Cape to Milan

Hello everyone!

It’s 2010 and Caroline and I are going on a journey from Cape Town, South Africa, to Milan, Italy. After spending a couple months on Southern Africa, we are going to fly to Ethiopia for a couple weeks, then we’ll fly to Istanbul and make our way across eastern Europe.

We didn’t spring for the nonstop tickets from Atlanta to Capetown, so our outbound journey involved consecutive overnight flights, with a full day of waiting around in Frankfurt. At the suggestion of my father, we took Germany’s (shockingly pricey) high speed trains to the historic city of Heidelberg to spend the day.

Heidelberg was very nice–set in the bottom of a deep valley, with a historic quarter right next to a nice river. We ate German food, had coffee in the oldest restaurant in the city, and explored the old quarter. The drawback: Germany is in the grips of a horrible blizzard right now, and we are dressed for summer in the Western Cape!

It wasn’t just us who were thrown off by the blizzard–the whole of Germany seemed messed up, including the world-famous punctuality of the German rail system. We learned that when a train is canceled, it just  disappears from the departures board without explanation!

In order to stay out of the bitter cold as much as possible (which is not that much, it turns out), we huddled into the lower section of the train station–which we found can be described as “lower” in more ways than one. After an hour or two brushing shoulders with some of Germany’s less savory characters, we finally caught a train back to the airport, checked in, ate a rather odd chicken curry sandwich at the airport McDonald’s, and took a nap in anticipation of the 10-hour flight to Cape Town.

Well, we did the best we could with our “day trip to Germany” considering the circumstances.