Our first brush with the language barrier in Europe was not a good one. It took us forever, absolutely forever, to find our hotel. This was because the location that it said on the receipt wasn't really the location of the hotel. Instead, it was the location of the managers, who met us at the nearby church to take us THERE. Imagine trying to figure that out, when the managers spoke broken English and all signs were in German. Fantastic, no?
By the time we dropped off our luggage, we decided to start finding out how to get to the World Youth Day volunteer check-in. It was at some place called "Koln Messe". We later realized that "messe" is a word for "auditorium" (I now assume). Luckily I'm good at reading subway maps, even though they're in different languages.. it's all about matching the station name with the place on the map and finding out which direction it's going and bingo.
The Koln main train station is huge! It's like a shopping mall, and all platforms are above ground, not underground. There are so many different types of trains. The regional train, the subway, the streetcars - they ALL run on the same lines and have the same map. So bloody confusing.
We finally found Koln Messe and by now it was close to 10 pm. The line was gigantic and it took us about an hour for us to get into the place in itself. I already felt the spirit when I was standing in line. So many people from all over the world, just singing and dancing. The other three weren't quite as impressed as I was, seeing as it was late and they were tired. We did meet a cute American. I forgot where he was from but he stood in front of us. And he came to WYD by himself. How sexy.
By the time we checked in it was close to 11 pm. We had to try and explain to the check-in girl that our hotel was not at the site where the rest of our team was staying. We realized that our team was staying at a campground! Thank the stars we decided not to go with that. Anyway, the check-in girl called our team leader, Florian Jung, and he told her (in German, of course) that we should meet him and the team at the campgrounds the next morning. Finding directions to the campgrounds was a whole new challenge, but we managed.
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