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| Erin's Journal for 9-20-02 Today was a moving day for us, so we planned to get up a bit early to repack our bags and get down by 10:30am. Well, forget that! For whatever reason, I again had a terrible time sleeping and was groggy all morning. I heard Glenn get up, and we shared a quick hug before heading off to our showers. I took a bit longer getting everything packed in my shower bag than he did, so he ended up waiting while I secured everything, and we got downstairs around 11am. No problem though, and we stuck our bags in a locker for the day while we waited for our bus to Dresden at 6pm. Our aim today was to get the photos we'd been taking and the few journals we've finished onto the website. We've been out a week now, and know everyone at home is waiting to see where we've been hiding! But we experienced an odyssey of frustration in getting this done! There was supposedly an internet cafe not far down the street our hostel was on, so we headed there. The guy at the counter seemed suspicious and insisted on pre-installing our software on one of his machines to see if it would work first. Well, he isn't familiar with the program of course, and although Glenn saw that he had it up and ready to go on one computer, the guy insisted that it wasn't working and tried it on another computer. This time it didn't work at all, and he said he couldn't let us try anything. All of this took over a half hour of waiting while he fiddled around, so it was now after 1pm, and into the more expensive time of day for internet use at his cafe. We asked if there were any other cafe's nearby where we could try again, and he referred us further down his street. We walked a long way, passing one internet shop that was closed down. By then we were ready to turn back and just work on setting up some pages for use on some other day when we found a reasonable place that would let us do our own stuff!!! We went back to the first place and used the computers for about an hour, although I chafed at paying the guy money after all the hassle. Afterwards, heading back toward the hostel, we found another place with a small internet shop in the back. The hostess was very nice, but didn't know what we were talking about. We tried our first step of installing software, but couldn't read any of the commands or icons, and then the disk seemed to be stuck in the hard drive! We had to get her to shut the whole thing down to get it back, and at that point figured we'd give up - we were jinxed!!! We headed back toward the hostel to find some lunch. We went back to our friend at the local hot dog store, and after eating, noticed a sign next to his shop which said internet Figuring it couldn't hurt to try one last time, we went in This place was just what we'd been looking for, and was only 6 doors from our hostel!!! We installed our software, transferred photos from our cameras and started downsizing them so they'd fit on our website. Unfortunately, by now we only had about 2 hours before we needed to meet our shuttle to Dresden back at the hostel, so I wasn't able to resize all of the photos. No problem, we thought, we'd just do those ones later at some next stop. You can always copy the pictures from the camera card again! Well, unbeknownst to us at the time, we had pressed the 'move' button instead of the 'copy' button, and discovered to our horror a few days later that all of the photos from Amsterdam and Berlin were gone!!! We are very disappointed - the small versions you see on our website still look great, but they're not of a quality to reprint or copy. BUMMER!!! Anyway, rushed for time, I got about 60 photos transferred to our website, but the journals wouldn't translate due to a lack of software on the computer there. So we quickly thanked the lady at the desk and went back to meet our shuttle. The bus turned out to be a van with 8 seats - so it was pretty full with 7 passengers with huge backpacks and a driver! But we had fun with our fellow travelers on the 3 hour trip. It would have been shorter, but we ran into traffic on a scale that reminded me of L.A.! We drove into the darkness to a hostel in Dresden, the Mond Palast. It is nothing compared to the Circus which we just left, but do-able for a night. We'll look for better tomorrow! |
| The clocktower on one of Berlin's new party building, visible as you leave the city |