We checked out of our apartment at 10am and did our final walk through the old town. Even at this hour on a Sunday, the crowds were growing. We were ready to be done with it. It was about a twenty minute drive to the rental car drop off at Pope John Paul II airport. It was a relatively seamless process having done this exact same thing the day before.
We then walked to get our covid test at the nearby parking lot. It was a bit of a fiasco. They were very disorganized. We pre-registered . . .sort of. They had no record of Nicole’s registration even though our credit card was charged. They were also not particularly friendly in trying to remedy this situation. I went first, and it was a fairly quick jab up the nose. Nicole was still sorting her situation out for a while after that, but got jabbed around the time I received my results via text message. It included a username and password for a website to view my results. After entering it six times, it became clear that it wasn’t working. I went up to the counter again, where they printed off a paper copy for me.
A few minutes later, Nicole received her negative result and walked away quite proudly with her certificate. If we hadn’t done the rapid test, I’m not sure how we would’ve gotten our results. With precious negative test results in hand, we went into the terminal where mask usage was (like everywhere in Poland) very half-assed. There were no self-check kiosks because that would have been too easy. Literally no one on our flight could check-in without queuing for the main desk like it was 1992. That seems to be a trend at the Krakow airport.
The rationale for this check-in process was supposedly because of Covid concerns, which as you can see by the above picture, makes no sense. Fortunately, the line did move relatively quickly and we went through security without much issue. We went to our gate area, to await the boarding process. We didn’t want to sit amongst all the other folks, so we just stood alone away from everyone. Five minutes later, a line of about twenty people queued up behind us. I guess there is a bit of a legacy from the communist days of forming random queues. Perhaps they thought we were waiting for something really good. We stepped to the side once again and people were confused.
We were the last people to board the plane with seats apart. Germany has special rules about what masks are required. Cloth masks aren’t allowed, so we were issued what they call FFP-2 masks by the Lufthansa flight attendants. I guess they want to standardize so they can more easily enforce against people wearing thin pieces of cloth or bandannas and such, but these cheap medical-style masks were not particularly comfortable (or in my view effective). Nicole sat next to a nervous flyer with a death grip on the armrests. I sat next to an unaccompanied minor who was all elbows and hyperactivity. The flight was mercifully short. We touched down in Munich, were able to exit the airport with ease and then took another hour and a half to get to a hotel that was about five miles away.
Our hotel, the Bayerischer Hof, should have been an easy one stop trip on the train, but a man at the airport station told us that the train only came once an hour and wouldn’t arrive for another 30 minutes. I knew there was a strike going on with the Deutsche Bahn, so this explanation seemed plausible enough. We took his advice and rode an earlier train out to a transfer point to catch the train toward Freising the opposite way. As it was Sunday, the trains were not frequent. After about 45 minutes of train hopping, we saw a train marked “Freising” on the front and side. We boarded. We somehow inexplicably ended up back at the airport, the end of the line. This was disheartening, but we weren’t the only confused ones. There was an older man pacing the airport station like he’d never seen such a thing occur. He has probably been meeting his mates for some beers in Freising every Sunday for decades and today the train took him to the international airport. More than an hour after we walked down into the airport station, we finally boarded the direct train to Freising.
We had a relatively short walk from the station down the cute streets of Freising. We quickly checked in and walked down the street to the WeißBrau Hüber, a biergarten with Bavarian food. Between us we ate some Wiener schnitzel with cranberry sauce, and some white Bavarian sausage that came with a pretzel.
Our waiter spoke virtually no English, so it was a little difficult to convey what we wanted, but we slogged through it. He seemed excited about the beers we ordered, though. We had all locally brewed wheat beers including one that was a Dunkel Weisse. The mugs and glasses were all labeled with “Huber Weisse,” which kept making me think of Ross in Friends with his special German laundry detergent. Nicole and I have been watching a lot of Friends since there aren’t any good new TV shows these days.
We walked back in a light drizzle back to the Bayerischer Hof to relax. If I must be honest, this wasn’t the most relaxing trip and I feel as though we didn’t have much time to unwind, but I’ll save all those notes for the reflections post. We are listed for tomorrow afternoon on a Lufthansa flight direct to Los Angeles. We already have seats since there are supposed to be quite a few open spots. With any luck, the people in front of us won’t recline into our laps while we try to eat.
passports & pepto bismol 