Escort Service

If you have ended up in this post with Google search 'escort service', you might be disappointed: 
I do not provide any 'friendly' services nor maintenance for old Fords. 

The life of an expat is sometimes a bit lonely, as your family lives in a different country and you are not able to see them as often as you would like to.

I often read from the other expat blogs, how people miss their family and try to gather the finances to be able to meet them every now and then.

So, I must admit that being an expat within Europe is a "light" version of expat life. The flight from Germany to Finland takes just over two hours and by choosing a cheap airline (read: Ryanair), the expenses of the traveling aren't too high.

For example, during September, Herr Welle was traveling for two weekends. But my family was able to rush in and keep company to Fräulein and myself. First my grandmother was here, then my mother. For both of them, the costs of traveling were less than 100 euros.

On Wednesday, I will be flying to Finland for a couple of weeks together with Fräulein. Unfortunately, Herr Welle is traveling on business, so he cannot fly with us or even give us the ride to the airport.

If you have ever travelled with a toddler, you know that two hands are just not enough. First, I must get myself, our 20kg luggage and Fräulein in her buggy from the parking lot into the airport building. Then I must let Fräulein run around and consume energy before boarding the plane. And at the same time, I must take care of our belongings. The flight is scheduled so that Fräulein will (hopefully!) take her nap there. But as she is under two years old, she won't have her own seat and must sleep in my lap. Again, two hands won't be enough for me to, for example, reach my bag for a bottle of water, while she is sleeping. And then there will be the same problem with the luggage, the buggy and the toddler, when we will land to Tampere, Finland.

But to my great relief, my grandmother promised to help us! She arrived yesterday (her second visit within a month!) and will fly back to Finland with us on Wednesday! I couldn't be happier!

This escort service will definitely be worth the 100 euros, which her plane tickets cost!

*****
Expat-elämään liittyy monenlaisia hankaluuksia, kuten läheisten ikävöiminen ja lentomatkat naperon kanssa. Täytyy kuitenkin myöntää, että kun asuu suomalaisena Saksassa, nämä asiat ovat helpommin hallittavissa kuin jos elelisi jossain valtamerten takana.

Esimerkiksi pelkästään syyskuun aikana saimme sekä äitini että mummoni meille kylään. Ja nyt kun aiomme lentää Fräuleinin kanssa keskiviikkona Suomeen, mummoni riensi meille taas avuksi. Kuinka paljon helpompaa onkaan matkustaa, kun on kaksi paria käsiä huolehtimassa Fräuleinista ja matkatavaroista! Ja tämän seuralaispalvelun hinnaksi tuli vain noin sata euroa - todellakin sen arvoista!

10 Euros Well Spent

Yesterday, Fräulein and I flew to Finland. Flying with a small child is never easy, but Ryanair gives you some extra headache.

When Fräulein was a baby, I regularly cursed the rule that you cannot take the infant car seat into the aircraft even if there are free seats. It would have been so nice for her to sleep in her own "bed" and I would have had my hands free (the seats are so slippery that you cannot place a baby on one without special arrangements). And with the Ryanair staff, you should never expect any help or nice words - something that seems to come naturally from the staff of some other airlines.

You must also be able to navigate Ryanair's awfull website when booking your ticket. In every possible opportunity, they advertise for car-rents, hotels and additional services. Previously, I was not able to make any payments with my Safari web browser - and you can guess, if I remembered that when starting to book tickets or only after every little detail was filled and I was not able to continue forward... Well, luckily they have now fixed that.

Why should we then use Ryanair? Firstly, it flies to Tampere, from where we have more convenient connections to south-west Finland than from the Helsinki-Vantaa airport.

And secondly, Ryanair is so cheap.

For this visit to Finland, both my outpound flight and return flight costed less than 15 euros. So, my flights were actually cheaper than those of Fräulein, as the price for an infant is fixed 20€ per flight!

But with Ryanair, every single thing costs more money. There are administration fees, fees for online check-in (no alternative available), fees for checked luggage, fees for extra equipment you want to carry, like instruments or baby-equipment (one fully foldable buggy is carried free of charge for each infant).

For us, the total cost of this visit was 136.98€. Even with all the extra costs, not bad!

Even though I find it very annoying that they keep advertising their services, this time I actually fell into buying one! I was making my online check-in on the night before and they asked if I liked to purchase a reserved seat. Normally, you just pick any available seat on the plane. And as I don't like to push our way into the plane first, and as it always takes some extra time when we need to hand over the buggy outside the plane, I am quite often the last one in. If the plane is fully packed, you might end up sitting in the middle seat of row of three with a restless toddler in your arms. Not nice!

I thought that, as most of the seats available for reservation were free on the night before, those wouldn't all be booked. So, I bought a window seat from the second row for 10 euros.

And I must say, that yesterday it really felt to be the best 10 euros I have ever spent!

I had thought that we wouldn't need to hurry into the plane as we had a seat reserved for us, but I was happy to find out that we were also allowed to use the priority boarding. As our seat was on the second row, I didn't need to carry Fräulein and our stuff through the narrow aisle.

The other two seats in our row were free, so I had plenty of room to place my belongings. And even though the plane wasn't full, I liked the fact that I didn't have to rush and stress about the availability of seats.

Fräulein spent most the the time taking a nap (thankfully!). If she had stayed awake, we wouldn't have had to worry about someone sitting right next to us and I might have even been able to keep her from running back and forth the aisle as we had so many seats to ourselves. With her sleeping and me eating some snacks, the two-hour flight went by very fast. We were also one of the firsts to get out of the plane, so everything went very smoothly.

Next time, when I'm going to fly alone with Fräulein and if I suspect that the flight might be crowded, I will most certainly use ten euros for this service! Good for my mental health! ;)

To Fly or Not to Fly?

I wrote earlier about our attempts to get our baby to fly to her own christening one year ago (see the post 'Fly, Baby, Fly'). Arranging the birth certificate, Finnish citizenship and passport really took some effort and quite a lot of paper work!

To our relief, the passport was granted fast. The Finnish consulate in Luxembourg received the passport on Monday, and we were going to fly to Finland on the following Friday. As Herr Welle was traveling (again...) and I didn't want to make another road trip with our baby, we asked to send us the passport. First, we asked if they could send it via courier, but for some reason that wasn't an option. The consulate promised to send it as a signed letter. Although a bit worried, we though it would be delivered in time. Even though the consulate is located in another country, Luxembourg is only 200 km from Wiesbaden. So how long could it take?

I had calculated that the passport should arrive on Wednesday. When it didn't, I asked about the number of the signed letter from the consulate. According to the tracking information, the letter had been processed at Frankfurt post hub earlier that day. Yes, the passport was so close!

To our horror, the snowstorm of the century hit Frankfurt just during that week. I tried not to worry when I saw some news about how post started to pile in the post offices due to the snow. Surely they would favor signed letters over Christmas cards?

Thursday passed. No postman. I even stood by the door phone while I was boiling water, so that I wouldn't miss the ring. But there was no one at the door.

The main character of all the fuss had no idea what was happening...

I found the number for customer service of Deutsche Post from internet and started to call around. As the letter was sent from Luxembourg Post, the tracking was not as easy as with letter send within Germany. But finally I had someone on the phone telling me that it was STILL in the Frankfurt post hub. It hadn't moved an inch closer Wiesbaden since the day before! But they assured me that it would be delivered the following day. Phew!

So it was Friday. Our flight was planned to depart in the evening, so we would still have time to get the passport with the afternoon post. Our post is usually delivered around noon. Around 1 pm. I finally started to panic. I called again to Deutsche Post and spoke with a lady, who had probably talked with thousands of unsatisfied customers during that week due to the delays caused by the snowstorms. So I don't blame her sounding bored, but I was desperate! She assured me, that there were no way we could get the letter. That there were millions of letters there in the post hub, so even if the hub was located by the airport, we couldn't just stop by and get the letter.

Fortunately, Herr Welle is able to think more rationally in these situations. He made a call to the consulate and things started to look brighter. The officer at the consulate called the airline, which we were about to use, and explained our situation. She even provided us with a scan of a very official looking document, in which all the information of our baby's passport were stated.

Thankfully, we were flying with Finnair (Finnish airline), both Herr Welle and me are Finnish citizens, we were flying to Finland and as a whole family. I appreciate the fact that the regulations of flying with children are so strict, but I'm happy that the crew at the airline recognized that the chances that we were kidnaping the baby were very low, and they accepted our baby to the aircraft without her passport!

But the excitement didn't end there. As it was still snowing a lot, many flights, for example all Lufthansa flights, were cancelled. Fortunately, our flight was only delayed for an hour. And we even got an empty seat booked between Herr Welle and me, so we were able to place our baby there in her car seat.

Thanks to the nice lady at the Luxembourg consulate and the flexibility of Finnair, we were able to have our baby christened in Finland on the following Sunday as planned!

If you are wondering, how we got back to Germany, we did not need to have such a fuss over it. Herr Welle wrote a proxy to his colleague, who picked the letter up from our local post office and brought it with him to their mutual meeting in Finland.

Flying back home

Tomorrow we will be flying to Finland for the holidays, so it might be a bit more quiet here in my blog. I hope there will be no snowstorm tonight, and our journey to Finland will be less exciting this year!