Now that I’m back in Maastricht doing the day-to-day grind I’ve got to work very concentratedly to keep myself distracted at work. Not surprisingly, I find my mind wandering about aimlessly, like so:

We’ve all got our respective crushes on Wills and Harry but no girl ever really grows up thinking she might actually be a princess. None that aren’t heavily medicated, anyway.

But in Denmark, Princess Mary – formerly of Tasmania, Dowunder – has gone and snagged herself a prince, and women everywhere are mad with jealousy.

I visited Copenhagen shortly after her wedding to Prince Freddie, and found myself gaping in the grounds of Amalienborg Palace, Princess Mary’s new digs. Soon enough, as I was idly eyeing the strapping young guards, a tour group of Australians happened past and I caught drifts of the conversation. ‘Yeah, I can’t believe Mary gave up her Aussie citizenship so fast…’ ‘I know mate, she totally sold out.’ ‘Dunno what she was thinking…’

Erm, I think I could hazard a guess. I can just imagine the conversation between Freddie and our Mary: ‘Now Mary darling, you do realise by marrying me you’ll have to give up being a Tasmanian?’

‘Uh, yep, that’s fine.’

‘And you’ll probably be subjected to all kinds of invasive fertility tests?’

‘Seriously, it’s no problem.’

‘And if we get divorced I’ll get to keep the kids?’

‘No worries.’

‘the media will rip you apart if you so much as step out with a zit?’

‘No really honey, I got it. Just show me where to sign and point me to my wing of the palace.’

For anyone interested in random menus from random restaurants in random corners of the world, you can’t go past Europe Trotter’s Helsinki Zetor (tractor) restaurant…check out the Oath to the Nation casserole. Definitely better than ‘freedom fries’, in any event!!

One more day left in Hamburg. We go to a café in the morning for hot chocolate before Wilken leaves for work. He orders a brötchen with what looks like raw mince and a quartered onion on top.

I ask what it is. He says it’s raw mince, with a quartered onion on top. It’s an interesting local take on a hamburger, which I’ll grant that given the namesake the place has license to do.

Later, we wander about the Schanzenstrasse, which is your typical German postwar, pro-socialist, ultra-hippy and über graffittied locale. Mangy dogs scratch about by a colossal concrete hunk of a Nazi-era bunker next to the U-bahn station; decidedly unemployed-looking folk swig from beer cans in the car park, and something with dreadlocks – possibly a young man – stalks by with an al-foiled oven dish in hand.

I always feel well out of place in such hoods unless I’ve forgotten to wash my hair and put only one shoe on, but I feel better today when I look at the price tags as we stroll about the shops. Turns out your typical German postwar, pro-socialist, ultra-hippy and über graffittied locale is turning bourgeois. Oh, and those kids you might have seen throwing rocks and protesting globalisation on the news lately – they’re from the swanky private school around the corner.

Have noted that, in Hamburg, all the U-bahn station names look decidedly like they’ve been come up with by five year olds: e.g. Baumwall (Tree Wall), Hoheluftbrucke (High-Air-Bridge) and not least the delightful Schlump, which is just one f short of the German word for smurf.

Have noted, too, that I’m not cut out to be a criminal. Walked to the station this morning with the smug air of someone who’s got exactly the right change for the subway in ten cent pieces, then got distracted by – and bought – a €1.50 secondhand edition of The Joy Luck Club. With only a fifty euro note in my wallet and the nearest cashpoint a subway trip away in itself, there was nothing for it but to ride black.

Riding black – a fine term in German that just doesn’t quite translate. Schwarzfahrer, so the ticket-less are called. This was first brought to my attention in a short film called, usurprisingly, Der Schwarzfahrer, in which a strapping young man of African descent gets on a Berlin metro and finds himself seated next to an old bag who rubbishes on non-stop about delinquent immigrants taking everyone’s jobs.

Somewhat miffed, our dark-complexioned fried snatches her ticket just as the ticket collector approaches, and swallows it in one fell gulp. Naturally, no-one believes her, and she gets thrown of the train for being – here’s the irony of it – a Schwarzfahrer, or ‘black rider’. Get it?

Needless to say, though, I was petrified the whole seven stations’ worth of stolen trip. But I didn’t get caught – in fact, it was kind of a rush…

The most excellent thing about Hamburg is that in German, its people are called Hamburgers. I’m told they are a lot like Frankfurters, only rounder and somewhat more meaty.

The second most excellent thing about Hamburg is that it is home to the most millionaires in Germany. Now, I’m prone to being impressed by millionaires even when we are talking Aussie dollars, which – let’s face it – are not the best work of economists anywhere. So euro-millionaires are really quite something to me, though naturally not so impressive as those of the sterling variety.

Hamburg is cold and its canals are brown, but it is really a very amiable place. Were it a quarter of its size with better weather and fewer Nazi bunkers and more flowery window boxes in bloom I imagine it could be quite so nice as Venice. After all, it’s got more canals than Venice, and fewer lecherous tourists, or at least more widely dispersed. By the Rathausmarkt there’s even a super row of white colonnades that some Venetian architect or other put up to remind himself of home.

In general, though, Hamburg is holding up well, despite having been manhandled a bit in the past – ruled by the Danes, annexed by Napoleon, besieged by the French and the Russians, burnt to the ground more than once and plagued by the fact that actual beef patties may or may not even come from there.

To redeem itself, though, it’s also the proud home of the world’s oldest nudist colony, established in 1903 for members to air themselves, so to speak, on a city beach. Which is actually a lake. An artifical one, given the dam. Still.

Ok, the link to ‘fun abroad’ is potentially tenuous here, but I couldn’t help myself: you have those garden ‘allotment’ what-nots in Britain too? I saw them for the first time in Germany and, with those tiny little shacks squatting about, thought they must be housing estates for the poor…or at least the very small…

Here’s the thing though.
I needn’t have warmed you up with all those airport stories because this time I didn’t even bloody make it that far. Budapest, I wanted to get to this weekend – well, ultimately, anyway – but in the short term I was just aiming for Dortmund, since that’s where my plane was off from.

But having arrived at Aachen in the still dark this morning, my clear run to the airport was thwarted by Deustche Bahn train drivers moaning about their pay. Hundreds of stranded passengers milled about on account of the strike with nothing for it but to start smoking again.

I joined the throngs of disgruntled passengers and we all swarmed about the platforms, heaving forward as one mass in the rare event a train would pull up, launching ourselves onboard and urging it forward with revolutionary will, only to find it parked stoically and permanently at a halt.

One train, unhappily, puttered forward a bit and wheezed to halt at Wuppertal, a useless town with no connection to Dortmund airport on the best of days, then slunk back to Aachen under threat of riot.

Not that there were any better options from Aachen. The taxi queue, which in all honesty probably can’t be called a queue on account of lacking an essential element – forward propulsion – stood at about 400 man strong. I gave up hovering about the back of the line once my nose froze solid enough for me to snap it off and store it in my pocket, and went marching about town trying to cut in on a taxi there, to no avail. Not because there was no one to cut in on but because there were no taxis to cut in on into.

At this point I’d never have made it to the airport on time even had my sister, who works in foreign affairs and therefore should ostensibly be able to do so, sent the required military gyrocopter. I gave up. And went somewhere else instead.

Hamburg.

I was banging on about airport check in my last post and it harked me back to my last major intercontinental haul. (This Dortmund-to-Budapest lark is a piddly little business in comparison.)

6:15 am

Wilken and I arrived at Gatwick bleary eyed having made the nerve-racking-cheap-Asian-airlines overnight haul from China back to Europe. Destination: Maastricht. Because this bit of the Netherlands is too piddly (useful word, that one) to have its own aiport (not one that flies anywhere useful, anyway), we’re scheduled on a flight to Cologne – but it doesn’t leave till late in the evening.

We drag ourselves wearily to the EasyJet counters, hoping against hope there’s an earlier flight we can transfer to without have to fork out too much of a hefty fee. But – Sorry love. Eight o’clock tonight’s the earliest flight there is to Cologne. What about another airport then, we ask. Düsseldorf? Dortmund? Aachen? Eindhoven? Amsterdam, even? We are met with blank stares. No planes from Gatwick flying to any of those places. It’s as if Germany and a significant portion of the Low Countries don’t exist.

8:30 am

A spark of excitement as Wilken jumps up, sprints over to a man dozing in the corner and wakes him excitedly. He’s just seen a strange woman pick up his suitcase and walk off with it. I rouse myself, keen for a diversion. But the man is shaking his head, chuckling a bit. It’s just me wife, he says in a thick northern accent.

10:45 – 12 noon

Scavenger Hunt

one sachet of sugar
something red
a photograph of a morbidly obese person
something shiny
any form of advertisement or brochure
a receipt (but purchases of any kind are prohibited)
one flower (real or otherwise; or picture thereof)
an empty bottle or can

It’s a tie. Wilken gets stuck on the flower and I fail to procure the elusive receipt. Can’t bring myself to sift through the bins.

Ah, airport check-in. My favourite.

My foolproof plan to keep myself entertained in the one spot lasted a good three days. Am now en route to Budapest for a last-minute weekend do, rattling around on an old bus between Maastricht and Aachen, just over the German border. From there I’ll catch the train to Dortmund airport.

I’m partial to airports not just because of the very nice toilets but on account of the danger. You know, of being detained or searched for fear you might be a terrorist. I had a top time of it back in July, flying from Gatwick to China to buy lots of bootlegged gear (clearly I didn’t learn a lesson there, about comments made in jest):

I lugged my suitcase up to the counter, surreptitiously balanced it on my knee as it was weighed and got away with thirty odd kgs. But he at the counter wasn’t having any truck with cheek and blankly rattled off the usual scripted interrogation: ‘Did you pack your bag yourself this morning? Have you left it unattended at any time for any length of time? Are you transporting any darts, catapults, knitting needles, hypodermic syringes, pool cues or rocket launchers in your hand luggage?’

And – my personal favourite – “Are you carrying any contraband without your knowledge?”

Well, I wouldn’t know about it then, would I? He eyed me warily, sizing up whether a five-foot girl with excited hair and blue-rimmed glasses might be a likely candidate for smuggling ground to air anti-aircraft missiles. To my great disappointment, eventually he let me pass, and I moved on to the security check. There, lip balms, mascara, snot rags and all other liquids must be plastic bagged and presented separately for inspection. It seemed the powers that were at Gatwick airport felt that any cross-dressing terrorists who have cunningly hidden their explosives in their lipsticks would be foiled by an air-tight seal.

Like I said. Ah, airport check-in.

Though I wasn’t born on the same day as Hitler nor clutching a blood clot like Genghis Khan, I nevertheless grew up knowing that conquering foreign lands was my destiny. Not with armies and bloodletting but rather with newfangled budget airlines and the liberal aid of Mastercard.

But I’ve gone and overstepped the mark already, haven’t I? I tell myself a thousand times a day I shouldn’t go blaring my intentions for the world, well, to the world. So forget I said that.

What I mean is, I quite like now and then to pop off to places I haven’t been. I get a real kick out of that. I tire easily, see, not in the sense of being weak-limbed but more in a fickle sort of way. I can’t even let the furniture in my apartment be for a month, so I certainly can’t dither about in one place much longer than that.

Having said that, I’ve been in the Netherlands almost a year now. No, not in the same apartment – I moved next door once I got sick of the old one. I suppose I’ve slowed down a bit in that sense – I throw on the old backpack now and then but its not permanently affixed to my back as it once was – but there’s plenty about to keep me entertained.

The Dutch are quite a novelty, for one, as I’m Australian myself. Not a convict though, which is a real shame as far as ice-breakers go. Of English blood, at that. I live with my boyfriend who was born in Kenya and raised in South Africa but is to all intents and purposes German, though his folks live in China. My hairdresser is from Haiti, and I buy my salami regularly from a street vendor from Burkhina Faso.

What this all means is that when I do get bored with the current situation, I simply move two blocks up and take my business to the Bulgarian butcher. Foolproof, no?

Let’s see how long it lasts.