Normally, I’m a planner. I like charts, pro/con lists, schedules and being apart from my planner gives me anxiety.
Normally, I’m good at planning. I look up timetables and maps and prices and can give a rundown of every step of a plan. My freshman year of college the friends I was making quickly learned that the easiest way to figure out what anyone else was doing on a given night or weekend was to check with me because I was the one organizing it all.
But planning in Europe is kicking my ass.
I’m not really in control in Europe. I don’t have a car here. The cities I visit are far larger than Des Moines and therefore their public transit is way more of a mess. Sure, the DART bus that would take me to and from work would sometimes not come or drive past me but another would be by in fifteen minutes and the only thing at stake was my comfort as my nose slowly froze in the Iowa blizzards. In Dublin, sometimes busses disappear. The live signs will announce that one will be there in 5 minutes and continue to display that for the next 20 minutes until the bus finally disappears from the sign and the next one doesn’t come for another hour and causes you to miss your connection. Or the second one arrives but so many people have gathered that you can’t all fit on the bus. Things are not often well-labeled or they’re in a different language, making understanding bus or train schedules nearly impossible as you simply wish for the best.
Every trip I’ve taken has had something go wrong. When going up to Belfast, only a two-hour trek from downtown Dublin, our bus filled up on the first stop. Leaving for London at 4 a.m. was derailed when the gates out of my campus were closed, causing me to miss my bus to the airport. I never got on the train going the right way in Berlin because routes were closed or would change without notice. In Athens, my friend and I missed our ferry to one of Greece’s islands because, despite calling an uber 50 minutes in advance for a twenty-minute ride, we sat in traffic until 20 minutes after our ferry’s departure time. In Venice, despite leaving close to on time, my flight somehow took an extra thirty minutes in the air, almost doubling the flight time from Rome. Getting back to the Venice airport, the ticket collector on the train gave me terrible advice that detoured me an extra hour, forcing me to take a fifty euro cab ride.
As I sit in the Catania airport writing this, I’m happy to report nothing went wrong in my 24 hours on the island but have probably cursed myself to a plane that will light on fire or get attacked by a lion.
As a planner, adopting the go-with-the-flow attitude is painful. I don’t like uncertainty and not pre-booking tours or excursions gives me anxiety but I’ve missed too many without refund that this is the only strategy I can afford. I guess that’s how it has to be in Europe, until I’ve mastered a city, I can’t expect to plan ahead. So, for the next week, it’s come what may.
If you need me, I’ll probably be screaming.
