Our plan had been to leave Magdeburg on Wednesday, May 26th to hitchhike to Frankfurt. We stayed Tuesday night so that Stina could go to choir practice. She's awesome at singing, by the way. ;)
But Wednesday rolled around and Stina wasn't feeling well. So we hopped on the ol' interwebs to find out what our options were. We decided we could take a Sachsen-Anhalt/Thuringen ticket (28€ for up to 5 people) to Gerstungen and then a Hessen ticket (31€ for up to 5 people) to the Hahn airport about 120 km from Frankfurt (Ryanair's hub). In theory, we'd then use mifahrgelegenheit.de to find 3 other travelers, and we'd wind up paying 12€ per person. Not bad, considering that the bus from Frankfurt to Hahn is 12€ per person alone. We'd spend the night in either the airport or the forest outside the airport. We weren't positive this would work. We couldn't be sure we'd find anyone to share the price of the tickets, but that was the least of our worries. The real problem was that, while there's information on the Hessenticket online, it doesn't show up when we use the train route planner. Also, the bus to the airport (which is the only way to get there) seemed like it might be another one of Ryanair's schemes to make money (I'm not saying it is, just that I couldn't tell if it was part of the national transportation network or a more private company that wouldn't recognize the Hessenticket).
Anyways, the whole point is moot. We found someone else's Mitfahrgelegenheit. It cost more than the ideal circumstance of our travel, but less than the probable outcome. So we left Thursday morning with this fellow, and arrived early Thursday afternoon in Frankfurt. It was still several hours until Angelika got off work (our CS host), so we ate some carrot-lentil mush, and found a park to read in. We met up with Angelika no problem. Made some dinner, went out for tea, and slept. The next morning we took this kinda expensive bus to Hahn, hung around for our flight (during which time I saw more Americans than I've seen in the past 9 months, including one reading a Magic novel), and flew to Valencia.
Here the airport is in the city. So we simply took the subway (1€ for a rechargeable card, 1,90€ per person for an AB ticket) to Christiane's flat. Since getting here, we have:
grown to hate my flip-flops
spent a total of about 10 hours on the beach so far
eaten many plates of tapas
gotten ice cream at regular intervals
gotten lost and seen a rat *this big*
visited a museum celebrating the 32nd America's Cup (which I now know is a sailing race)
stabbed my ring finger with an orange tree branch
seen the purplest flowers and agéd tiled buildings
learned "una carafa clara, por favor"
relaxed with Buffy and Smallville
buried me in the sand
and hung out on a balcony looking over the rooftops of the city.
Stina has managed most days to write her 2000 words. We've started doing sit-ups on the beach. And we never get out of bed before 11AM.
Tomorrow we start hitchhiking to Faro, Portugal. Press your thumbs for us!
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