Prodigal daughter

My dear daughter has been spending the third year of her degree course in Germany.  She has been working in a gymnasium as a language assistant, helping to instil a better quality of English into the students.  Hmm, I hope it is a case of do as I say, not as I do.

She decided to spend the Easter holidays interrailing around Europe with a friend.  Well that was the original intention, as things turned out, the friends she intended going with found that life intervened and they were unable to go.  She was left with two options – the first was to decide not to go and the second was to go alone.  To her great merit, and my discomfort, she chose the first option - she’s a brave girl.   

Did I say she was brave?  On day one she caught a train early in the morning, heading for Nurmenberg, from where she was to take a coach (why?  I thought this was called interrailing for a reason) to Prague.  She hadn’t been on the train for an hour before she rang me in tears, sobbing uncontrollably, because she was miserable and overwhelmed.  I tried being sympathetic, but that doesn’t help greatly, in my experience, the more sympathetic I am to her, the more upset she gets.  Eventually I pointed out that she had made the choice to go on her own, and that from now her options were limited.  She could either carry on with the trip on her own or she could change direction and come home for Easter, but whichever choice she made, she needed to stop crying as she was making herself much more vulnerable by doing it.  Many people seeing her upset would offer to help and not everyone would be doing it for altruistic reasons.  Whilst it is sad to be suspicious of people with good intentions, a single girl travelling to several European cities on her own cannot afford to take chances.

Eventually when she got on the coach from Nuremburg to Prague she fell asleep.  The worst of problems looks so much better after a good sleep and my guess is that she didn’t sleep well the night before she started out.   By the time she arrived in Prague she was feeling much better, and our Skype conversation that evening was much more positive thank goodness.

She enjoyed Prague the next day, posting a photo of a humungous cup of coffee which she had bought to warm herself up.  It was so large, I queried whether she was intending to drink it or bathe in it. 

All was so much better I began to relax and think that things would progress more smoothly.

Ha ha ha ha

That will teach me.

From Prague she travelled to Vienna and from there to Salzburg.  Her idea was to spend a day in Salzburg and then take the night train to Venice.  It would have worked fine, if she had only read the timetable properly, and arrived at the railway station at the time the train was due to leave, rather than the time it was supposed to arrive at its destination!   Then something apparently went awry with the night train to Venice and it was no longer a viable option.  That meant getting on an earlier train which would arrive in Venice around midnight, and booking a room in a hostel for that night.   Easy.  Wrong, not easy – the hostel was booked up.  There was no wifi on the train “they lied to  me Mum”  which necessitated a phone call to Mum, “can you book me a hotel in Venice?”  Yes of course – that isn’t difficult – a hotel for the price of a hostel, on the same day and in Venice – yeah I can do that!  Amazingly – I could!  I sent her the details and she booked it.   I can’t claim to have been comfortable for her to be walking around a strange city at midnight but it couldn’t be helped.  Then I got another phone call about 11pm our time, midnight in Italy, to say the train was delayed and she was worried that she would lose her hotel room, so I had to email the hotel and let them know about the delay.  Then 45 minutes later yet another call, she had arrived but didn’t know how to get to the hotel and the battery for her tablet had run out of power, so I had to text details to her.  Finally I got a text at 01.05 to say that she had arrived “safe and sound” at last I could go to sleep – thank goodness!

She has been at this for less than a week, and there are another two weeks to go, - will we survive?  Oh my.