With the cancellation of my flight, my weekend got off to a bit of a rocky start. I’d had to get up at four in order to get to the airport on time, and was a little annoyed that my taxi had set me back a whopping twenty five quid Admittedly my mother had warned me about this, explaining that a new change in legislation meant taxis were charging substantially more for fares at antisocial hours, but even so I felt faintly outraged. Nowhere near as outraged, of course, as I felt when I got to check in and became aware of the debacle with my flight. Despite the fact that it wasn’t quite six am, I was so frustrated that I had to go to Costa’s for an iced latte (any excuse), and spent the rest of the time wandering around the poor selection of shops in Birmingham airport’s grubby little terminal two. I was tempted to buy my boyfriend a handheld fan which squirts water on the grounds that he constantly experiences menopausal hot flushes, but in the end I didn’t because I figured he was probably too macho to want to use it in public (more…)

Since I was accompanied by my parents, this second weekend in Tuebingen was always going to be rather more sedate and rather less fun. We were all travelling out there together to celebrate my sister’s 21st birthday, and this time my mother had booked the flights, which were via Stuttgart and thus far less stressful. Stuttgart seems to be a small and quiet little airport, at least before 10am on a Friday morning. Quite why my mother had booked the flights for so early in the morning was something of a mystery. The weather in Britain had been so stormy during the preceding couple of days that a strong tail wind allowed our flight to arrive thirty minutes ahead of schedule and so it was that we found ourselves disembarking from the train in Tuebingen shortly after 11am. (more…)

Getting a flight at 7am on a Saturday morning for a quick weekend away in Germany always seems like such a good idea, until the alarm goes off at four. Having not had more than five hours sleep all week, it was somewhat of a struggle to drag myself out of a nice warm bed into the freezing cold and darkness of the house, with the result that I was hardly ready when my taxi banged on the door. The taxi driver seemed friendly enough, apologising profusely for the fact that the temperature in his taxi was sub-zero, but he then proceeded to drive me to the airport via a route which, in my long experience of taking taxis to the airport, no other taxi driver had ever taken me before. I felt a trifle disconcerted. I have a strange phobia that taxi drivers will either wilfully abduct me or misunderstand me and take me somewhere entirely different to where I wanted to go. The former has happily not yet occurred. The latter unfortunately has on at least one occasion. (more…)