To Berlin

On Friday, July 31^st, we had breakfast in the Colbert’s bright, cheerful and colorfully decorated breakfast room, then checked out around 8:30. 

We walked the few blocks to the station, bought our tickets for the train to the TGV station and went up to the platform to wait.  And wait: the train was late.  The train following it was late.  The train following that was late.  Our TGV train to Lyon was scheduled for 9:49, and it was now past 9:00.  We talked with a young Chinese woman who spoke very good English.  She and her friend were on their way to Mont St. Michel, and they had already missed their connection.  Eventually (9:12, I think), a train arrived and everybody who had been waiting piled on.  When we got to the TGV station we discovered that the problem (having to do with signals) that had stopped the trains going into Avignon Central had also delayed our TGV train from Marseille.  It arrived maybe half-an-hour late and we boarded.

As we already knew, the train had been overbooked, so there were people standing by their luggage at the ends of the cars, where you get on and off.  I got Mary Joy into her reserved seat, found a place to put my bag and went back to where the others were standing.  Once the train started, some pulled sown some seats from the wall and sat.  I checked to see if I could sit in the restaurant car, but the tables were mostly standup.  I came back to Mary Joy to see how she was doing, when the woman across from her, who was traveling with a teenager and a three-year-old, offered to take the little girl onto her lap and give me that seat.  They, like we, would be getting off at the next stop, which by then was less than an hour away.  That was very kind of her, and I accepted her offer.

Soon we were back at Lyon Part-Dieu Station.  We went out the front and there was the stop for the RhoneExpress train to the airport.  For some reason, the ticket machine wouldn’t take my Visa card, but it did accept my MasterCard ATM debit card, for a total of over 29 euros for the two of us, a price that surprised Mary Joy.  It was a half-hour ride along the line used by the trams, though farther, and I think the car was a tram car.  Across from us were a young Italian woman and her mother.  The younger woman got a round-trip ticket from the conductor, while she got the older woman a one-way ticket, handling the transaction in French.   The daughter was apparently living in Lyon and accompanying her mother to the airport for the latter’s flight back to Italy.  Toward the end of the ride the daughter laid her head on her mother’s shoulder.  Living alone in a foreign country must be hard for a young person.

At the airport station we walked and walked and walked until we reached the area to check our bags on EasyJet.  We did that, went through security, and walked to our gate, which, as usual for EasyJet, was a rather lengthy distance away.

The flight to Berlin Schoenefeld was uneventful, taking less than two hours, though, once we landed, the plane had to taxi a very long distance to get to the gate.   This airport was supposed to have closed in 2010, to be replaced by a new Berin-Brandenburg Airport next door.  When our friend Marika flew to join us in Venice in 2012, her ticket originally indicated that she would leave from and return to the new airport.  That had to be changed before she left.  Latest word is that the airport may open in 2017.  Or maybe 2018 or 2019.  Needless to say, this is something of a scandal and casts a blot upon the German reputation for efficiency.  Given the distance we had to taxi both coming in and going out, I wondered if they were already using the runways of the new airport, though my research hasn’t found any indication that they are.

Marika met us, joyfully, in the arrival hall.  We went out to the parking lot and got into her car, and she drove us into the city.  When we were settled, we, Marika and her brother, sister-in-law and two nieces had pizza for dinner up on the roof terrace of her building.  It was good pizza and very good company.