In my last post, Kate and I were weary, dusty and full of despair and terrible aeroplane food, standing on the platform at Bayreuth station, abandoned by all and sundry.
I was all for getting on the next train home and giving up. After eight hours lugging an army back pack around Germany I had already been delighted enough. Kate counselled patience.
Eventually someone from the university turned up. They drove us to the local Youth Hostel and checked us in. They then went away to ‘fix things’, saying they would pick us up later on and take us out for the evening as a consolation prize.
The Youth Hostel was fierce. The woman on the desk cracked her knuckles and scowled. There were many rules. I had not been in a Youth Hostel since I was eleven, stuck in the Derbyshire Dales with my class mates and some very unforgiving nylon sheets. I did not feel that things had improved in the intervening years. Not only that but we had to pay for our own accommodation, which was a bloody liberty all things considered, and it was already taking chunks out of our emergency funds.
We had been told that we would have to open German bank accounts as it was a cash society and banks were the way forward. We had very little actual money on us because we were going to be opening accounts. Kate had an emergency credit card. It was next to useless, as at that point Germany really was a cash society and unless you were in a major city, nobody took credit cards at all.
If you offered them a credit card they looked at you as if you had just admitted that you liked licking small children.
We were stuck in a dorm with six other people and brusquely told that there was nowhere secure for our luggage. This was not brilliant news as all our important documents etc were stashed away, and it would have been just our luck to have had them stolen to add insult to injury.
There was however, nothing to be done.
We shoved our bags in the communal hallway, which was the only place they would fit, and sat on our bunks disconsolately waiting for the woman who had dropped us off to pick us up again.
Several hours later she reappeared. Her name, and I kid you not, was Heidi Wunderlich (which means wonderful). She was extremely annoying and flicked her hair about a lot.
She was about as far from wonderful as you can get. She was mostly unsympathetic, very brusque and had no concern for our plight whatsoever. She made it clear that she just thought we were whingers.
Which was nice.
She invited us to go into the town centre to meet our friends. The knuckle cracking guard announced that the doors to the Youth Hostel would be locked at ten o’clock and if we weren’t back by then we would be sleeping outside.
We were not feeling the love, to be honest.
We went into the town. Our friends all had places to stay and were all having a wonderful time. This only made me more morose.
We pumped Heidi for information.
She said that there was nobody to put us up and that we would either have to stay in the Youth Hostel, or find our own accommodation. If we had a problem with it we could go and talk to someone at the university the next day, and that was that.
Obviously we did not have the first clue about finding out how to go about getting our own accommodation. At university in England they help you find places to live or offer you a place in halls. They don’t just throw you out into the wilderness and tell you to get on with it. Then there was the added complication of the fact that I spoke no German, and Kate only spoke a bit.
We could not even drown our sorrows in alcohol because no sooner had we been allowed out, we had to go back to the gulag, so we could get our beds and not end up sleeping in a municipal flower bed, at which point, given the warm welcome we had already received, we fully expected to be dragged into the town square and shot.
We had a terrible night’s sleep thanks to municipal snoring and the fact that we were worried sick about our luggage, our homelessness and just what we had signed up for.
The next morning we set off for the university to try and sort things out. We also needed the use of phones. We had called our parents the day before with instructions to get help from the Welsh end of things, but these were the days before mobile phones, and the pay phones were eating what little money we had left.
We paid up for another day at the Gulag as it was clear that whatever happened we were not going to get any quick answers and even a dorm room was better than nothing.
