Santiago (Chile) – Miami (USA) – Essen (Germany) – Annecy (France) from 1/02 to 12/02/13

So we took off Friday night, to land with 2 hours more in Miami. Still a little bit sleepy and annoyed after 1 hour and a half waiting for the control of the passports… The guy asked me any kind of weird questions: “Where are you going today?”; “ah you have been to South America”; “for how long?”; “have you been to the USA before?”; “when did you plan your flights?”; “Did you travel as long as you planned?”; “What do you plan to do today?”; “Are you alone?”; “did you travel alone for 4 months?”; “you are going to Germany, but you are French? Why?”; “When do you go back home?”; “Do you speak Spanish?”; “It might be a bit cold at the beach today”…

It was exhausting and a bit stupid, and it was really in this order of questions, without any link between the questions, just asked randomly…  Then he stamped my passport, but he put it a bit on the “Ushuaia- end of the world stamp”… That wasn’t cool! 🙁

And I finally got out, to get my luggage. I found my backpack, without any sign from the flights information or number or name on it :-/ I was pretty lucky to find it! But no sign of my suitcase… Oops… so I asked the people there and they told me my luggage was supposed to be transferred to Düsseldorf without getting out… Well, that is not what they told me in Santiago last night!! Anyway, no chance to find my suitcase, I will see when we are in Düsseldorf tomorrow! Now getting out and find Alex (who arrived 2 hours earlier), put our bags in the luggage storage (because there is one! The persons I asked to in September didn’t know it obviously…), managed to get money out of an ATM in half an hour (a really crappy touch screen that didn’t really work properly), got bus tickets and took the bus to Miami Beach!

We laid on the beach, in the morning winter sun, it was nice! Too bad that the water was way too cold to swim :-/ We napped for 2 hours got up to find a place to eat something and got back to the airport.

We checked in, and luckily I had only my backpack, that counted as my only luggage, and didn’t have to pay for a second one 🙂 Still not sure I would find my suitcase in Germany though… Anyway, check in done, we boarded a few hours later and took off around 16:00. After we got beer (in glass bottles!) and wine, and wine again and more wine (because they make more rounds around the plane with the bottle of wine… instead of coffee/tea in other companies), I didn’t see much of the flight I was sleeping J So you understood it, that was Air Berlin, a German company where you can get all this alcohol!

We arrived at 6:00 in the morning, with 6 hours less to our clocks… Oops that is weird, we skipped the night… We changed the last Chilean pesos we had and got our suitcases and bags (all of them!!). We arrived at Alex’s home a bit later and had a really nice bacon and eggs breakfast, before going to sleep… until the end of the afternoon :-/

We spent a quiet week, with a bit of snow…

One day we went to the chocolate museum in Köln… that was great! Few hours hanging around , learning about chocolate beans and chocolate in general, seeing the process of collecting/melting/mixing/eating (ha no, this one wasn’t a process 🙂 /cooling… and of course with a nice smell 🙂

I kind of surprised myself a few times, wanting to speak German, but all what was coming out of my mouth was Spanish :-/ Even for really basic stuffs…for example in the supermarket, instead of answering “Ja” or “Nein” it was “Si” or ”No” coming out… people where confused and me as well!

In Switzerland, in the train back to France, the people talked to me in German and I asked them to speak English… and they talked French in fact, which would be easier for everybody 🙂 Well, I will need a little bit of time for adaptation!!!

Now, as a welcome back to France, it is snowing for more than 40 hours non-stop, and we have around 50-60 cm in the garden now…

See you soon! (If i can get out of the house… 😉 )