My Journey Begins in German Airports...

      Hi friends and family! I decided to start this blog so that you guys could get a glimpse of what I am up to and participate with me as I discover new lands! As the title says, the first place we traveled to was Berlin! My girlfriend, Katie, will often be mentioned in this blog as well, as we frequently travel together. Our flight was on Lufthansa. I had never flown with them before so I didn't know what to expect. The flight itself was actually super nice! They had TV shows and recent movies to watch. I watched The Avengers, Men in Black 3, and New Girl.

      There was a young couple with a baby directly to the left of me. I thought this would be bad (who doesn't dislike having a baby next to them on the plane?), but it ended up being great! The baby was super cute! Whenever it would look at me I would make a really happy, smiling face and it would smile back! I did that like 30 times throughout the plane ride and it always smiled back! She started banging my tray a little at one point so I banged it back, and we took turns banging the tray for about 5 minutes. It was adorable! After that, the mom put the baby on the dad's lap and they banged the mom's tray for awhile. They got jealous of me.

Our Lufthansa plane

      We were happy to finally be off that 9-hour plane ride! Little did we know that this was the happiest we would be for the rest of the very long, stressful day.

      Upon entering the airport we discovered that our connecting flight from Frankfurt to Berlin had been cancelled. We didn't know this yet, but Lufthansa ground workers were on strike...goodie. Katie and I had no idea what to do so we went to the line that people who needed to re-book their flights were supposed to go to. We stood in this line for about an hour and had gotten about half way through the line. We were clearly not the only flight that had been cancelled. We began to have second thoughts about this line so I tried finding a clerk to help me (I had done this earlier, but they were not really knowledgeable enough about the airline to help). The clerk I finally got a hold of told us that we were in the wrong line and needed to move to a different line.

      Long story short (because this is stressing me out just having to think about the experience again) we stood in 5 different lines for a total of 5 hours before finally getting new tickets. Upon arrival in Berlin we then had to stand in line for another 1 1/2 hours because our luggage did not travel with us to Berlin so we had to fill out paperwork to have it mailed to us. We were finally able to leave the airport after many strenuous hours. We took a taxi to Biesdorf which is where Katie's brother and his family live. Oh yeah, the taxi driver did not speak English and got lost at least 3 times. 

      Summarizing, we were on a plane for 2 hours, had a break in Denver, plane for 9 hours, got off, stood in different lines for 5 hours, got on a 1 hour flight, stood in line for 1 1/2 hours, took a 40 minute taxi ride getting lost multiple times, and finally made it to our destination. If we were on The Amazing Race we would have had the worst luck in the history of the show!

      Aron and Simone (Katie's brother and sister-in-law) were letting us stay with them and were extremely generous in the time we were there! We talked to Simone for a little bit and then went to bed. This was how my European journey began...