Friday, June 29, 2007

Bremen Bound Finale!

Needless to say, with the whole thing with the money problems that I had, Frank was not in a good mood. Neither of us were in a good mood at that point to be exact. We just wanted to get to where we were staying and sleep. We had been up for close to 24 hours at that point with little sleep. So we went down to the platform (Frank was informed of the platform by talking to one of the train station workers) 12A to wait for the train. Waited about 15 minutes when a train pulled up on 11A, it was heading to Bremen. So we figured it should work, even though it wasn't the train for 12A. So we hop onboard, lugging the baggage around. Thankfully there was a spot for us to throw the baggage into without taking up seat space.

After we got on the train, a gentleman sat down across from me, so I wanted to confirm with him that the tickets that we had bought were correct. He said they were, so we were good. It took us about an hour to get from Hamburg to Bremen. The countryside was glorious, I kind of figured that we would see almost constant villages or something like that when travelling, but that wasn't the case.

Well, we finally get to Bremen and get off the train. Well, we figured that we would be meeting our advisor at the platform, but we didn't see him. Actually we had no idea what he would look like actually, but I thought that seeing I had sent my photo into them, they could at least see me. Frank didn't send his whole passport in, just the number. So we waited for a few seconds, and saw that there was an elevator that went down below the tracks. So we caught a ride down the elevator, and looked for the main entrance. We found an entrance, but it turns out that it was the back entrance. We waited at the back entrance for a little bit (didn't know it was the back entrance at the time), but our advisor didn't show. So we decided to give him a call. Got his voicemail. Or at least we think we got HIS voicemail. Not sure, but didn't want to leave some random message on someones voicemail if it wasn't the right guy.

So being low on patience and sleep, Frank looked around for another entrance and found the main entrance. So we checked out the directions to get to where we were staying, headed out to the Tram/Bus stops, and waited for the right tram/bus to come along. We needed the #4 train to take us to the right spot, but we couldn't find where to buy the tickets. There was a ticket center, but it was closed. So while waiting for the train, our advisor, Mr. W, showed up. He said that he was waiting on the train platform but couldn't find us. I suspected that he might have been on the wrong platform. Well, we all piled into the #4 train, and headed for our temporary home, talking about our experiences along the way. I could actually feel my mood get better as the minutes passed. We headed down the HeerstraBe Schwachhauser to our street where our temporary home is. We followed Mr. W to the house, got introduced to Mrs. C (Could be Miss, not sure what happened with husband, she has 2 adult children), and Mr. W handed us over to her. What she has is a 4 bedroom, 1 and a half bath... condo I would give a guess. Well, Frank and I didn't even consider dinner at that point because we were so tired. We crashed. Tried adjusting my alarm clock according to the time, but found out the next day that I was two hours off. I "think" I might have slept for 10 hours straight, but I'm not sure. And that was the first day. :-)

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