european road trip #2

so picture us with 2 heavy and cumbersome cases for mike's 20 work laptops, a huge suitcase with a weeks worth of clothes for the family, a very large backpack filled with computer equipment, 2 smaller bags that we hand carry and 2 kids. we are chilling in the train station with plenty of time to kill, watching the departure board for our train information. time ticks away and trains numbers that depart after ours start appearing on the board. suddenly mike says 'why don't i see more night trains here? where are the trains to paris, rome, and amsterdam?” i take our tickets and go seek out a train station official. i find a help desk and ask her about our train and she informs me WE ARE AT THE WRONG EFFING TRAIN STATION... she tells us to go down 2 flights of escalators and catch a subway train to frankfurt south station – the next one departs in 8 minutes. i run back to mike and within seconds we grab all of our stuff and negotiate said escalators and children (who still don't like getting on an escalator without holding somebody's hand...). we find the track and 3 minutes later the subway arrives. we have to go 6 stops before frankfurt south, then find our track for our train and we have about 17 minutes to do it...

once on the subway i thought i was going to throw up. i could not believe that we didnt verify we were in the right place. with all that time we killed in the station we could have made a simple inquiry and saved ourselves this problem. what would happen if we missed out train?? i didn't want to think about it. we just took it minute by minute and prepped the kids for the sprint out of the subway and up to find our departure track. 2 strangers helped us with our stuff up the stairs and we located our track to find all of the train personnel still having a smoke on the platform. we made it! we get on with maybe 3-4 minutes to spare.

when we booked this trip we reserved first class sleeper cabins to and from copenhagen. but something happenedwith the reservation and it never went through – mike found out that there were no more first class cabins to copenhagen so we had to take a second class cabin. they have 6 bunks in them so it was a gamble - would be have one to ourselves or would we have 1 or 2 other people in it? we find our cabin which has 2 men and a shitload of luggage already in it. but at that point, having just barely made it on to the train, i didn't care. we were there and we would make the best of it. upon entering the train david says quite loudly 'mom, these bedrooms are small'. i heard couple of passengers laugh.

in our cabin was a german man who was off to buy a new car in denmark to save 7000 euros that he would have paid in germany and a chinese man that spoke no english and just a small bit of german. the kids practiced the words they learned on Ni-hao Kai-lan and he was quite impressed with david's pronunciation of 'happy chinese new year' in mandarin.

we found a locked room to put most of our stuff in and settled in for the evening. the kids thought it was pretty cool to pull the beds down and climb in. despite having an ongoing, yet silent, argument about how much the window should be open, it was really like taking a long plane journey and having other passengers around you. the kids feel asleep pretty quickly but mike and i had difficulty falling asleep and barely got more than a few cat naps in the whole night. the other guys had no problem sleeping... we were roused pre-dawn for a passport check at the danish border. i think i had actually been sleeping at that moment, too. david, who slept in a bed and not a crib his entire life, fell out of the upper bunk. how he was unscathed by that we will never know. then i pulled naomi out of her bed and brought her into mine. i didn't need 2 kids falling out of bed and i was continually worried about the train stopping short and bodies flying.

morning came and we arrived around 10am, got in a cab, and went to our hotel to start our time in denmark. our hotel had changed ownership that day from a starwood to a scandic hotel (thanks for the notification starwood...) and there was some big shin dig in our lobby with lots of men in skinny pants.

my initial impressions of copenhagen: everything costs a bloody fortune and everybody smokes. seriously, things are double and triple the cost i am used to paying. a latte that would cost me $2.50 in wisconsin and $4.50 in chicago, costs $7 here. a bowl of soup in our hotel is $20. an order of fries with our falafel was $7. how do people afford living here?? i inquired about cigarettes and they were not as expensive as i thought – about $6.50 a pack. i guess it is a relatively cheap addiction to have. i can't wait to get back to amsterdam where things are relatively cheap!