was time to explore Germany. As luck would have it, the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) CYTO 2012 conference (http://cytoconference.org/CYTO/pages/default.aspx) took place in Leipzig, Germany this past week, and my husband and I were in attendance, along with some of our Norwegian colleagues. What is always nice for me about these particular international conferences is that I end up meeting American colleagues from the different places where I have previously worked—Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the University of California at San Francisco. This time around was no exception—it was a pleasure to catch up with earlier colleagues like Zbigniew, Bill, and Claudia. The ISAC conferences are special for me, because it was at one of them, in Cambridge, England, that I met my husband for the first time, and for the second time when the annual conference was held in Breckenridge, Colorado. After that, we became a couple and have since attended many other such conferences together. The society has evolved through the years to meet the changing needs of its members, but remains at its core a flow cytometry society, although it now embraces image cytometry and mass spectroscopy as it moves into the future.  

As a pre-teen and teenager, I had a pen pal in New Zealand, by the name of Lillian. We wrote to each other from the time we were twelve years old until we were about sixteen, at which point the letters stopped. But I had learned a lot about New Zealand and her about the USA during that time. When I last heard from her, she had decided to take a job working on the New Zealand railroad. I still treasure the small gifts I received from her—volcanic sand and a hei-tiki necklace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hei-tiki). I was reminded of her this past week because I had the pleasure of talking to a new conference attendee from New Zealand by the name of Kylie—it was a pleasure to meet her. Meeting her reminded me of what these conferences are really all about—encountering new people and forming new networks and connections. But it was our conversation about New Zealand films and also about how the New Zealand government has worked hard to integrate the Māori people, that I remember most. I want to find some of the films she mentioned, and to read a bit more about New Zealand society generally.

It is true what the Dalai Lama says— ‘Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before’. Because you never know who you’re going to meet, or what kind of experiences you’ll walk away with. This by itself—the excitement of unwrapping the unknown—is worth the time it takes to travel to new places. It doesn’t matter if the purpose of the trip is business or vacation. It is about staying open to the world around us. I’ll be writing more about Germany in coming posts. I’m happy we finally decided to spend some time here. From what I’ve seen so far, it is a fascinating country of contrasts.