The drive to Pittsburgh with my mom turned out to be calm and uneventful to my surprise. I had expected to be nervously sweating the whole way to the airport seeing as I was headed for a whole new continent and to meet the woman of my dreams. We stopped at Burger King, of all places, for my last meal in America for who knows how long. I had a chicken sandwich and french fries with a Coke. I can still taste it, and that isn´t necessarily a good thing because the grease in the deep frier was past spent and needed to be changed, or at the very least heavily filtered.
I ended up driving my Mom´s Kia Sedona for about 75% of the slightly over 6 hour trip. Bless her heart, she had school work due at midnight that night and not only had she not even started it yet but she would have to turn around and head 3 and a half hours south to reach her hotel room in West Virginia, where she had a job to do the next day, before she could even start it. My mom is a master of sacrificing for those whom she loves. I respect her because of that more than I have ever shown her. The airport in Pittsburgh itself was practically hidden away in the hills of Pennsylvania. It was pretty big, though it was no Denver or Atlanta that is for sure. I had flown across the U.S. a couple of years prior and flew in and out of Louisville, Denver, Tacoma, and Chicago. Now I added Pittsburgh to my list of American airports that I´d had the "pleasure" of experiencing. I will always remember the Denver airport as a small city in itself. Even Iceland´s main airport and Schoenfeld in Berlin didn´t come close in side or impressiveness. I remember thinking to myself that the rumors about a NWO headquarters being located under the Denver airport was perhaps not such an outlandish idea as some might suppose that it was. The line to go through TSA security in Pittsburgh looked massive, it stretched well past the roped off waiting area. To my surprise it took less than 25 minutes to get up to the agents. Another short 10 minutes and I was through the body scanners, tying my boot laces, and shoving my laptop back into my computer bag. Shouldering my backpack I headed towards C60, it was the furthest gate in the entire place to my knowledge. Arriving to the terminal I began to remove my passport and tickets from my pocket and as I did so, to my great surprise, the lady behind the desk pulled out a microphone and spoke into it with saying something like, "Jordan Quinn, please come to the service desk at gate C60." I was so nervous they were going to tell me I couldn´t fly out of the country for one silly reason or another... nothing is surprising anymore. Thankfully it turned out to be no big deal. A couple from the Netherlands hadn´t been able to secure seating in the same row and had asked if they could switch tickets with me. I obliged even though at first I was a bit disappointed knowing I had lost my window seat for my first flight across the Atlantic. Oh well, that´s just the way things go sometimes I told myself and truly I felt blessed regardless, after all I was getting to leave the country and pursue the life I truly desired. Nothing could bring me down. 20 or 30 minutes after our scheduled boarding time we were finally on the plane and ready to go. The flight was slightly over 6 hours long, it is the longest flight I´ve been on so far to this day. I will never forget coming into Iceland, it was still dark but the sun was just beginning to lighten the sky enough to make out the dark waves below. The coast was lit up with lights and a boat or two was bobbing up and down in the water. It was truly a pleasant sight. Due to being the middle of December it was pretty chilly out in the open air of Iceland, though it was far from the sub artic tempatures the name of the place tends to mislead people into anticipating. To my understanding, Iceland is more green than it is Ice, and Greenland is more Ice than it is Green... point being, don´t judge a book by it´s title! The flight leaving Pittsburg had been delayed, so was the flight leaving Iceland. I landed in Berlin almost a full hour late. I had basically two hours to figure out how to get 25 or 30 kilometers across the city to the main bus hub in order to catch my bus to Zagreb. This is when my phone decided to stop accepting wifi from any source what-so-ever. Talk about fighting panic. I tried for 30 minutes to find a signal that I could connect to before I realized it was futile and just started asking random airport workers and security for directions. After speaking to 5 or 6 individuals I finally talked to a guard who pointed me to the train station. I had been looking for a shuttle bus and now changed direction. It was well after 1pm and I was trying to catch a bus out of the country at 2:30 PM. I ended up paying triple what I needed to for my train ticket (7.5 Euro instead of the 2 Euro it should have been) because the ticket machines were in German and I couldn´t google translate anything with my phone being out of service and unable to connect to wifi. On the first train I spoke to a couple of guards who again pointed me in the right direction to catch the next train which would finish carrying me across the city and deposit me about 1 block from the main bus station. I got off where they told me, I found a local buying a ticket at one of the machines and recruited his help in purchasing mine. I couldn´t actually understand what he was saying, and he pretty much just took the money from my hand and did it for me. I was paranoid that he was giving me the wrong ticket but it ended up being exactly what I needed. 20 minutes later I was off the second train and headed towards the bus station. It was 2:30. The buses left while I was standing in the rather large and slow moving ticket line. The next bus wouldn´t be leaving for Zagreb for 7 hours! I was depressed at first, like with giving up my window seat on the plane from Pittsburgh, but quickly recovered when I looked around and realized I was in Europe and half of my journey was over. I had driven several hundred miles, flown several thousands, and now would take a 900 mile bus voyage to finish it up. I walked around Berlin a bit, never straying to far from the familiar streets directly near to the bus station. I walked into a couple of stores, checked out a couple of food places, took some pictures like any other lame tourist would, and even paid to use the public bathrooms for the first time in my life. I had a tiny bite to eat and smoked half a pack of cigarettes while I waited for bus number N60 to show up. I was never so happy to step onto a bus in all of my life. It was also the first double-decker bus I´d traveled on. Way cool, much nicer than the Greyhounds or Coaches back in the States. Austria, the Czhek Republic, and Slovenia passed pretty quickly. The 16 hour bus ride didn´t seem nearly so long as it actually was. I don´t quite remember where all we stopped other than Prague and Vienna, both of which I pretty much adored due to the vast differences in culture and architecture as well as the general energy. Europe is nothing like the States. Finally I reached Zagreb after the hour plus long wait in bus terminal at Vienna. I saw Zvjezdana waiting for me on the curb and my heart melted on the spot. TO BE CONTINUED...
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December 2018
AuthorWriter, nature lover, poet, pagan, occultist and blogger. Categories
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