I've just got back from a 3 night mini break in Berlin with my daughter. Everything went quite smoothly until the bus journey back to Tegel airport - although the very efficient, but complicated, integrated transport system did take some getting used to.
We checked out of the hotel, got the S Bahn (metro) to the TXL airport bus stop on the outskirts & just missed a bus. Couldn't get across the road! Within minutes the traffic on the road got very congested. We were the first people in the queue for the bus but as time went on people poured out of the metro station continuously & blocked the entrance & the pavement. It was pouring with rain & very cold. No buses came, but more & more taxis, full of people, passed by. Normally the TXL buses come very regularly. After about half an hour it became obvious that there was something very wrong. We assumed a traffic accident. Police cars somehow screamed their way through the traffic.
We tried flagging down taxis, but all were full. Eventually one stopped, but it had been ordered by a young man. He very kindly offered to share with us & a young woman. About this time we learnt that there was a bomb scare at Tegel & all roads in had been closed. The backed up traffic wasn't moving. The taxi driver had tried to take a fare to Tegel but had to turn round & come back. It was obvious we would just sit in the taxi at a standstill so we got out at an Aldi a little way along the road.
By this time the enormity of our predicament was obvious. We were soaking wet & shivering with cold. Neither of us could find out anything on our phones. BA & the airport phones were jammed. The young man & woman were hugely helpful. I dread to think what we would have done had we not met them. My German is OK, but I don't have the vocabulary for a situation like that.
We decided that all we could do was to walk back to the metro station & go back to the hotel & hope that we could get a room & some help sorting out what to do. By this time we were very worried indeed. I think it was a combination of factors. We had no control of the situation. We couldn't communicate or get enough information. We didn't have a base & were in a strange country. We felt very isolated. The knock on effect of not getting home would require a lot of sorting out.
As we got back to the station we saw that there were several TXL buses arriving. So we changed our plan & got on one, hoping. The traffic was very busy, but it was moving. The airport had re-opened. The bomb scare was apparently a bag of rubbish. We arrived & we caught our flight which was delayed by an hour.
The thing is that we were so completely unprepared for the situation. It all happened very quickly & could so easily have been dire. Actually we were extremely lucky in many ways, not least of which that it wasn't actually a bomb or terrorist attack.
In future I will have emergency phone numbers for the carrier, the airport & the hotel in my phone. I will also have websites where possible. I will duplicate all information in a notebook. Information & communication is key, but is one of the first things to be inaccessible. Ditto transportation. Goodness knows what people did before mobile phones, but there are so many the phone is actually useless in a foreign country where you don't have any contacts. Chaos is literally just round the corner.
It makes you seriously consider whether any non essential travel is actually a good idea nowadays. The world is so interconnected. An incident, real or not, can happen anywhere & at any time. When you are involved it shows you just how vulnerable you are & how little control you actually have.
We were very pleased & very lucky to get back to the UK in one piece.
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