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“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” ~Abraham Lincoln

Monday April 8, 2013 

I was bored.             

Sitting in Supply Chain Management, I couldn’t take it anymore. The formulas probably would have confused me anyway, but my professor’s accent made it ten times more confusing. I needed to check out, so I booted up my laptop to check out for a few minutes.

I was excited when I opened my email and saw that I had an email from Andy, the travel agent I’ve been working with for my trips to Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Paris. He was going to actually be the guide for the tour I’d hired in Amsterdam, and he was sending us our itinerary for the trip.

I read through it and it looked perfect. There was a great blend of history (the Anne Frank house, the Van Gogh Museum, etc.) with the classic “touristy Amsterdam” (aka: the red light district.)

The tour started at 10am on Friday. I had booked an early morning flight again, but this time I was just going to go Friday through Sunday. I went to double check my booking, pretty sure I left Prague at 7am.

As I clicked through the emails in my “Travel” folder (where I keep all of my flight and hostel reservations, I found my Amsterdam booking. Opening, I was shocked at what I saw. Sure enough, my departure was Friday April 12…but the departure time was 17:25, not 7:25.

There was no way!

I wouldn’t have done that!

I couldn’t have screwed up so bad!

I immediately started looking at contingency plans. First I checked airfare, but it was way too expensive to book a new ticket. I hadn’t bought travel insurance, so I couldn’t cancel the reservation anyway. I checked train tickets and found there were a few routes. I immediately emailed my parents to see if they were free to Skype. As soon as class got out, I went home to give them a call.

They told me two things I needed to know. (1) If I called them—which would take a miracle since I’d had my cell phone turned off—I should be able to change my booking for a small fee (2) If I didn’t change it, I could take the train there and still use the return flight back. That gave me options.

We wound up Skyping longer than I’d intended to. I rushed back to the tram to get back for my afternoon class, but I missed the 9 as it pulled away.

This day was going downhill fast.

I caught the next 9. The car I was in was mostly empty. I stood towards the back staring out the window. At one stop, when the door opened, I noticed a woman trying to finagle a baby carriage onto the tram. She made eye contact with me and said something in Czech. I didn’t understand her words, but I stepped off the tram. Lifting the front end of the carriage, I helped her load the baby onto the tram. She thanked me (in English) and asked where I was from. I told her America and we talked briefly. Her English was quite good.

She got off a few steps later and I helped her lift the carriage off.

As she walked away and the tram continued to school, I smiled. Had I not screw up my booking, I wouldn’t have gone home, and I wouldn’t have been here to help her with the carriage.

I guess good things really do come out of things that seem bad at first.

Tuesday April 9, 2013

I had an intensive class today on Cross Cultural Communications. It was really, really interesting, despite the fact I was preoccupied by my Amsterdam dilemma. At noon, we got an hour long break for lunch. I went and took the tram to the main train station.

Online, I’d found tickets to Amsterdam, but to get the fair I had to come to the station. The train would leave Thursday afternoon, and then arrive at Amsterdam airport on time Friday morning to meet the group at the hostel. I wasn’t willing to spend more than 75 euros on the ticket, but all of my online research indicated that that was reasonable.

Apparently, I was wrong again. The price of the ticket was 300 euros (roughly 400 dollars.) Even the ticket lady told me it was a bad deal.

I left, a little disheartened. Grabbing some pizza on the way back to school, I sat in one of the study lounges and began to think. I wondered, is this really worth it? I’m only missing eight hours of the tour…four hours of which are free time. I pulled up Andy’s itinerary and realized all I was missing were the Amsterdam Sign, the parliament building, and the cannabis museum. I’d still see the Anne Frank house (which was why I’d booked the trip to begin with) and I was going to be there in time for the Dutch dinner. I wasn’t missing any of the nights I’d paid for in the hostel…by my math, the value of what I was missing was about 40 euros…was it worth spending 300 euros to save 40 euros?

As I logged into my laptop, I saw that Lad’ka was online. I decided to try one last idea before I gave up. I sent her a message on Facebook saying, “Hi Lad'ka! Could I meet you somewhere in the dorms tonight to use your mobile phone? I need to make a phone call and mine doesn't work anymore.”

Within a few hours, she replied, “Hi, sure, you can use my mobile phone I am at dorm and I am not going to go out today.”

We met in the lobby of her dorm building at 8:30. I called Czech Airlines to find out how much it cost to change my booking. The man on the other end of the phone was definitely Czech, but spoke very fluent English. I explained my situation, gave him my booking number, and told him the flight number I wanted to change to.

“I’m sorry sir,” he said. “You used a student discount code to book your flight. It is absolutely impossible to change your booking. The only way to do it would be to pay the difference in this ticket, pay a penalty fee for misuse of a discount, and then pay a transfer fee. It is cheaper to just buy a one way ticket on that flight.”

I sighed. “Thank you,” I said, “I understand.”

He paused for a minute. There was an awkward silence on the phone. “You aren’t going to yell at me?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I understand.”

“Oh!” he said, his voice perking up. “Most Americans yell at me.”

My accent must have given me away. “Not at all,” I said. “I appreciate your help.”

“Thank you sir,” he said. “Have nice evening and I hope your trip works for you.”

I hung up. “No luck!” I told Lad’ka giving her back her phone.

We hadn’t actually seen each other since Dresden, so we chatted a bit before heading back to our dorms. We decided we would meet for Pizza at some point in the coming weeks.

I decided to give up. It wasn’t worth going broke just to get to Amsterdam. The Amsterdam sign would have been cool, but the Cannabis museum didn’t really interest me anyway. I emailed Andy to tell him my situation. He wrote back immediately and said he understood. We agreed on a time to meet once I got to Amsterdam, and in a roundabout way, my trip was back on track!

Lesson learned!