June 12 SOMEWHERE I DON'T KNOW THE LANGUAGE

So, I wake up in London Stansted. I’m interested to see how the next step goes, seeing as I don’t have a return ticket to the US yet, and the last time I went through UK Customs, they held me for an hour until I could prove I was leaving the country. But this time, nothing. I s’pose it helped a bit that I’m immediately traveling on to Germany, but they also didn’t rifle through my bag at all.

On the other side of Customs, I was greeted with this dumb ass cake at 8:30 in the morning. I guess I’ve heard that people eat cake for breakfast, and hey, why not, it’s not much different than a doughnut. But I’ve been eating airline food for 12 hours and I have no need for dry cookies and cake. I grab some bottles of juice, which of course are confiscated five minutes later for being over 3oz/100mL at the next checkpoint. Annoyed for 1) forgetting about the stupid liquid rule and 2) for needlessly wasting, I tromp around a bit.

I start to get a strange feeling that something’s not quite right. After poking around on the internet for a minute, I realize that the airport I think I’m flying into in Germany and the airport I’m actually flying into in Germany are two different places. Two different places by about an hour. Waa waa. Where I’m actually flying into is nowhere near Dusseldorf, which is where the airline advertised I was flying into. That’s like advertising a flight into Minneapolis and actually landing in Saint Cloud. That’s what I get for flying the budget airline. I don’t really care, other than my car hire pickup is at the airport that I’m not actually flying into. So I land in the town of Weeze (please tell me that residents of this city are knows as Weezers. Please). And so the improvising begins. Luckily, I didn’t get my car from a budget rental agency, so the world behemoth Hertz is able to accommodate my miscalculation with their last unreserved vehicle. Oh Ford Mondeo, you’re a pretty rad station wagon.

I make my 90 Kilometer journey to the airport I thought I was flying into. The band won’t show for an hour, so I go exploring. I don’t quite understand why, but there’s a desolate section at Dusseldorf International called Airport City. It has a dreary post-apocalyptic chill to the place, all the way down to the windows that are smashed out for no apparent reason and green mold growing up slick wet walls. In the hour I wait, I don’t see one person walk out of any of the poured concrete office buildings.

The sad environment is interrupted by HUGS. I find BBE, and they have a hilarious time watching me relearn how to get a car up to 200 kilometers and hour. We get to where we need to be and I’m pretty excited for some German band hospitality at this point. Meals in Germany tend to rule, but tonight we just get money to go fend for ourselves. Which means we end up eating pizza. Pizza dude has a whistle that he toots relentlessly when he needs his peon to pack up pizzas in boxes.

The show is fun and we’re off for the night to a weird apartment. Ah, the free accommodation grab bag, you never now what you’re going to get. The owner of the flat isn’t even there, but he calls up and talks my ear off about what lights not to use (kitchen ceiling, because it doesn’t create a good mood), and that we should sign the ceiling and/or his band book. I don’t know what this dude does to pass the time, but I do know that he has computer printouts of the Scrubs sitcom characters taped up on the wall of his kitchen. I’m rendered speechless and pass out on a mattress.