Ticket fiasco

I was worried about our tickets all along – we had Chinese tickets issued at great effort and expense by a Beijing travel agency (not recommended, but the better way is in the notes at the end.) We had Mongolian tickets issued in Ulaanbaatar, and Russian tickets issued in Moscow, Ukrainian tickets from Kiev – all of which I worried about. But these were the Deutsches Bundesbahn tickets – a train system I’ve been riding for more than twenty years, with trains that always run on time, always clean, always wonderful. I was sure of these.

The Polish conductor took one look and said, “These are for yesterday. They are invalid.”

He gave a good discount, but we had to pay for our tickets again, and he said we could deal with the German section when we got to Germany.

I had written my German ‘sister’ Friederike the exact details written on the tickets (without recognizing the mistake!) so she was confused – we said we were arriving on the 21^st, but the email said the 20^th. She came to the station, and waited, but we were not on the train. She spent an anxious 24 hours, then came again. We saw them on the platform, and she was so relieved! Until I explained the cause – My German mother, Margarete, spent an hour with me in the station trying to find new tickets for today – it was their mistake, and they ought to fix it. But you can’t fix something that isn’t there, and there were no sleeper beds available for the rest of the week. The only option was to pay $850 to sit up all night in a smoking compartment! I said, no thank you.

Back at Friederika’s house, I went on the internet, and at last found a bus that ran overnight to London. It would bring us in the afternoon instead of the early morning, but it was only $228 for the three of us. It cut our visit short, but we ran and bought the tickets, had a hasty but delicious dinner, then headed out for the bus station.