When we boarded the flight, there were a few minutes of utter chaos. The reality of the situation was that the Stuttgart passengers were gatecrashing the Hamburg flight, but no one had taken this into consideration when allocating the seat numbers. Consequently, my seat was double booked and I had to wander aimlessly down the plane until I found another one which looked randomly free. It was one of those tiny little Embraer aircraft which only have one seat on the left hand side of the aisle, and so I was able to sit in antisocial peace on my own

The captain was a very nice man, and apologired profusely for the confusion. Methinks he was pretty hacked off himself as nobody had properly explained to him or the air crew what was going on. I later found out from the air hostess that the first she’d heard of it was when she got on the plane. To be honest, they all sounded as fed up with their employer as I was.

Anyway, the plan was to head to Hamburg first and then sit and wait on the tarmac for a bit before flying on to Stuttgart. The pilot seemed a bit worried about this as it would normally be illegal for him to fly internally between German airports; the company only has a licence for certain routes. The air hostesses were also a bit worried about the legality of it, something to do with the number of hours they were supposed to stay in the air…

In a bizarre twist of fate, I suddenly realised that I knew one of the air hostesses! That is to say, I didn’t recognise her in the slightest, and was beginning to get annoyed when she came round with the drinks trolley and was doggedly pushing me to have a cup of coffee, despite my protestations that I didn’t want one. It’s a good job I don’t have a temper, otherwise I might have told her where to stick her overpriced filth. As it is, I’m a timid weak-willed sort of person and I eventually agreed to buy one on the grounds that refusal was becoming embarrassing. It was only when I reached for my purse and she whispered that no, it was on the house, that I saw her name badge and realised I went to school with her. Actually, I sat next to her in A Level Geography for two years and used to lend her my notes But to be fair, that does make it six years since I last saw her and in the intervening period she had grown a fringe.

At any rate, I had a free cup of coffee and later got passed a free bottle of water prominently labelled “crew only” which was very kind of her and caused the couple on the other side of the aisle to glare at me viciously I take back some of what I said about Flybe, because she and the rest of the crew were all very nice, and whoever’s fault it was, it wasn’t theirs.

It being a bright sunny day, the flight was pretty nice. As we took off I had a great view of Birmingham city centre and could even make out the tower of Old Joe, the university clock in the distance. The approach to Hamburg was also very enjoyable as we came in low over a massive river which I assume was the Elbe. We sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes while the baggage of the Hamburg passengers was unloaded, and we also acquired a new load of passengers whom the aircraft was supposed to be taking back to Birmingham but who were due the surprise of a little detour via Stuttgart. Meanwhile I was feeling awake enough to read, and skimmed through one of the pile of Esperanto magazines which flood through my door ever since I joined TEJO. This one was a little surprising. An article about a group of Japanese people who find cleaning toilets a semi-religious experience, and another about a town in Poland where some school children had beaten up their English teacher. I was surprised to find a very nice gentleman whom I had met in Southport not falling far short of praising this as a victory over linguistic imperialism. After that I decided a bit more normality was in order and went back to Engleby, which is good but potentially very dark.

Anyhow eventually we took off, eventually we got to Stuttgart where it was a horrible cloudy day, and here there was a further commotion because the German authorities boarded the plane and requested everyone get off, even those who were intending to stay on for Birmingham. Everyone was most put out by this, including the cabin crew. Stuttgart is only a small airport though and by the time all this had been resolved and I had got through passport control, I was pretty chuffed to find my bag had already been offloaded and was sitting all on its own on the baggage carousel

Sadly I’d just missed the hourly bus to Tuebingen but there was the advantage that this gave me time to search out something to eat. I ended up with a Pizzabroetchen and a Vanilleschnecke from the airport bakery, and headed outside to get some much needed air whilst I waited for the bus. There is an excellent bus service which ferries people between Tuebingen and the airport in less than an hour, which is quicker than the same journey by train. The road journey is significantly prettier and more exciting too, although I was worried that even armed with a timetable and an email of instructions, I might fail to stand up on time to get off at the correct stop for my sister’s suburb. I sat right by the door just in case.

I needn’t have worried though because everything went according to plan, and having got up at the hideous hour at 4am I finally arrived at my sister’s flat at half past one. By this time I was in a tired sort of daze and had I not been so pleased to see her, I would certainly have fallen asleep. As it was we had some bread and cheese with coffee, and I started to feel a bit better I was disconcerted when sitting in her kitchen to look out the window and see a cow walking past But there is a sort of farm behind the accommodation block and now the warm weather is here they have released the cattle to graze

We headed into town on the bus in order to do some shopping. It’s Fathers’ Day next weekend and so I thought maybe we should take the opportunity of being together in the same country to get a joint present. This was a bit of a race against time, because no shops open at all on Sundays and they mostly close at five on Saturdays. Also, there aren’t really many shops in Tuebingen at all. In the end we went to the famous Gummi Bear shop, which sells gummi sweets in every shape and colour you could possibly imagine. I wanted to buy myself a bag of gummi cocks but in the presence of my sister didn’t dare In the end we settled for a box of sweets for my dad in the shape of a car, which looks quite cute That mission accomplished, our next task was to buy some peppermint flavoured Rittersport for my mom.

Rittersport is the only famous brand of German chocolate of which I am aware, and they make it in a factory about twenty miles from where my sister lives. Its uniqueness consists of the fact that the bars are always completely square, which is apparently because they were initially designed as bars which would fit into a sportsman’s pocket (hence the name). It now comes in a variety of different flavours, all with a different colour packaging, and is quite delicious. I wouldn’t choose it over Cadbury, but as far as I am concerned Cadbury is sacred, and I would choose it over Lindt, which I really don’t think is that nice despite how much people always go on about it and how much it costs. The nicest flavour of Rittersport is the mint, and until very recently it used to be obtainable from the foreign section of the posh food hall of Rackham’s in Birmingham. Recently, however, they appear to have run out, hence my mother’s request that we bring her some back. This should have been a simple request to fulfil, but was complicated by the fact that because there are so many different flavours of the chocolate, the first three shops we went to didn’t have the mint We obtained it in the end though in a little chemist where there was a big poster over the display saying, “Ich treibe Rittersport”. I thought that was quite witty

By this point the shops were closed anyway, so we decided to go for a bit of a walk. We climbed a hill which lies just behind the city centre and on which the poshest and most expensive houses are built. The majority of the most imposing houses belong to the Burschenschaft but please don’t ask me to explain who they are, because I scarcely understand it myself. They are slightly frightening anyway, and there was one particularly intimidating house we went past which had a red carpet leading up the steps to the door whilst either side of the path was lit with flaming torches Trying not to catch anybody’s attention, we progressed up the hill and after climbing through a small wood we emerged into a large clearing with a tower. The tower looked rather like it might once have been used as a prison, on account of the narrow barred windows. My sister said she thought it had been built by Kaiser Wilhelm, but when she said that I don’t think she meant one of the German rulers but rather one of the local kings who continued in existence here long after the country was allegedly united.

The tower was locked up and so we couldn’t climb it for a better view. Instead, we headed back down the other side of the hill, through some fields of peculiar German sheep and alongside a little river into the town centre. I had already arranged with my sister in advance that for dinner we were going to go to Neckarmueller, an historic brewery on the banks of the Neckar and my favourite restaurant in Tuebingen.

The Schnitzel there is really very good, and they serve Apfelschorle in big tall glasses as if it were beer One of my sister’s flatmates has just started working there and I feel sorry for her because she’s allowed to carry people’s food but not to bring them their bills, and so she misses out on all the tips Anyhow, after that we felt like pudding so wandered round Tuebingen in the twilight for a bit until we found a place that was selling the most delicious icecream I’ve had in ages. That was followed by a Latte Machiatto in a nearby bar. I don’t know why none of the coffee houses in England serve Latte Machiatto, but in Germany it appears to be everywhere. It’s a strange sort of concept, being essentially indistinguishable from a normal latte but served in a glass beaker with no handle and a straw to drink it with. It takes a bit of getting used to, drinking hot coffee with a straw, but it’s actually rather fun

I was fairly exhausted after all my travelling, and retired to my hotel before eleven. The hotel, being honest, leaves a lot to be desired. I had a bad impression of it the first time I ever saw it with the word “Fremdenzimmer” stencilled on the side in huge letters. Fremdenzimmer, it just sounds a trifle unwelcoming The girl who checked me in was unwelcoming to say the least and refused to accept that I was correctly pronouncing my own name. One of life’s phenomena which I have never understood is the peculiar perception the Germans have of English vowels. It matters not which part of Germany you visit: uniformly across the whole country, Germans are convinced that the English pronounce u as a and a as e. Hence the German word Handy, their mistaken impression of what the English call mobile phones, is actually pronounced Hendy, which they fondly imagine is excellent British pronunciation. Similarly when speaking English they talk about “a cap of tea”. What you and I might imagine was a cap, that is to say something you might wear on your head, they would call a “kep”. The Queen is not affluent, but effluent, and so on.

That aside, the main objection I have to the hotel is how incredibly dark it is. The corridors have no windows and are lit by the sort of lights which only come on when you are standing underneath them, with the result that you have to walk through a darkened passage which becomes illuminated just five seconds too late. The rooms themselves are also incredibly dark, being lit by one solitary sixty watt bulb on the far wall. I was enjoying reading Engleby so much that I wanted to get through another chapter before I went to bed, but the light was so poor that I event admitted defeat and went to sleep.

The breakfast buffet in this establishment is also not going to win any prizes. The orange juice is watered down so much that it more accurately resembles squash and there is no cereal, the choice being between muesli and muesl. I am also slightly disconcerted by the fact that I have never stayed there and not been the only person eating breakfast. It was, however, only forty euros a night, and so it’s not fair to complain

Having packed my walking boots, for Sunday we had planned a more ambitious walk. My sister had obtained some walk leaflets from the local tourist information office and we decided to combine two of their suggestions to make a longer walk of just over fifteen miles. Having finally succeeded in convincing my sister it didn’t make sense to attend Mass, we made an early start, and after the thirty minute walk from where my sister lives to the town centre, began to walk through the western outskirts of Tuebingen and ascend a hill known as the Kreuzberg. It was a baking hot day, but the walk was very pleasant and the exertion of walking uphill was relieved by the frequent patches of wooded shade. When we temporarily emerged from the trees there were some beautiful views back towards Tuebingen and the Wurmingen Kapelle, and thanks to the excellent written directions we soon arrived at a picturesque little village called Hageloch

Hageloch appears to boast only one eating establishment, which was nevertheless absolutely lovely and the woman there presented me with the biggest and most refreshing Apfelschorle which I have ever drunk in my life. We were tempted to stay and eat there, but eventually decided that we didn’t have time and needed to press on if we were going to stand any chance of making the necessary bus back into town.

Now, the second walk we were trying to complete started at one end of Hageloch, and we were quite definitely at the other, so my sister had a clever brainwave that we could climb up a hill through some apple orchards and eventually intercept the woodland path we were aiming for. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and we quickly climbed up through the beautiful orchards and reached the woods. The problem was that once in the woods there weren’t any helpful footpath signs, and we weren’t entirely sure where we had come in. We had a look at the map over lunch and were confident we had it sorted, so strode out at a brisk pace for half an hour or so, making the features on the ground fit with those on our walk instructions. After a while, however, we were faced with incontrovertable evidence that we weren’t actually where we thought we were, and were faced to retrace our steps in the hope of finding some sort of landmark which might correspond with the map.

Things were rather fraught for a while. I was rather panicked that we would be stuck in a wood forever and I would miss my flight back home. We walked for twenty minutes down one path only to find it come to an abrupt end at a precipice, and we had to walk all the way back again. At one point I caught a glimpse of a huge brown beast running through the forest towards us and screamed rather loudly on the grounds that it looked suspiciously like a wolf. Closer inspection, however, revealed that it was just a deer

My sister has her gold Duke of Edinburgh Award and is actually pretty good at map reading, so before long she managed to get us back on track, and we eventually arrived at a pretty place called Schloss Hohenentringen. The castle was very attractive indeed and probably worth seeing, but it was so incredibly busy on a sunny Sunday afternoon that I just wanted to get away from it as quickly as possible. We proceeded to climb down a narrow valley and into the village of Entringen proper. As we walked down the main road towards it we began to hear ominous rumbling noises behind us, and it soon became apparent that a particularly vicious thunderstorm was hot on our heels. We just made the village as the first drops started to fall and sought refuge under the porch of the Rathaus until it calmed down enough for us to find the busstop. There was rather a long weight for the bus, with the result that we didn’t get into town until half four, barely giving me time to get back to my sister’s, grab my stuff and make my connection to the airport.

I managed it somehow though and the goodbye was mercifully short, although I did as ever end up crying slightly. The journey back to the airport gave me time to reflect. Sometimes I wonder what we’re doing, tying ourselves down to a long term residence in England by talking about grown up things like buying a house. The quality of life seems so much better on the continent in so many ways that it is difficult to come up with justifications for wanting to live in Britain. Life in Britain always seems rather like a grey existence, making the most of the moments which fall between the general unpleasantness. I think I might rather live abroad and have a dead end job and struggle for cash than stay in England with a career and a mortgage. But I am probably romanticising it out of proportion, and of course life can be crap everywhere. I just know that if I ever end up single, I won’t be hanging around.

The journey home was totally uneventful, despite the fact that I was put sitting in row 13 I arrived home after 11, utterly exhausted, and not looking forward to my six am start for Bolton

The first thing we did upon arriving was very naturally to text my sister, who explained that she was in the middle of typing up an essay which she would then need to take into university to print and hand in. After that she was planning to do some shopping, have lunch and meet up with some friends at three for a birthday coffee and cake affair, but that she should be able to find time to meet up with us for a couple of hours once that was over, about half four. My mother wasn’t best pleased by this announcement, but she did have to bear the responsibility for it, having previously told my sister not to let us disrupt her normal routine. My sister had evidently taken this recommendation to heart.

It was cold and damp in Tuebingen, and we were all very cold and hungry. We went for a half-hearted walk along the Platanenallee before having a large pizza in what is apparently my parents’ favourite café. By this point it was gone two; that is to say, past the time at which we were allowed to check into the hotel, so we decided to do just that. It had been raining whilst we were eating and so my mother suggested we take a taxi from the railway station, where we had left our bags in lockers, to the Hotel am Schloss where we were staying. I was of the belief that this was somewhat unnecessary as it was at worst a ten minute walk but likely to run to a comparatively expensive taxi fare due to the one way and pedestrianisation schemes in place around Tuebingen. My mother explained that she didn’t want the suitcases dragged through puddles, so I offered to carry the heavy one (hers) and give Dad the light one (mine), but my attempts at thrift fell on deaf ears, and so it was that we arrived at the hotel in a taxi.

The journey was actually a bit hair-raising, because the drive up to the Hotel am Schloss commences via a very sharp turn up a steep and narrow cobbled street. The taxi driver was a woman, and I suspect formed the opinion that we were slightly mad; firstly for taking a taxi such a short distance with such a small amount of luggage, and secondly because my mother, in an attempt to convey how strange it was to be sitting in the front seat of a car which was travelling on the wrong side of the road, randomly announced “Ich denke, dass ich Taxifahrer bin”.

The Hotel am Schloss is a rather grand affair, one of the most expensive hotels in Tuebingen. It is situated at the top of a hill, adjacent to the very impressive Tuebingen castle. The rooms have views over the mediaeval old town or the Schwabian Alps, depending on which way you are facing. The restaurant is locally famous for being the best place to eat an authentic variety of the local speciality, Maultaschen, which I will describe later, and is correspondingly pricey.

We had two rooms booked, and the plan was for my sister to abandon her normal abode and come to stay in one of the rooms with me. Checking in without her, however, I was forced to make the all important decision as to which room out of the two we had booked she would prefer to stay in. The rooms were… erm… weird. I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels and I’ve never encountered anything quite like it.

Starting with the positives, they were both large and airy. one was bigger than the other, but they both had ample space for a sofa and arm chair. The smaller room had windows down the entire length of two walls of it, which were adorned with a peculiar set of beige and crimson drapes which later proved to be impossible to rearrange correctly. In the evening I spent a good twenty minutes attempting to manipulate them so that every bit of window was appropriately covered, and we still ended up with strange chinks of light coming into the room in the middle of the night. That aside, its main distinguishing feature was an enormous wood carving of the face of Eberhard (who founded Germany’s second oldest university in Tuebingen during the Middle Ages) which was hanging above the bed in a somewhat disturbing manner.

The second room was substantially larger and colder, and decorated in a bizarre pseudo-mediaeval way which I can only assume must have been chosen in a desperate bid to attract American tourists. The curtains and bedspread looked like they had come straight out of a re-enactment of King Arthur, but the most striking feature was the wardrobe. How to describe the wardrobe?! It was a flat-pack construction which looked suspiciously liked it might have come from the local branch of IKEA, and contained far more MDF than it did wood. This in itself would not have been remarkable, had the proprietors not employed someone to give it a mediaeval makeover. An artist of dubious credentials had covered it with a life-size portrayal of a couple with strangely distorted features, in a style that was so appallingly bad and un-lifelike that you were supposed to think it actually was mediaeval. It totally freaked me out, and for once I made a forceful decision that I was going to be staying in the other room!

The weather continued to be poor, so we sat in our respective rooms and used the opportunity to wrap all the presents for my sister which we had carried with us from the UK. The huge iPod speakers which my great aunt and uncle had bought for her had caused some confusion among the airport security staff earlier in the day. I only had a small necklace to wrap, so I sat in a corner and finished Der Teufel von Mailand, the truly excellent book which my sister had bought me for my birthday a week previously.

When my sister finally arrived it was nearer half five than half five. The reunion could have been strained, but the atmosphere was helped by the presence of 6 enormous 21 balloons which my Dad had blown up and I had gone round affixing to the curtain rails. There was a lot of catching up to be done, but my sister had arranged a get together of her friends for Friday night and needed to go to her place to get changed. My mother slightly bullied her into letting me come too, which was slightly embarrassing but ultimately very fun as her friends were all very nice people and because they were mainly international students, their German was in some cases not very much better than my own.

It wasn’t a late night but once we got back to the hotel my sister and I stayed up talking until gone one am, which led to me being rather tired for the rest of the trip, having got up at four on Friday morning.

It was slightly surreal celebrating my sister’s birthday abroad, but I think that she had a good time. My parents had bought her an iPod and various other people had given her money, which had been mercifully easy to pack and was much needed as her Erasmus grant has still not come through. She decided she wanted to spend the day taking us for a walk, and so we all wrapped up in the warmest clothes we could muster and set out. Behind the hall of residence where she lives there is a nature park called Schoenberg, an area of wooded hills which are protected under local law, and it was through this we walked towards a little village called Bebenhausen.

Bebenhausen, when we finally arrived at it, was quite a remarkable little place. The small village is the site of an ancient monastery which spreads over a considerable area and is still preserved in tact, having been captured during the Reformation and appropriated by the local kings for use as a hunting lodge. We spent over an hour wandering around it, looking at the different buildings and gardens, but being chilled to the bone, we soon retired to the one guesthouse establishment in the vicinity for a warming cup of coffee.

In the evening we had booked a table to eat Maultaschen in the famous hotel restaurant. It was a very small little place, with the tables so close together you could accidentally elbow the person sitting at the table next to you, and I quickly began to wish we had asked for a menu in English, being as the standard menu was written not in High German but in Schwabisch, the local dialect. Sometimes I think German dialects could really qualify as languages in their own right. One of my sister’s flatmates considers Schwabisch to be her mother tongue and dislikes being at university, where she is subject to the strain of trying to express herself in Hochdeutsch.

The Maultaschen, when they arrived, were quite strange. The only thing I can think of to sensibly compare them to is ravioli, but I feel this is somewhat of a disservice to them, as ravioli conjures up for me at least, horrible memories of school dinners, and these were actually rather nice. What you have to try to imagine is the filling from a sausage roll, wrapped in the pasta from ravioli, and being the size and shape of a small Cornish pasty. Imagine three of these on your plate, coated in a sauce of cheese, ham and tomato, and you should have a rough sort of idea. They were highly tasty, if somewhat filling, and certainly not likely to be a hit for anyone without a strong love of sausage meat.

In the evening we went out to explore the Tuebingen market. Tuebingen doesn’t actually appear to have a traditional German Christmas market of the type you might expect, but this weekend was a special chocolate festival and so a chocolate market had sprung up down the streets of the Altstadt, full of stalls selling different types of chocolate treats. There was delicious hot chocolate, which tasted rather like the chocolate river which Roald Dahl’s unlovable creation Augustus Gloop tried to drink from must have tasted, and stalls selling all manner of flavoured chocolates, with a strange preoccupation with chilli flavour. There were stalls were you could make you own chocolate, eat pancakes covered in chocolate, or buy large quantities of slabs of the stuff at knock down prices. And, of course, there was the obligatory smell of Gluehwein which seems to permeate every inch of Germany throughout December.

Sunday was kind of strained, because we all knew we were going home but were trying very hard to not let that thought affect our spirits. We had prearranged to spend the day in Stuttgart visiting the famous Christmas market there, but the itinerary was complicated by the fact that certain members of the family refused to entertain the idea of missing Mass on the Second Sunday of Advent. The Mass times in Tuebingen itself meant that if we waited to attend Mass there, it would hardly be worth going into Stuttgart at all. I thus spent half an hour on my sister’s internet, and managed to located a Catholic church in the middle of Stuttgart, no mean feat considering what a highly Protestant area it is. Mass was at twelve, which meant we had to leave Tuebingen at half ten at the latest. This wouldn’t have been a problem in any way, shape or form, except for the not so small matter of all my sister’s presents, which needed to be transported four miles across Tuebingen to my her flat. Breakfast wasn’t served in the hotel until eight, so it was nine before I was safely checked out and ready to assist her. The irregularity of bus times on a Sunday morning meant we were going to have to walk there and catch the bus back which was fine, except for the balloons. You can probably not imagine the embarrassment of walking four miles across an awakening city, carrying a bunch of enormous balloons! To say we attracted considerable attention would be an understatement.

Anyway somehow we made it there and back with no worse mishaps than me losing my pedometer down my sister’s toilet, and before long we were arriving in Stuttgart. The church I had chosen was mercifully close to the station, and the service was much more pleasant and easier to understand than the one I had attended in Tuebingen two weeks previously.

After an hour of strenuous praying, we felt in need of sustenance and set off for the Stuttgart branch of Vapiano. Vapiano is a chain of pasta restaurants which is represented across all the major cities in Germany, and is hopefully going to open in London very shortly if it hasn’t already. When it does, you have to go there! It’s trendy and pricey, but it’s such a strange experience you have to try it once. The premise behind the chain is that you get to watch your meal cooked right in front of you. When you go in they issue you with a swipe card, and then you take it to different counters depending on what you want. You can choose pretty much any type of pasta you can think of and combine it with a wide selection of sauces, then there are counters for starters, pizzas and desserts as well. You queue with your tray in front of a chef, tell him what you want and then he cooks it according to your specification, asking you how much onion you’d like and how much garlic he should put in and so forth. For fussy eaters like me it really is quite a exciting prospect to be able to tell the chef exactly which bits you want left out, and it’s also rather fun to see how quickly they can put the meal together. It’s true that you can end up standing in the queue for a while if the person in front of you has ordered something complicated, but on the whole I think the service is faster than you’d get in a more conventional restaurant and the food is really fantastic. One word of warning if you try it; on no account lose the swipe card that they’ve given you. You pay off your balance on the way out, and even if there are two of you and you’ve put all the food on one card, they need to be able to confirm the other card is unused, otherwise there’s a flat rate charge of fifty euros.

I had never been to Stuttgart before so I was greatly looking forward to it, but in matter of fact it was actually very difficult to get any sort of a feel for the place when it was literally suffocated by the Christmas market. Hordes of people thronged the streets, pushing and jostling in an excessively aggressive manner, and despite not being normally claustrophobic I began to feel quite uncomfortable with it. The streets seemed rather too narrow for the volume of people trying to pass down them, and it required real dedication to actually make a purchase from a stall. Added to that, I don’t think it was the best Christmas market I have ever seen. In previous years I have been to both Frankfurt and Cologne, and I think either of those wipe the floor with Stuttgart, if not in size at least in atmosphere and variety.

And then we had come unto the end again and there was one of those painfully sad goodbye scenes before we all bundled into the S-Bahn and away, leaving my sister standing forlorn on the platform. The journey back was unpleasant and I wouldn’t recommend that anybody ever fly with Flybe; I’ve used them three times and both times their level of customer service has been unacceptable. The first time I flew with them was to Edinburgh, and they informed us that my father had changed his ticket to fly to Malaga and that if he wanted to come to Edinburgh he would have to pay a fifty pound admin fee to change it back again. My father had not, of course, done anything of the sort, despite the fact they claimed they could prove it had been done on his card. The second time I flew with them was to Düsseldorf, and upon arrival back in Birmingham they randomly locked the entire cohort of passengers into a holding room for an hour with no explanation. On this third occasion, the plane turned out to be an hour late taking off, but there was no announcement or explanation for this at the airport, and no apology for it when we finally boarded the aircraft. Anyone who wants to fly anywhere should use Lufthansa; Flybe is not good value for what it is.

It was horribly lonely arriving home without my sister, but thankfully it’s nearly the Christmas holidays, and come next Thursday we will have her home and to ourselves for a whole two weeks

I arrived at the airport far too early and was surprised to find it empty. On reflection I suppose it isn’t wholly shocking that multitudes of people do not choose to fly at 7am on Saturday mornings in November, but it was a refreshing change not to have to queue for check-in and to walk straight through security. There were no queues for the internet terminals either, and a great deal of my time and small change suddenly seemed to disappear down a black hole, so that I scarcely had time to swallow a cup of coffee and a chocolate cake which I didn’t actually want before my flight was ready for boarding.

The aircraft was also peculiarly empty, with the result that I had an entire three seats to myself and avoided the necessity to make small talk with a random businessman. The flight passed relatively quickly whilst I tried to avoid choking on the Lufthansa regulation cheese sandwich and attempted to telepathically absorb as much of my German grammar book as possible without actually opening it. I did genuinely mean to read through it and refresh my memory because I feel like my German has been somewhat neglected of late, but there is something mesmeric about travelling which means I just want to sit and stare blankly out of the window.

I guess the great thing about being on a plane is that you’re not supposed to be doing anything else. I mean, there is very little you can actually usefully do in that sort of environment. And thus you have no qualms about giving yourself that rare permission to do nothing except be, and that can be rather enjoyable. It always interests me to discover what sort of thoughts come unbidden into my mind when I relinquish control of it. Today I ended up contemplating those dreadful three weeks over the summer when my boyfriend split up with me. I think that I came to it via the thought that the last time I was on a plane was one of the happiest days of my life to date; coming back from a holiday in France with him, which had initially been a little awkward due to our not-exactly-a-couple status, but which was perfected on the final drunken evening when he told me that he wasn’t going to leave me and start a new life in Korea. Now life is on an even keel again and August is at a safe distance to be contemplated without tears. And yet at a distance, as I discovered somewhere above Belgium this morning, it is even more frightening that it was at the time. As I ran over each encounter, each conversation, each argument, I was struck anew by how tenuous the happy ending actually was, and left almost breathless by how the pain of what might have been almost was.

I wasn’t particularly daunted arriving at Frankfurt airport by myself, having been there several times before and thus feeling fairly confident that I could navigate my way through it successfully on my own. This confidence proved to be misguided. I believe there is a gap in the market for someone to start selling guide books to Frankfurt, preferably complete with several maps. My first aim was to find baggage reclaim, which seemed a modest sort of goal for someone who has just arrived at an airport. I found myself directed down a maze of corridors and escalators, which culminated in an enormous and disorderly queue for passport control. German officials are very hot on the control aspect of passport control, and on a prior journey I have actually been reprimanded with “Nicht laecheln!” (“Don’t smile!”) for daring look cheerful during such a solemn ritual.

Eventually passing through this, I narrowly avoided being shepherding onto a connecting flight to New Delhi and proceeded to walk what felt like several miles down a rather chilly tunnel. I find long hikes in airports rather tiresome, but the admitted advantage is that if you do finally have to good fortune to arrive at a baggage carousel, your bag has not only long since been unloaded from the plane, but has already done several laps on the conveyor belt and is started to get out of breath.

Baggage safely reclaimed, my next goal was to make my way to the station, and so I was cheered to see a sign with a train and an arrow on it. Following this hopefully down a very steep staircase, I found myself in an unpleasant-looking underground subway. It felt like the sort of place where something dire was always on the verge of happening, but never actually did, probably as a result of the surfeit of policemen who seemed to be frequenting it. Walking past an Irish pub which looked like if you entered it you might never be seen again, I followed a series of further train pictures and was conducted round in a large subterranean circle before proceeding back up another escalator which returned me to the level where I had started. Resisting the temptation to reclaim another piece of baggage, I became entangled in a queue of people waiting to fly to Tel Aviv and in an attempt to at least not end up there, I started walking in a direction in which train arrows were not pointing. Curiously, I promptly found myself in the airy and spacious glass-roofed station building which I had been expecting to see all along.

Fortunately I had had the sense to buy my ticket online, and so was spared at least one further trauma. All that remained was to sit and wait for my train, a wait which was much shorter than I had anticipated after so much unexpected and time consuming exercise. The journey from Frankfurt to Stuttgart was very pleasant, on a big intercity express. I was surprised how quickly we got out of Frankfurt and into the surrounding countryside. It was a shame that I didn’t have time to stop off in the city itself, which from my limited acquaintance with it seems like a fascinating place, but time was so short that it was imperative to press on to Tuebingen.

Sadly there was a fifteen minute delay in Mannheim whilst we waited for a late incoming train from elsewhere, and so I arrived in Stuttgart two minutes too late for my onward connection. Looking at the departures board I realised that there was another local train leaving in five minutes and a rather undignified sprint enabled be to reach it seconds before it pulled away. Collapsing in a hyperventilating heap in the bicycle compartment, I was immediately interrogated by the inspector, who was upset by the fact that my ticket was specifically valid on the preceding train only, and therefore not on this one. There followed an interesting discussion as to whether or not the fact that I had missed the preceding train was the fault of Die Deutsche Bahn and whether I therefore had the right to expect to be compensated for my delay by being allowed to use the next available train without paying a fine. The inspector didn’t appear wholly convinced by my rather incoherent and breathless arguments, but in an uncharacteristic display of German flexibility, he agreed not to arrest me on the understanding that I stayed in the bicycle compartment and didn’t cause an obstruction. Bicycle compartments are not very comfortable places to sit but I was anxious not to be delayed by the hours of German form-filling bureaucracy which would ensue if I was done for Schwarzfahren (travelling without a valid ticket) and so I readily agreed. I spent the rest of the journey trying very hard to look like a bicycle. The journey was mercifully short and so by half past one I was standing on the platform at Tuebingen and wondering if that rather grown-up looking young lady who was standing a hundred metres away staring expectantly at the swirling mass of passengers, could actually be my little sister.

It was, of course. She looked different though to how I remember her looking when she left home to go and study in Germany three months ago. She seemed taller and thinner somehow, her hair was surprisingly long and she was wearing more make-up than usual. When she caught sight of me she ran towards me and hugged me, which was somewhat of a shock since we never traditionally go in for that sort of thing in my family. A pleasant shock, though…

And so began a weekend which, if truth be told, consisted largely of eating and drinking. First stop was my sister’s flat, which I have to say is both the largest and the cleanest student apartment which I have ever seen in my life. To be fair she has moved into a block which has just been extensively refurbished, and so it stands to reason that the kitchen is clean and bright and shiny, but I was impressed that the inhabitants had kept it that way and that there wasn’t as much as one piece of unwashed up washing up on the draining board. That’s Germany for you I guess! One of the conditions of the tenancy is that you make a cleaning rota and the caretaker can apparently request to see it at any time if he requires proof that your cleaning is not sufficiently organised.

From there we caught a bus into the town proper and headed to a little bakery where I had the first of the ten Latte Macchiatos which I managed to consume within two days (there’s just something so exciting about drinking hot coffee out of a glass with a straw) and something called Flammkuchen which I believe technically are from Alsace and consist of a pancakey sort of mixture with pizza toppings. It sounds a bit unusual, but is really really nice

That fortified me for a strenuous afternoon’s sightseeing in Tuebingen. My sister gave me the guided tour, which actually didn’t last that long because the place is much smaller than I expected.

That is to say, the actual town is a fair size in terms of outlying suburbs but the actual centre, the Altstadt, is rather compact and doesn’t have a terribly wide range of shops. In terms of the chain stores which you might expect to see in any European town these days, I saw H&M, The Body Shop and Benetton; that was it. I assume there must be a MacDonalds somewhere, because I can’t bear to believe that there still exists a spot on the planet which true civilization has not yet reached, but I regret to say that I didn’t actually see it with my own eyes.

Tuebingen is also rather hilly, far more so than I expected, and so I found myself getting somewhat out of breath from time to time as my sister, now accustomed to it, charged off up the hill to the Schloss ahead of me. When or why the castle was built I really can’t tell you without consulting Wikipedia, but it was suitably picturesque and the view from the ramparts was very pleasant even on the dull, grey sort of day that we had. I was a bit surprised to discover that in the area where the moat must once have been, a large group of people were practicing archery at very high speeds. Being somewhat unnerved that one of them might inadvertently hit us in the eye, we made a hasty retreat and went for a walk down by the river.

The river Neckar flows through Tuebingen and is very wide, although it doesn’t appear to be terribly deep. In the summer people punt up and down it in strange little boats not quite like the ones which they have at Oxford, but by November all these had been safely stowed away somewhere and I didn’t get to see them. It was quite a strange feeling for me to stand on a bridge and look at the Neckar. For a start I confess to being a bit of a geek about rivers; I get awfully excited every time I go to a new city which has a river, even if the river is fairly minor, and if a place I go to should have a famous river running through it then my excitement is very intense indeed. The first days on which I saw the Inn, the Rhine and the Danube stand out for me as important events in my life. No really, they do As for the Neckar… not the world’s most prestigious river and one that perhaps few people in England have ever heard of. I know I had never heard of it, aged seventeen, when a certain someone described it to me for the first time. It is a long story, which is not ever going to be told on this blog, but I once had an emotional attachment to the town of Heidelberg, through which the Neckar also flowed, and so I spent many years dreaming on a day when I would finally stand on a bridge and look at it.

It is strange how we finally get the things we wish for. I have now fulfilled my dream to see the Neckar, even if I have never been, and probably never will go, to Heidelberg. And actually, I must say I have seen better rivers!

That said, it is hard to get the full impact of the thing because someone, at some unspecified point in history (this being the narrative of my sister, of whom history is not her strongest point) collected a big pile of rubble from somewhere (no idea where) and dumped it in the middle of the Neckar. Well, not just dumped, but sort of flattened out and put earth on top of and made into a big long promenade, a quasi-island in the middle of the river, with tree planted on it, and benches, and statues. Die Platanenallee, they call it, and it would be a rather pleasant place to walk a dog, if you happened to have one, which I never would, being scared of dogs.

Down by the riverside there is a sort of tower, in which died a famous German playwright called Hoelderlin. My sister informed me of this in a solemn sort of way and did my best to look suitably impressed and not like a very ignorant person who had no idea who an evidently highly important German literary figure actually was.

“What was it Hoelderlin actually wrote, again?” I tentatively asked her after ten minutes or so of fruitlessly mulling it over in my mind.

“I have no idea,” she confessed, “but I’m sure he was someone important”.

Far more exciting than the demise of poor Hoelderlin then, is Currywurst. Now I confess that I have never eaten Currywurst, nor seem likely to, seeing as I have a strong aversion to curry. But I mention it here because Currywurst has recently taken on a strange sort of significance in the Tuebingen psyche.

For the past few months, an anonymous graffiti artist has been walking round the town in the dead of night and using stencils to spray peculiar slogans about Currywurst on any available space. This being Germany, I think people paint over or wash off the slogans as quickly as possible, but I still saw quite a selection of random phrases, Currywurst wider Krieg (Currywurst against war) being the most frequent. According to my sister, only a few weeks ago a rival artist has started spraying similar messages about Falafel. Falafel aendert sich nie (Falafel never changes) could even be seen painted on the side of poor Hoelderlin’s tower. I confess to not understanding this craze in the slightest, but my sister claims Falafel is Turkish and thus thinks the messages may have some sort of racial undertones.

Before night fell I went to check into the hotel where I had reserved a room for the night. The staff were Eastern European and had not very talkative, but the room was adequate considering that it was setting me back less than thirty quid including breakfast. The only annoyance was the lack of sufficient light to read, but seeing as I wasn’t going to be there long enough to actually want to read I can’t really complain

We soon headed out to sample the delights of the Tuebingen nightlife. There is a rather nice pub-like establishment down by the river called Neckarmuller, which specialises in different sort of beer, served in big tall glasses which look like vases for roses with exceptionally long stems. I had one of the nicest Schnitzels I’ve had in a long time, despite the fact that it was served in a beer gravy and I don’t like beer in the slightest. There was a variation on Spatzle as an accompaniment but it was completely different to the sort of Spatzle which I’ve had before; far more pasta like. My sister and I both fancied a pudding but unfortunately all Neckar Muller had on offer was ice-cream and it felt a bit too cold to experiment with it. We resolved to leave and go elsewhere on a quest for cake.

This Quest for Cake turned out to be resemble the Quest for the Holy Grail in far too many respects. As the knights of the Round Table had no idea where they might find the Grail, so were condemned to wander aimlessly through the dark forests in search of adventures, so we had no idea where in a small German town one could reasonably expect to find light refreshments of the cake variety being served after seven pm in the evening, and thus condemned to wander aimlessly up and down the hilly side streets. Mirages of cake appeared in front of us, always visible but never quite attainable due to bakeries being shut and what not. We contemplated going into a restaurant and asking if we could skip the starter and main course and just take dessert, but in the end we chickened out and had a coffee, before heading to a bar to drown our sorrows in Gluehwein.

The Gluehwein had cherry juice in it and was rather delicious. Sadly it also had cloves floating in it, and cloves being something I would rather not have to swallow whole, no other course of action was available than to try fishing them out. This proved to be difficult enough sober, never mind an hour or so later, and it’s probably a good job most of the people in the bar were German and hopefully too rusty on their English to understand our paranoid exclamations of “There’s something hiding in my drink! I know it’s there, I just cant find it!”

Breakfast at the hotel came too soon and proved to be rather an embarrassing affair as I was the only guest partaking in it. Having got up and checked out early enough to attend half nine Mass down the road, it transpired that half nine Mass had actually been cancelled, so we had a long and rather chilly walk into town on time for eleven.

My sister sort of insisted on going to Mass, but to my mind it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. Unfortunately it was a special youth Mass which meant the prayer books had inexplicably been removed. Without the words, the only responses to the German Mass which I was able to muster were Amen and “und mit deinem Geiste”. The elderly lady sitting next to me evidently thought I was a heathen and halfway through asked if she could have my hymn book seeing as I didn’t seem to be making much use of it. The normal course of the Mass was interspersed with random interludes of children singing American gospel songs. It was difficult not to crack up when they burst into a rousing rendition of “Swing low, Sweet Chariot” just before the sermon; that strange way Germans refuse to believe that English people do not render the letter a meant that they kept singing about a “cheriot”; and the whole spectacle just seemed completely incongruous with the very Germanic surroundings.

The ordeal over, I expressed the desire for more cake which led to a minor dispute with my sister over how cake is defined. When I said I wanted cake I meant something along the lines of a pastry; something light, without vast quantities of cream, which I could eat without spoiling the dinner I had spent most of Mass fantasizing about. My sister, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a more continental attitude of defining cake as a sickly gateau-like substance, and this led to disharmony over the sort of cake-establishment we wished to grace with our custom. In the end we both ended up with doughnuts we didn’t want, and moved straight on from the cafe to the pizzeria where we had already agreed to eat.

We must have sat there for two hours or more, talking about this and that. It was so nice to get the chance to talk to her properly again, and it brought home to me how much I miss her. It had got to that awkward time where we were both silently counting down how many hours we had left. We had a desultory walk round the town once more to point out a few lesser sights I might have been forgiven for missing first time round, then found another cafe in which to sit and try and pretend I wouldn’t be getting on a train in ninety minutes. And in the end I was glad when it was time to catch the eye of the waitress and leave, because there is only so long I can keep up bright conversation for whilst trying very hard not to try.

It was very strained on the platform, we both focussed on talking about something totally and utterly pointless (my boyfriend, in fact ) and then the bright red train became visible at the end of the platform and we both burst into tears and hugged each other.

The journey back, which I had almost been looking forward to, being quite a fan of travelling, turned into a bit of a nightmare. The train to Stuttgart was fine. It arrived on time and I managed to run across Stuttgart station once more and make my connection with about sixty seconds to spare. The ICE to Frankfurt, however, left something to be desired. For a start, the entire train appeared to have booked their tickets online. Now this is in principle A Good Thing. I had booked my ticket online too, and received an email telling me that I would be sitting in carriage 23 and giving me a seat number. The problem arose from the fact that a hundred other people had also received emails allocating them seats in carriage 23, they all seemed to be boarding at Stuttgart, and train carriages are too narrow to allow two people to pass in the aisle way. It seemed that everyone with seats at the top of the carriage had got on and the bottom and vice versa, with the result that there was a very ugly and ill natured traffic jam in the middle and I’m not exaggerating if I say the train was twenty minutes into its journey before all were comfortably seated.

There followed ten minutes of peace and quiet, then an announcement that we were on the outskirts of Mannheim. The train stopped, and vast quantities of people who had only just found their seats jumped up assuming we were at the station. A few minutes later there was a further announcement asking everyone to sit down and not to leave the train. Confusion reigned before clarification came in the form of another message on the tannoy. The train had broken down, something wrong with the brakes, and we were going to sit here until someone could come to look at them.

I started to sweat. I was still half an hour’s journey away from the airport and I had been allowing myself exactly two hours to check in and navigate my way back across that maze. A slight delay was not a disaster, but every minute it went by took away a minute I could afford to spend wandering round in a lost bewilderment in an attempt to find a check in desk in Frankfurt airport.

The minutes ticked by. Announcements came thick and fast. No one could be found to mend our train. Someone had now been found. The problem was not very serious, the train could be repaired on the track. The repair would take five minutes. Just another five minutes ladies and gentlemen and then we’ll be moving. We thank you for your patience. And so on and so on. Meanwhile the conductor sprinted up and down the carriage like a frightened rabbit, trying to field questions about what would happen if people missed their connections to Amsterdam. Further polite announcements were made via loudspeaker, which basically amounted to the fact that anyone who had been trying to get to Amsterdam was screwed.

As for me, I was still in with a fighting chance of making my flight, so long as everything went smoothly. Quite clearly when faced with such a circumstance, things elected to go anything but smoothly. Exiting the train, I was quite pleased to see a sign pointing to check in after only two minutes walk. Less pleasing was the fact that only two check in staff appeared to be on duty. I felt myself lucky that I was somewhere near the front of the queue but it turned out to be fairly irrelevant, as the queue declined to move an anything beyond snail’s pace. The passengers from hell appeared to be checking in at one kiosk and were having a lengthy fight with the check in girl about whether they should or should not have printed off their own e ticket prior to arriving at the airport. Check in girl number two noted this and evidently decided it was time to call it a day, closing up her desk. A small riot nearly ensued when the passengers from hell were finally processed, and a pilot then jumped the now half a kilometre long queue and checked in before us. So many irate Germans waving passports is quite a frightening sight, and it soon inspired Lufthansa to locate the extra staff which ten minutes previous it had sincerely assured us it did not have.

having checked in literally the minimum hour before my flight, I had thirty minutes to find my gate. Sound doable? I promptly abandoned all hopes of finding a toilet or a place to buy a drink, and devoted all my energies to navigating. Things seemed to be progressing well, I got through passport control with less of a wait than one normal is subjected to at Frankfurt, and arrived at security check number one. For reasons I don’t quite understand, anyone flying to Britain has to undergo two identical security checks before they are allowed to get on a German plane.

Concentrating intensely on not smiling, I managed to bundle my coat, scarf, belt, phone, passport, pedometer and small change into a tray at an acceptable speed and felt rather proud, until I got reprimanded for putting my bag directly onto the conveyor belt and not in a tray on the conveyor belt. Naughty me! I avoided being taken into a little booth to be searched by a very unattractive armed policewoman, and began to redress myself whilst waiting for my bag.

My bag didn’t come. It took a few minutes for this to register, and then I became rather anxious. I noticed that it had been isolated over to one side, and that a number of people were alternating between staring at it and pointing at me. What on earth could be wrong? I was hit by the sinking realisation that I had left an empty bottle of apple juice in the side compartment. Could this be what was causing such a stir?

Eventually I was approached by a rather daunting official and asked to confirm that this was my bag. Having done so, he asked me to unzip the side. I did so, already forming the necessary German apologies for having forgotten the empty bottle, when I discovered to my surprise that this was actually the side with my purse in.

“Open your purse!” the German commanded, and I duly did so. He peered at it crossly, and informed me that I was carrying a suspicious number of Euro coins.

???!!!

Okay, so I did have quite a bit of small change, because I still haven’t quite got my head round euros and so prefer to also pay with notes for the sake of speed and convenience. But I didn’t have an excessive amount, it being only an average sized purse, and so I was rather nonplussed. I started to regret having admitted to speaking German, because I think sometimes they let you get away with more if you put on an act of being English and stupid. All in all I was detained for fifteen minutes while I struggled to convince the Germany security team that there was no sinister motive in me attempting to carry a moderate quantity of 5 cent pieces out of the country, but in the end I succeeded and started to move towards my gate with a slow jog. I had around ten minutes until boarding!

By virtue of my extraordinary sense of direction (?) I ended up at security check two just as my flight was called for boarding. I was somewhat apprehensive that I would have to justify my coins all over again, but luckily there was only one man on duty and he seemed far too preoccupied with the Polish passport of the lady in front of me to care about my collection of coppers. Phew! I literally ran onto the bus to my plane with thirty seconds to spare and that was it, one adventure successfully concluded

Now I can’t wait until next weekend, when I can do it all over again!