Wilkommen Damen und Herren

Well, what an eventful few days. When I last wrote, it was the end of a long day of packing, storing and final jobs before our flight to Sydney. However, it was not the end of the day for us, but rather the beginning of a very very long journey.

We jumped on our next plane, an Etihad 777 which took us to Abu Dhabi. This flight took 15 hours. This was a horrible flight for many reasons. The first problem can be referred to as GOM - the Grumpy Old Man! We were seated in the central row of four seats, and shortly before take off, a man was seated at the other end of the row we were in - there was a spare seat between myself and this man. He was seated there by a hostess who was clearly trying to calm him down. He soon made it clear what he had been upset about. He wanted to sit by himself. Hate to tell you buddy, kind of hard to do on a PLANE full of PASSENGERS!

So he did what he could to make sure he was as alone as possible on said plane. He put his belongings on the chair between us, clearly marking his territory, then proceeded to put up a blanket wall from the headrest of the row in front to the headrest of the chair in our row, blocking himself off and blocking me from getting near the chair. As I got tired, I tried to curl myself up into a ball on my chair and my socked foot got a little too close to his special buffer chair, and he growled at me!

The beautiful terminal 1

This continued for the whole flight - unless he was asleep. This was not much better however as he snored like a pig. He was a horrible horrible grumpy old man. At the end of the flight, I bent down to put on my shoes. He was also attending to his belongings in the footwell of the buffer chair space. I got growled at again for coming into his zone.....

As the plane landed, he was up before the rest of the plane and had grabbed his bags, and started to force himself through the queue of waiting people. We were pleased to see him go!

Now, if only that had been the only problem on the flights.... When it came time for meals, Michael had specially organised with Etihad for me to receive a special meal due to my allergies. First meal arrives and it is full of capsicum. Luckily, I had eaten at the Sydney airport so I wasn't hungry. By the time breakfast rolled around, my special meal was just scrambled eggs with mushrooms so I wasn't too upset.

Once we arrived in Abu Dhabi, we had time to go and freshen up, and we made our way to terminal 1 (from terminal 2) where our next flight was due to leave from. Terminal 1 was beautiful - I mean gorgeous. It was obviously fairly new, with the most amazing tiled column in the centre of the domed room, and duty free down below. But then sadly we found out our flight had been moved, and we had to walk to terminal 3. This was clearly an old run down section of the airport. We had to wait in a very crowded area and when our aircraft was finally ready for boarding, we stood for half an hour, waiting to be let on to a bus which then took us out to our airplane which was located way way out, beyond the cargo loading area. Hmmm, not quite what we had expected. At least the scorching transition from bus to plane was only a few minutes and the plane itself was beautifully air conditioned.

So, finally on the last leg of our journey, we were pleased it was only a short 6 hours this time. My specially ordered meals never arrived but I didn't mind as the food was delicious, and we weren't seated near any horrible people. So Etihad was finally looking like it had redeemed itself slightly. Until we landed in Germany. We were let through customs without hassle and we were excited to finally be in Munich. Then we collected our luggage. Two brand new suitcases that suddenly looked like they had been on about 20 holidays. They were so marked, scuffed and scratched that clearly they had been thrown and mishandled since leaving Australia. And to top it off, we later discovered 3 tubes in our toiletries bags had exploded, so they were also squashed at some point.

But that aside - we were finally in Germany! And it felt overwhelming! There was a moment, when I was trying to drag my suitcase across the cobblestones that I did think "I've made a big mistake", but then again, I had been awake already 40 hours by that point. So once we got to the hotel (which is lovely by the way - with a swinging chair and everything!), had a shower and sent a few emails, we headed out into the central Munich area. We were purposely keeping ourselves awake to acclimatise to the timezone.

The last time we saw Munich, it was covered in snow. So it was a pleasant surprise to see it had hardly changed yet everything was different. It was 30 degrees and a beautiful sunny afternoon, flowers hanging from every building and waterfountains everywhere in operation. There were fresh fruit stalls every few hundred meters, and we even found the fresh food markets. Once we had looped back to our hotel, we were both starting to stumble, and I couldn't see properly any more (my eyes were stinging and not staying open properly) so we stopped for dinner just down the road from our hotel. Michael had steak and I had schnitzel. Not feeling super hungry, I almost didn't order it, but in the end, I ate all of it! 2 pieces of weiner schnitzel, bowl of potatoes and a salad! I must have been starving!

However, as soon as the food was gone, we retired back to our hotel, where, as soon as our heads hit the pillows, we were out like lights.

We slept for 12 hours straight!