Cologne
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I'm in Budapest now.. using their ultra slow computers to blog... it's free anyway.. so i shan't complain.
It's 2am now and I just woke up.. why? Because I slept oh so early the night before.. in fact.. the afternoon before. The day before had been disasterous. Making the stupidest of all mistakes in any European travel.. we complacently went to the wrong airport in Frankfurt to catch our plane to Budapest.. only to realise that the next airport was 1 hour 45 minutes away!
And hence we tried to change our booking to another country/another later flight using the internet terminals there.. which sucked our Euros like it never tasted the coins for centuries (ever since the last group of idiots went through the same plight as us eons ago).. Turns out that we couldn't change our flight that flies out of the country on the same day itself through the internet. Worse still, due to the lousy cookie system and the layout of the website, we accidentally spent 2000+ euros in all (from my card) to change our flight to the exact one the next day!!
I had to call DBS immediately to block the card to deauthorise the transaction. WTF.
Since the bloodymoneysucking internet couldn't serve us well enough, we decided to call the airline company to change the booking through the phone. And yes, seems like all the machines in Frankfurt airport are Eurothirsty animals. The phone leeched our Euros like nobody's business as well. Worse still, their telephone operators dont speak ENGLISH!! WTH!! It took us to call a few different telephone operators to find one who could speak English. BUT STILL, we couldn't call the airline company because it was a service number aka the 1900- numbers we have back in Singapore. KNNB.
Hence we headed off to the airport to speak with the budget airline people at their booth directly.
12 euros to head to that wretched airport which we should have been.
During the journey there.. i could almost hear the jets of the plane that we missed booming pass the take off strip.
Damn stupid mistake. I really blame myself a lot for making this mistake. It's not like I don't know of the probabilty of 2 airports in a city. It's not like I've never heard of such incidents before. And I'm supposedly the more experienced Europe traveller.
Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn.
Things started to turn our a little better once we headed to that airport. We managed to change our flight to the same one the next day for only 75 Euros. And the extra one day we have in Germany, we went to Cologne. (18 Euros to and fro)
To me Cologne wasn't too bad.. just that it was a bit rowdy over there that day because their Cologne soccer team managed to kick themselves into the German league or something. Trust me, it was so exaggerating to see the whole town celebrating but they actually were donned in red and white. I must say like 90% of them were. Those who weren't were either oblivious to the soccer fraternity or tourists like us. Throughout the whole day the streets were filled with people singing victory songs at the top of their voices.. waving flags of their Cologne team.. doing crazy things.. and of course.. the places with the greatest intensity of these victorious sentiments were the pubs were these people watched the match with beers in their hands.
We spend most of our time at the Chocolate Museum.. Why is there a chocolate museum at Cologne? I don't know. But i was cool to see how the chocolate is processed.. though I've seen almost the same thing at the Cadbury factory before.. but oh well. Chocolate brings out the kids in us. Haha. Bought chocolate liquor. Interesting right? It's superbly nice. Bug me for it when i get back.
The Rhine river is nice and beautiful. Enjoyed a nice walk down the river.
There's this huge catherdral in Cologne which is super grand and super gothic. Too bad we couldn't go inside coz it was closed by the time we are done with the Chocolate museum. That didnt stop us from taking more jump shots and stupid videos there. Anyway.. since all of us aren't Christians, we woudlnt' have missed much anyway.
By nightfall, the streets were getting rowdy and dangerous. People were drunk and getting themselves injured. The howling and singing still kept ringing on the streets. We were tired, wary and just wanted to get back to the airport. We spent the last few hours in Cologne in trusty ol Macdonalds while we waited for our bus to pick us up back to the airport.. where we spent the night there.. yes, sleeping in the floor.. all lokkokked and shagged out.
And here we finally are, in Budapest. The whole day was spent virtually doing nothing. What a waste. Seriously.
But I think everyone got the rest we needed from this fiasco.
30 more days.
MAKE IT COUNT!!
Signed off at
7:57 am
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th reader
