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8 January 1999 Saturday was a laid back relaxed kind of day. It started off with a nice, traditional German breakfast of breads, cheeses, vegetables and spreads with coffee, tea and juice then Mrs. Ostberg was nice enough to do all of our laundry for us so we'd have nice clean clothes when Amy and I returned home - Amy to California and me to Japan. In the afternoon Andrea, Amy and I drove into Ludwigsburg to visit the Ludwigsburg Palace. I had been to Ludwigsburg a couple times before back in 1994/1995 and had been to the palace as well, but I think it was especially fun for Amy who was getting her first taste of German palaces! Also, it was good practice for my and Andrea's bilingual translation skills since she and I were giving Amy a simultaneous German to English translation of the German language tour. After the palace tour we walked around downtown Ludwigsburg, most of whose stores had already closed since it was past 4 p.m. on a Saturday, and got to see the nice city center square which was once a giant parking lot for cars but has since been reclaimed as a nice, cobble stone Catholic and Protestant church square and pedestrian commercial zone.
Fortunately we made our train, jumped onboard and were whisked up to Frankfurt in about two hours. Once there we found a hotel to spend the night and spent the rest of the evening relaxing and getting our things together in preparation for our trips home the following day. 9 January 2000, Return to Japan and eventually Waki-machi Amy was scheduled on a mid-morning flight from Frankfurt Airport so I accompanied her to the airport after breakfast at the hotel and stayed with her until her plane to San Francisco via Paris departed around 10:00 a.m. We chummed around a little café spending the remaining German coins in our pockets and then shortly thereafter Amy boarded her plane and was on her way home. Since my Korean Air flight didn't depart Frankfurt until 10 p.m., I had 12 hours on a cold, gray Sunday afternoon to kill, and since it was Sunday and Frankfurt is more of a commercial city than a "social" city, there wasn't exactly much going on. Being the fan of high-rise architecture that I am, I took the train back into downtown and walked around the deserted streets looking that the German incarnations of the skyscraper. My favorites were the Deutsche Bank glass high-rise towers in downtown and the Frankfurter Messe tower just a little west (?) of downtown. The walk around downtown only took up two hours so I was still left with 10 hours to occupy myself with, so to pass another two hours I walked to the Frankfurt Conventional Hall where I spent $15 for nose-bleed tickets to the Holiday on Ice contemporary dance ice-skating show, which was pretty impressive! There were ice skaters swinging around on suspended cables with pyrotechnics exploding everywhere, so a good time was had! That brought me up to 4 o'clock and so I walked back downtown and had a pizza dinner alone in some seemingly popular Lover's Lane-esque Italian restaurant looking like a freak eating dinner * by myself! * and then went to some little movie theater and watched some French filmed titled "Himalaya" where I fell asleep for an hour and woke up right before the credits rolled. (Hopefully I wasn't snoring!!!) By that time it was 8 p.m. and was high time I book it out to the Frankfurt airport and head back to Japan. My plane departed on time and the flight was totally uneventful. The flight was perhaps at only 30% capacity and therefore virtually everyone had at least 2 to 3 seats each. As for me, I just reclined all my seats back, took off my shoes, stretched out, put in my ear plugs, donned my eye mask and slept for several hours. The flight path was over Poland, Russia, Kasakhstan, Mongolia and China then into South Korea. We landed in Seoul around 4 p.m. the next day (Monday) and then I caught my connecting flight to Kansai Airport at 6:30 p.m. The only problem (and this turned out to be a MAJOR problem) was that we had to wait for a delayed connecting flight from Los Angeles and hence did not depart until 7:30. This was a problem because I needed to be at the Kansai Airport in Osaka and at the ferry terminal to catch the last ferry back to Tokushima by 9:21 p.m. Since the flight to Kansai is 90 minutes, we were really pushing it by departing so late. And just as luck would have it, when I got off the plane in Japan at Kasai/Osaka Airport at 9 p.m. there was a GIANT crowd at the customs center as it appeared EVERY plane landing in Japan that day landed at the same time!!! So it took forever to get through customs and I missed the ferry. Eventually I ended up taking the train down to Wakayama City then catching a 2 a.m. ferry into Tokushima and arriving at Tokushima City around 4 a.m. then taking a morning train into Waki-machi and arriving at home at 7 a.m. and then stumbled into work looking like hell bright and shiny at 8:00 a.m. Everybody at work was like, "So how was your trip to Europe?!?" and all I could say was, "Don't ask. I just got back 60 minutes ago." So there I was back in Japan ready to jump into the daily routine of things again. Fortunately I was able to take a couple weeks off for a vacation and have a great time in Europe with my sister and my friends! Until my next journey. . . Ciao! |
We
then returned to Andrea's place, where Mr. Ostberg gave me a great
bottle of Spätburgunder red wine to bring back with me to Japan
as a sayonara gift. We then packed up our laundry, said our good-byes
to the Ostberg family and jumped into Andrea's car and she drove us
to the Stuttgart train station so Amy and I could catch our I.C.E.
train up to Frankfurt. We jumped out of the car, said auf Wiedersehen
to Andrea and thanked her for inviting us to stay with her. We then
grabbed our bags and ran into the Stuttgart train station looking for
our high-speed train since was supposed to be departing in just a
couple minutes!