More Travel Planning, and a Typo - Cheltenham, Sep. 5

I got much better sleep last night! We'll see how tonight goes, but I seem to be acclimating. In general, I feel awake and sleepy at the correct times of day, so I think I've adjusted time zones pretty quickly.

​I've been working on booking travel to mainland Europe. Before I leave the UK, I'll be visiting some cousins in Purley for a couple days, which is just south of London. I looked around at a few options for getting there, and train sounds like the best option. I'll head there on Saturday, then fly to Germany on the next Monday.

Figuring out travel restrictions for getting into Germany has been a bit confusing, as I've heard conflicting and incomplete information from various sources. The German government website is not written as clearly as I'd expect for Germans, there are several times when the information I want is a couple paragraphs below where I'd expect, so it's not feasible to quickly skim the website. It's also not helped by the recent EU recommendation against US travelers, which is made more confusing by the fact that I've got US and UK citizenship, have a US vaccine and live in the US, but am coming from the UK. So it's not clear to me the best way to get into Germany, but I believe I can get in safely if I claim US citizenship on arrival without having to quarantine.

I'm not yet sure where in Germany I'll fly to, anywhere in the north half is fine with me. I will be visiting someone in Leipzig at some point, which could be before or after I visit the Netherlands. Once I'm there, I'm intending to stay in one place for a couple days, such as a youth hostel, Airbnb, or a hotel (depends on prices and quality, I'll be looking). Then I'll hop on a train to the next place, stay for a couple days, repeat.

Anyways, that's all the travel updates I have, the rest of yesterday was pretty quiet. Although I did make a wonderfully bad typo that messed up our dinner plans. We were hoping my brother would cook dinner, and he was out at a climbing gym. So I sent him a text asking "Are you okay cooking dinner tonight? If so, do you need stuff from the store?"

Instead of "cooking," my phone replaced that with "coming." To which he delightfully replied "Yep! Actually, shaving cream would be nice"

I hadn't realized my typo, so I was very confused at that point. We had some shaving cream at the house, so I figured we'd just wait until he got home to decide what we needed from the store.

When he did come home, of course he didn't realize we wanted him to cook, and it was already getting late. We realized we had food vouchers from the hotel we were staying at, because of some booking mistake. The vouchers were for £75 per day (yes, that's a lot, it wasn't a cheap booking mistake), so we decided to get food from the hotel.

We asked the person at the bar to order for takeout, who told us to order at the front desk. We went to the person at the front desk, and said we needed to order at the bar. Hmm...

The person at the front desk agreed to just take our order for us, which she then had to enter into the computer at the bar. Really not sure why the person at the bar sent us to the front desk if they have the system for entering food, but at least the order was placed.

Rather than waiting by the bar or the front desk for the food, we were told that we'd be called in the room once the food was ready, and we'd have to come back to the front desk to pick it up. No room service, which is fine, but it's just a bit silly that we had to go upstairs just to go back downstairs.

While we were waiting, we wanted to give the people back at the house an update, but realized we hadn't grabbed their phone numbers. We looked through our contacts and discovered that we had multiple numbers for each person. None of us were able to call due to international calling plans, and we didn't know which numbers were correct. I eventually found a correct WhatsApp number, so we were able to give them an update.

Once the food was ready, we went back to the front desk to pick it up. We were going to take the food back to the house, but it was instead served on plates on a couple trays. We asked for the food to be put into boxes, which triggered some confused looks at us. It really wasn't helping that we had American accents. I hope I've reached my quota for being the annoying tourist!

As they were boxing up the food in the back, we managed to make friends with the person at the front desk. The food was pretty good, albeit a bit cold once we finally ate like half an hour after the food was cooked. We'll likely order from there again in he future, but hopefully give the hotel staff a bit better instructions this time!