In April I purchased two tickets to fly from Frankfurt to Austin on December 15th using frequent flyer miles. I had wanted to get the tickets for December 31st which annoyed the woman on the phone. Apparently if I wanted to get frequent flyer tickets from Germany to America on December 31st I should have started much earlier than April. Getting return tickets on the 15th rather than the 31st meant that Kaitlin and I would be coming home two weeks before Paul. As December got closer and closer I began to make intimidating mental lists of everything that needed doing upon re-entry. Four months of backed-up mail and a house that needed to be unpacked after the renter left, car inspections and enrolling Kaitlin in school, restocking the fridge and reconnecting with my job, oh and it would be Christmas a week after our return so decorate a tree and all that.
I designated December 1st as the day to start facing reality and began a Bergen to-do list containing items like ‘figure out how should we pack everything to bring back’, then ‘buy the boxes or suitcases we would need’, etc. On the 1st I called American Airlines to check on our tickets which led me to find out that the airline had changed the flight schedule. We were now scheduled to fly out of Frankfurt 5 hours earlier than when it was first issued. This could be considered a problem given that our scheduled flight from Bergen to Frankfurt would now be arriving after we needed to leave Frankfurt to America. When I pointed this out to the person on the phone, she said that anyone buying tickets in April should expect problems with their tickets. Then began a scramble to try to either get our AA tickets or our SAS tickets changed. Both tasks ended in failure with the airline people bemused that we thought we could change anything at such a late date. We should have been trying to do this months ago. In the end we canceled the tickets with SAS, reserved a hotel room near the airport in Frankfurt, and purchased new tickets from Bergen to Frankfurt via Baltic Air with a layover in Latvia.
December 1st really didn’t go very far in calming me down about the complications of re-entry, but it was nice to still have two weeks in Norway. By December the sun was rising so late and setting so early that I had to leave the apartment at dawn to be sure that I could get my walk up to the mountain tundra finished before it got dark again. I went on as many walks as I could in the last weeks especially on days after it snowed. Bergen is surrounded by seven mountains and the pine forests leading up to the peaks were wonderfully silent after a snowfall. In the late afternoons Kaitlin and I would go to our favorite cafe to read our books while drinking coffee and looking around at the other cafe customers. We never got tired of how Scandinavian-looking everyone was. In the evenings the large pool by the museums that was frozen over would be crowded with kids laughing and shouting as they slid on the ice. When we walked home in the dark after watching the kids play almost every window was lit up with Christmas candles.
And then it was December 14th. We took our boxes and suitcases down to the bus station at 2:30 AM, shoved them on the bus, said good-bye to Paul, and rode to the Bergen airport. At the airport it was a relief that all our luggage met Baltic Air’s weight restrictions. Baltic Air’s excess baggage weight fees were so severe that we had gone to the trouble of buying a scale and weighing everything several times before the final packing. Go through security, get on the plane, arrive in Riga Latvia, get on another plane, arrive in Frankfurt and go through customs. I got questioned about why we had been in Europe for longer than three months but thankfully had brought enough paperwork explaining the Fulbright situation that we were let through without too much hassle. Then collect our luggage and try to figure out the German airport shuttle system to get to our hotel.
After we were settled into the hotel Kaitlin and I took a city train down to Römerberg square. It was a good surprise to find Römerberg alive with the colorful holiday lights, the smell of spiced wine, the sound of Christmas carols, and the excited passersby of a busy Christmas market. There were beer gardens full of people standing around drinking mulled wine, sausage stands, carved cuckoo clock and Christmas tree ornament booths, and several places selling big bags of caramel corn. The quest for German cookies that I had started when we first arrived in Europe in August seemed like it would soon be at an end, although perhaps Germany having lots of good cookies is merely a myth. I found hardly any when we traveled to the country in August and in the whole Frankfurt Christmas fair we only found two places selling any and then not many varieties. It looked like if we wanted an abundance of Christmas cookies we would need to fly home to America and make them ourselves.
The next morning, we got up with the alarm clock and took the hotel shuttle to the airport. Through security and onto the plane. 10 hours and three movies later we landed in Dallas and went through US customs. Then the plane to Austin, a taxi through the city, and, finally, home.
