Traveling Alone

           My first trip solo was just two weeks after I arrived.  We had our “UMass students in Germany” orientation in Freiburg, which is about three hours from Stuttgart.  I decided it would be a brilliant idea to use the website www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de to get there.  It’s a website that links drivers offering rides with people that need rides.  Drivers post their trip details on the website, and riders can join them for a much lower price than any other form of transportation.  My German teacher had suggested it to me, and it turned out to be about half the price it would have been to take the train.  So I found a driver going to Freiburg at the same time I needed to get there.  Her name was Bettina, and she and her boyfriend Sven were offering the ride.  I could barely understand the website, but I managed to translate it enough to obtain her phone number and call her.

The call was…interesting.  Luckily she could speak a little English, but not much.  She told me to meet her at the Hauptbahnhof at the sdpfodshgoew (not a real word) entrance where the bus stop is.  I went to the main entrance where I thought she would be since there’s a bus stop there, but no sign of her Opal Kadett.  So I called her in a slight panic thinking she had left already.  She told me she was at the south entrance.  Too bad I thought that since the main entrance kind of faced south that it was the south entrance.  Finally, after walking to the completely wrong side of the building and back, I found Sven standing at the car (I Facebook-creeped on Bettina to make sure she was real, and her profile picture was of her and Sven).  It turns out that there are two bus stops at the Hauptbahnhof.  I was at one, just not the right one.

There was one other rider riding with us to Freiburg.  I don’t remember his name, but he was from Columbia and traveling around Europe.  Go figure, he didn’t speak any English.  He spoke a little more German than I did, so he was able to talk a bit with the drivers, but let’s just say it was a quiet ride.  I sat there in silence and did my German homework, and three hours later I made it to Freiburg to meet up with the other UMass students.