Germany 2019 day 4

When I woke up today I packed most of my things and then went down to the last breakfast. While having breakfast one of the receptionists came into the dining room along with a guy who looked like a construction worker. The receptionist asked around for anyone staying in room 311. Which ofc happened to be my room. When I said it was my room he asked if they could have access to it because there was a problem with the heating in all of the hotel. If I hadn't been diligent with putting the Do Not Disturb sign on my door every time I left the room they probably would have gone in anyway. I asked if they could wait 30 minutes to an hour because then I was checking out. He wasn't happy about it but accepted. The only probable reason I could think of why they needed my room is because my window opened up on to the roof. We finished breakfast and then went to pack the last few things and met up in the lobby. We checked out and went to the fair. Before packing up my laptop I made sure to write a bad review on TripAdvisor.

I was happy to be away from the hotel - nothing about that place equalled a good stay. There wasn't enough light in the room - if my laptop keyboard wasn't lit up I wouldn't have been able to see it at all, and the walls were too thin - during most of our stay there I wouldn't have needed my own alarm; I woke up in time from the alarm from the guy in the room next to me. Anyone who knows me can attest that I am not a light sleeper in any way.

Our time at the fair was spent mostly as the previous days and then we left for the train station around 3pm to take the train to Düsseldorf airport. And once again the German train system decided to give me anxiety. We had looked up beforehand which departure train we would need to get to the airport on time. When we got to the train station it wasn't even up on the big departure screen yet and there was less than 30 minutes to go (the Swedish departure boards usually show up to an hour or more). Some Norwegians ahead of us in the queue for tickets couldn't make sense of the ticket machine so the station guy had to help them. It really isn't all that complicated - just change the language to English first and it all makes sense. When we got our tickets the departure train for the time we had checked still hadn't shown up on the board. There was less than fifteen minutes left. With around ten minutes to go the train showed up on the board, but it didn't say anything about the airport and the station guy had gone up in smoke. We asked around a bit. Most of the people there were from the fair and were going in the same direction. Then suddenly the station guy showed up again out of nowhere (have the Germans invented teleportation?) and we asked him and it was indeed the train that said nothing about the airport but had the right departure time. So we rushed to the track with less than five minutes to go - and then ofc the train is ten minutes late. When the train arrived and we got on and got seats I took out my phone and got on to Deutsche Bahn's website, changed it to English and looked for our departure and train. Found it and it was indeed going to the airport. Relief. Note to DB: it could be a good idea to show on all screens and signs which trains are going to airports. Confused and stressed tourists aren't at all nice to deal with (speaking from experience).

We arrived at Düsseldorf Flughafen Bahnhof (the word Flughafen is so much fun to say that I kept saying Flughafen instead of airport throughout our whole stay) and after a quick look at the screen (double checking it because we are great at confusing ourselves lol) we got on the SkyTrain to the airport.

Düsseldorf airport is a mess. Just as last year. We had to go around the security to get to our check-in desks and because Germany hasn't caught on to the whole self check-in service we had to stand in line. I had forgotten how much we used to queue at airports before self check-in was a thing. Which it still isn't in Germany. After much waiting we got our boarding passes and dropped our luggage and then went back around the security so that we could enter it. Great design, guys! The security control went pretty smoothly until they got to the woman before us. Apparantly a first time flyer who couldn't be bothered to read signs. She hadn't prepared anything before it was her turn and she had brought her entire make-up and toileteries bag with her carry-on and hadn't put anything into the little plastic bags so the security guy had to ask her to leave the queue and she put up a lot of fuss about it, but finally left the queue so my dad and me could prop down our coats and laptops and laptop cases and phones in the crates push them through and then smoothly go through the scanner. Get out of our way, we've done this before! :P

After security we went to find our gate and then had dinner at a restaurant close by. We both chose the burger and a last German beer (no kölsch in Düsseldorf though). The burger was really good but had some interesting components. Like coleslaw made from red beets so the burger was all pink/purple in the bottom :3 and stewed onions in the top. Still made for a great burger that we probably wouldn't be able to find anywhere in Sweden! We also met up with a group of Swedes at the restaurant and had a last chat with them before boarding our plane. This plane was bigger and the ride was much smoother. No delays, and when we arrived in Copenhagen our bags were almost the first ones to arrive! We managed to catch the train we had planned and the switch in Malmö to the commuter train out to my hometown was smooth as ever. Mum picked us up at the station and then we spent a few hours relaxing in the living room before bedtime.

Germany 2019 day 3

Today has been mostly in the line of yesterday. A lot of walking and talking, but while yesterday was more about exploring and possibly finding new contacts today was more about renewing old ties and talking to old contacts. Most of my dad's old contacts are aware who I am so today's wtf moment was when one of the contacts asked whether I was new in the company. Dude, I was born in the company. I didn't say dude, but otherwise that's what I said. I've been helping out for as long as I can remember and I've been working since I was 13 and legally could.

The day passed incredibly quickly. This year my dad decided to participate in the international Rotary meeting at the fair and I tagged along. I spent most of the time sitting a bit to the side, not really participating. But when a Japanese guy showed up my interest was piqued. After the meeting I decided that I wanted to have a look at the two Japanese companies that were present at the fair. The biggest one was a lot of fun. They had a lot of inherently Japanese things that I had never tried or hadn't tried in ages and they were all so impressed and happy when I talked to them in Japanese. Even if what I said was mostly yes, thank you, and I understand.

After the fair we went back to the hotel and changed clothes and then we met up at the Dominikaner. We had originally planned to go to Haxenhaus to have dinner, but we ended up att Früh, because most of the people we were with didn't want haxe for dinner and Früh does other dishes besides haxe a lot better than Haxenhaus. So we went to Früh and I had haxe for dinner. Delicious as always :D If I just have one chance per year to have haxe, then I will have haxe.

Tomorrow is the last day at the fair so we will check out from the hotel in the morning and then bring our luggage to the fair, and then go directly to the airport from the fair in the afternoon.

Germany 2019 day 2

Today was a day with a lot of walking. I woke up at 7am and after getting ready I walked down to have breakfast with my dad at 7.30am. Breakfast was as good as a hotel breakfast usually is, though the flow was odd so there was a lot of walking back and forth to get things, also I would've liked the bacon to be more crispy.

After breakfast we went back to our rooms to get ready and then walked to the train station to get on a train to the hall. Almost any train will do and it's just one stop.

Most of the day was spent walking around. We talked a lot to the Swedish exhibitors as well as my dad's contacts from Spain. We did tie some contacts with people from Denmark, Poland, Belgium and Ukraine which might lead to some new and interesting things. Mostly it all depends on the cost of transport. Which was one of the major reasons we didn't talk to anybody from the UK because as things are nobody can predict what will happen to transport costs and customs after Brexit has been completed.

Most of the time I spent quiet and listening, but I would like to credit myself with some ideas. More than my language abilities (which don't really matter because we never speak to anyone who knows French or Japanese) I believe that my occasional ideas is why my dad asks me to come along to these things. I have literal life-long experience with his business, but my dad and I see things differently and so we think of different things and I believe that's sometimes of use to him.

Reason why we never speak French or Japanese? French-speaking countries usually only deal in cookies or chocolate which are of no interest to my dad's business, and when it comes to Japanese the transport is either too expensive or the expiration date is too short. Also there are hardly any Japanese exhibitors at this thing. We talked to a few during my first year at ISM back in 2016, but nothing came of it due to above reasons. I really like Japanese things and would love for my dad to deal with them, but from what I've seen in Japan and otherwise, none of their things really fit what he does so dealing with Japanese things would mean opening a brand new chapter.

As is almost traditional we had bockwurst for lunch and then spent some more time walking around the fair. These days are odd because it feels like we're doing the same thing for ages and it feels like time doesn't move but then it's suddenly 4pm and you start to wonder where the day went.

Just before 6pm we left the fair hall and went back to the hotel. We changed clothes and then met up with some friends at the bar Dominikaner, which is just across the street from our hotel. This bar has become our meeting point over the years and we always meet up here for a couple of pre-dinner kölsch (beer). Anytime anyone at a bar or restaurant asks what you want to drink, always answer kölsch. After our traditional beers we walked over to a restaurant our friends knew of and had dinner there. And then we spent a whole lot of time there just talking and hanging out. Around 10pm we went back to our respective hotels.

Now there'll be a little bit of reading and then it's sleepy time. Breakfast at 8am tomorrow!

Germany 2019 day 1 - The day which was more miss than hit

So this has been a pretty crazy day with hardly anything going our way. We left my parents' place around 11am to go to the airport. We had done the online check-in thing the day before and so we just went to one of those check-in machines to print our boarding passes and luggage tags. Then we went to do the bag drop. The lady there shows my dad ahead to the queue to the bag drop, but she stops me and tells me to go somewhere else because I already have the tag. She says I don't have to stand in line, I can just scan it myself and sent my bag away. My dad has the tag too so when he hears this he leaves the queue to go with me to the automatic bag drop. My dad's bag scans fine, but ofc mine doesn't. So it takes us a couple tries to make it scan right. But finally the machine approves and sends my bag away. We move on to the security checkpoint, which for once is very fast (at least we had that working for us) and then we move on to exchange money and grab something to eat before our plane departs. After lunch we start walking to our gate which is usually somewhere in the middle of the airport, but this year it had been moved to the farthest end possible and it took us probably 20 minutes to even get there. We sit down and wait and when there's ten minutes until boarding starts they announce that the plane is overbooked by eight people and they would like eight people to volunteer to stay behind in Copenhagen for a few more hours and then go to Düsseldorf via Frankfurt later in the evening. Also receiving €150 as compensation. Three people volunteered. When it was actually time for the boarding to start they upped the compensation to €250 and two more volunteered. Still not enough so they picked eight people according to the list that would have to stay behind. Luckliy neither my dad or I was on that list. We got on the plane (the tiniest plane I've ever seen, if anyone was obese they wouldn't have even been able to get on it). Took forever to get the boarding done because the plane was so tiny and then we just stood there waiting. Then we finally got rolling and then we stood there again for a long time. Then we got rolling and we got all the way to the edge of the driveways. Where we had to stop again because they were deicing the plane before us and that took forever. We finally left Copenhagen 45 minutes late.

The pilot rushed through the whole thing to the point where only the members got appropriate service and the rest of us had to chug our coffee, without even getting a chance to buy something to eat should we want to. We land in Düsseldorf and the deboarding was just as much of a mess as the boarding because tiny planes have no room to move about in, and to stand up straight by your seat you'd have to be no taller than 5 feet or 150 cm. Bus to the terminal, pick up our bags, then from the terminal to the airport train station we got on the Sky Train (which is pretty cool tbh) and then we hurried to buy our tickets for the train only to miss it by 30 seconds and then have to wait 25 minutes for the next one. 40 minutes spent on the train and then I was really looking forward to just get to my room and relax a bit before dinner. This day had different plans.

We got to the hotel, which wasn't the same as we usually stay at. There were two receptionists, both of whom seemed completely uninterested in doing their jobs and totally lacked any kind of service-mindedness. First of all we had to fill out a form to make ourselves exempt from the city tax because we were there to work, and then we had to fill out yet another form. I think some kind of guest information form. They had computers but this hotel seemed very old-school. They even had that wall with actual room keys hanging from it. Actual keys. Wow. I've been staying at different hotels in different countries almost every year for the past 25 years and I've never seen that. That's extremely old-school to me.

I got to my room by way of an elevator the scared the shit out of me every time it stopped because it stopped with a slight bounce making me feel like it would just drop. Then I got to my room and struggled with the lock and as soon as I got the door open I could hear the radiator clanking. I tried turning the knob on it but that just changed the noise from clanking to a very loud hissing. Great. I decided to try to grab my power bank for my poor dying phone from my suitcase before going down to the lobby and demand a new room. Couldn't open my suitcase. I have never set a code, it's always been on the default 000. But the dials must've gotten rolled around somehow during transport and somehow I had received a code without meaning to. I started to try combinations, but just got more pissed by the annoyance of the constant clanking/hissing from the radiator that I just grabbed all my stuff and went to my dad's room. He struggled a bit with the suitcase but managed to get it open. And then he came with me to my room to have a look at the radiator. He also struggled with the lock to my door and he couldn't get the radiator to shut up. So we went down to the lobby and I asked for another room. She said to wait five minutes and while we waited she checked in another guest and then told us to wait another five minutes. Another guest came down and complained that he couldn't have the room he'd got due to his asthma and the smoke from the nextdoor restaurant got in there. He got a new room, no problems. Then I asked. The receptionists asked what the problem was with the room I told them and they told me that they were full and couldn't change today unless I wanted a room at a sister hotel. I asked them why they could change rooms for the guest before me but not for me, and they pretended to not know what I was talking about. But after some annoyed talking and me actually knowing the room from which the earlier guest had changed, I managed to get the room above the restaurant. It was quiet and slightly bigger. Much better. When I grabbed my luggage from my old room I decided to slip them my business card where it clearly states my position at the hotel I'm working at. Like a quiet way to tell them that I know every trick in the book, I know what they are doing and what they should be doing and how they should behave. When the receptionist noticed she tried to get me to sign another form because I had given her a business card. I took the card back and went to my new room absolutely fuming. I quickly unpacked and then went back to my dad's room. I had to walk by the lobby and the receptionist calls to me that we already had that form and "my" business card. No, they don't. They have my dad's business card attached to the form that exempts us from the city tax. I told her that if she had bothered to look at the cards she'd see they are not the same. But that it doesn't matter.

My dad and I left and went to look for dinner. We ended up inside the old and trusty Löwenbräu and each had a really good burger and a couple beers. Then we decided to have an early night. We each went up to our rooms and I had a shower and changed into jammies.

The situation with my room and the receptionists and the general appearance of this hotel appalls me. If we had acted anything even close to how those two receptionists were acting we'd get an earful from the manager. Their behaviour was lacking in all aspects. No interest, barely any attention, no smiles, no courtesy, no service-mindedness. They did the minimum required for their guests but nothing more, nothing extra. If a guest had come down to us complaining about a room and asking for a change we would've changed that room, no questions asked. All we need is a reason for the change. Even if the hotel was fully booked. Because if all guests haven't arrived yet, then we have the means to change. Changing to another hotel is a last resort thing, it's not something you do just because somebody wants to change a room early in the evening.

I've half a mind to actually tell them off tomorrow and slip them my card again. And also for once I'll be the one to leave a scathingly bad review on TripAdvisor, rather than having to respond to one.

My past 5 books: YA, a classic and fantasy

1. A Sky in the Deep, by Adrienne Young. This is a book I got in an OwlCrate a while back. I started reading not expecting much, but it turned out to be really good. I wouldn't say that I love it and the plot is pretty simple and common, but it's a plot that works. It really works even though an attentive reader sees pretty much every twist coming from a mile away. Even so I really enjoyed reading this book and it was one of those reads that I just didn't want to put down.







2. Thérèse Raquin, by Émile Zola. I read this as an old Swedish edition that I got from my grandmother. I thought I had read it before, but I mixed up the title with Thérèse Desqueyroux. This book was a lot less "classic French" than I expected. Not so much melancholy, but more about moments and actions. I could draw parallells partly to Thérèse Desqueyroux, partly to Madame Bovary and partly (actually) to Le Père Goriot. It's this whole piece of life writing that makes it seem like so many classical French authors drew inspiration from each other. Anyway, I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would. French literature was so ruined for me when I studied French literature, that I just expect everything to be a hard read that the author has made more complicated than necessary just for sport. But this book was really good and I could actually see myself reading it again.

3. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. I've seen the movie more than once, and I really wanted to read the book. And I loved it. Just like I love the movie. Death is a great storyteller and the random tidbits throughout the book just struck my fancy rather than being annoying. I just really enjoyed this book.










4. Half A War, by Joe Abercrombie. Finally got around to reading the last book in this series! The funny thing with this series (and with Abercrombie's writing in general) is that you keep discovering that you don't really know this character liek you thought you did. In the first book I liked Yarvi and felt for him, in this third book I'd just rather he wasn't. Or didn't. Anything he did throughout this book I'd just rather he didn't. Yarvi is so ruthlessly ambitious and clever that he never once stops to consider what consequences his actions might have. Princess Skara was the main character of this book (like Yarvi was the main in the first, and Thorn Bathu was the main in the second) but Skara seemed so... flat. I actually had to pick out the book and read the back cover to remember her name. And Skara just kept giving me Elizabeth Swan vibes throughout the whole story. Thorn Bathu was consistently the best character in this book, just like she was in the last one. I also really liked Raith.

5. Sharp Ends, by Joe Abercrombie. Abercrombie's first collection of short stories. They all tie in to the books in the First Law universe. Same places and mostly familiar names, cities and characters. My favourite stories were the ones featuring Shevedieh. There's something romantic about thieves in fantasy settings that I just really enjoy. And if you add the obtuse Javre and the douche Carcolf to the mix you have a romantic comedy! Yes, really. Anything featuring the Northmen was also good but for an entirely different reason. I just love how blunt they are and how simple they make life seem even though they're surrounded by war and death. This was a really enjoyable collection. The stories I didn't enjoy reading were properly distanced between the really good stuff so when I was done with it the feeling was that it was really good. But there are some stories that were a drag. Like the very first one.