True Confession

Those who have traveled extensively with me before know that I can suffer some pretty severe Travel Paranoia (referred to as TP from here on out). Symptoms of TP include but are not limited to compulsively checking to make sure that one's passport hasn't been lost/stolen/spontaneously combusted, multiple revisions of train/bus/transport vehicle schedules, premature panic attacks when a ticket isn't instantly located precisely where it had been stored so it would NOT be misplaced, etc, etc. Kind of a weird infirmity to suffer from considering the traveling I've gotten to do, but nothing about TP is logical. I like to think that every new trip is a therapy session to help alleviate myself from unnecessary spikes in blood pressure and extreme psychological distress.

Okay, so I'm obviously (semi) joking about TP, but that being said, I had some pretty good reasons to be a little nervous about making sure I actually made it to Munich. Potential calamity inducing elements included:
1) Finding a train/bus that could get me to the Jerez Airport for my 7:00am flight. Jerez is a city about 40 minutes away by train or bus, and while schedules for public transport in Spain always seem a little haphazard to me (that could be the TP talking), it didn't help that I had booked my flight for January 6th -- aka el Día de los Reyes Magos. Los Reyes Magos (Three Kings Day) is a major holiday as it is the day that Spaniards exchange gifts with their family and children receive their gifts that the Reyes magically bring overnight (sidenote: Santa Claus is definitely present thanks to globalization, but not the main gift giver of the winter holidays). Crap, why didn't I think about this when I scheduled my flight?!?

2) Iberia, the airline company I was flying, has been has been having problems with large numbers of employees going on strike all throughout the holiday season, especially with flights that were flying through Madrid (which mine was). As a result, a large percentage of Iberia's flights were being cancelled and/or late.

3) I was to arrive in Munich 45 minutes before my friend Lisa, who was flying back to Germany where she works from her home in Minnesota where she spent Christmas and New Years with her family. What if something happened and she wasn't on her flight? I wouldn't have anywhere to go, no knowledge of the language, and what if I couldn't contact her...?

I'm happy to say that everything turned out just fine thanks to an overnight stay in Jerez and a friendly Bolivian taxi driver named Juanjo who got me safely to the airport. And while other people I talked to had problems with Iberia, all of my flights made it to their destination with minimal delays. After some ingenious sign reading (ps- we are so lucky that English is used as a default language in airports, restaurants, general international settings), I found my way to the adjacent terminal and was able to find Lisa without incident. From there, I was golden, as she has been living in Munich for close to a year now and has picked up enough German to operate as a functional member in society and could tell me everywhere I should go and how to get there.

I'd give Munich a thumbs up in my general review of things, and while I enjoyed exploring the city, I do have some issues with it. Within the first day of walking around the city, Germany's obsession with order and beauty became quite apparent. The architecture throughout the city and the art I saw in museums was incredibly immaculate, meticulously constructed as if the only way to achieve beauty was through eye pleasing symmetry and balance. So I guess what I'm saying is that everything was pretty to look at because of its predictably well polished appearance, but its perfection almost became uninteresting after a while. Don't get me wrong, everything was quite cool and I was quite impressed with what Munich has to offer, it's just that unique/weird/impractical things are usually so much more intriguing... then again, maybe I'm just turning into a bit of a travel snob. I mean really, who complains about when things are too perfect? Me, apparently....