Getting there is half the battle

"Maybe my problem is just that I don't travel enough," I thought to myself as we waited in a German airport for our fourth, and final, flight.  Sure, packing has never been my best talent.  It had long ago joined cooking, tidying, and singing on my mental list, "Things I Wish I Could Do Well But Have No Chance of Ever Mastering".  As I desperately tried to squish my carry-on, using every pound of my body to allow the zipper to painfully pull the bag closed, I recalled the past 20 hours of my life.

My voyage to France was going flawlessly...until the first flight was cancelled.  Hannah, Megan, and I glued smiles on our faces as we worked out a new set of flights to get us to France.  Snowstorms in Philadelphia meant our Philadelphia-Frankfurt flight would not be taking place.  This was not a real problem, however, seeing as we would never make it to Philadelphia because the Pittsburgh-Philadelphia flight was cancelled as well.  After patiently waiting an extra four hours at the Pittsburgh airport, the journey to France took us through Raleigh, Charlotte, and now, Frankfurt.  Although we had made it this close, Frankfurt brought more than just language barriers for me and my (limited) french-speaking travel companions.

Going through customs seemed easy at first: show the official-looking German man my passport, tell him I'm studying in France, and go to the next room.  I watched Megan, our guinea pig, successfully pass into the next room and followed her lead.  What I found was not what I wanted to see: Next Room is a bad place.  Next Room is a dimly lit room full of conveyor belts and machines.  Today, however, the machines are not running and nobody is in Next Room to help.  Next Room has no exit.  So I did what seemed obvious at this point; I waited for Hannah.

Hannah was right behind me and I'm fairly certain this girl has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit.  Hannah enters, looks around but also sees no exit.  Now I've known Hannah long enough to know that when she's stumped, the rest of us are in trouble.
"Typical.  So typical.  I make it all the way across the ocean to get stuck in a room," my brain tells me.
But then, another girl enters Next Room and she looks like she knows what she's doing.  She only pauses for a moment before she maneuvers around our paralyzed group and walks straight into a wall.  I tried to stop her.  I warned her that we couldn't find the exit but she ignored all my input.  Really, I didn't want it to have to come to this.  As I mentally quiz myself on my first-aid skills (after all, a lifeguard is never off-duty), I see the wall open right before her face would have bounced off the foggy glass door.

So we learned our first lesson: traveling to other countries means plenty of embarrassing moments.

And that's where this blog came from.  Instead of spending my time embellishing travels to make me sound cultured and sophisticated, I'm going to spend my time embellishing all of my embarrassing moments to make me sound as lost and clueless as I really am.

Look for Part 2 of the Frankfurt Failure to read what else can happen on a six-hour layover in a foreign country.