Birthday plans!

I figured I would give Nick’s fingers a vacation and write the entry about my birthday weekend because Nick put a lot of effort into making it really special and I love him a little more for it, if that’s possible. We mentioned in an earlier post that we had bought insanely cheap tickets to different places via RyanAir. For the weekend of my birthday, we bought a round trip to London for 6 Euro each. I admit, London was not the place that I really wanted to spend my birthday in. There were far more romantic and cool places that I had in mind, but I couldn’t pass up the ridiculous offer.
I contacted our friend Sharman who we had met in Ecuador while we were living there. Marta (our Spanish teacher) introduced us to Sharman because Sharman was taking a 2 week vacation to Ecuador and was looking for some people who she could (understand) and hang out with. We took her to Salsa night, dancing and went out for dinner a few times. She’s a great person and told us if we ever came to London to get in touch and she would love to show us around. So, we did. I was under the impression that Shar would be picking us up from the airport and we would be staying with her for weekend. Meanwhile, Nick found a really great deal on a flight from London to Paris because he knew I had been dying to go there forever. He contacted Sharman and told her to keep sending me messages and keep me under the impression that we would be in London for the whole weekend.
Flash forward to the week before the trip. Of course, as luck would have it we both came down with colds on Wednesday before leaving on Friday. If you don’t already know, I really have to be one of the unluckiest people in the world (as far as random mishaps go). Sometimes, I feel like the guy from Mario Kart driving around with the storm cloud above my head. I spent most of Thursday and Friday sleeping (occasionally waking up to watch the World Cup :D) and pumping my stomach full of OJ and soup.
When Friday came, although my sore throat had subsided a bit, I still felt like there was a small army of germs marching its way through my sinuses; but, off we went. Our flight didn’t leave until 10:55pm and was only a little more than an hour long. Because of the time difference, we arrived in London at 11:30pm. The flight was smooth but I ended up having a problem with my ears and sinuses while we were landing. My ears were in an immense amount of pain, so I was happy to be on the ground not only on time, but early! Nick, of course, was thinking “Wait until she finds out we have another plane to catch!” However, that’s where the luck stopped for the time being. As we rounded the corner for customs, I knew we were in for a LONG night. There were about 150 people waiting in line in front of us, waiting to be pushed through the two windows that were open.
An hour and a half later, we had the pleasure of meeting the most unpleasant woman on Earth. I have never been looked at in such a suspicious manner before. Now, after standing in line for an hour and a half until 1 in the morning while sick, I had some trouble dealing with her BS. The first thing she said to us (no greeting) was “Put your passports together on the counter, so I only need to reach up once.” What?! You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean I know that border guards have a physically demanding job and all, but REALLY? She continued to bombard us with questions about our jobs, lives, intentions etc. Even after asking for and seeing our return ticket to Germany, she seemed to think that she was doing us a favor by letting us in. Thanks to Satan, we missed the bus we needed to take to the other airport (at this point, I was still thinking that Shar was picking us up there because it was closer to her house). We asked an information desk what our next best option was and they told us there was a bus that would take us into London (1 hour and 15 minutes) then we would have to wait another hour there and then get on a second bus to the airport (add one more hour and fifteen on).
At this point, I was practically begging Nick to call Sharman and see if she would be willing to pick us up at this airport, so that we could get some sleep and not have to arrive at the airport at 4:30 am. Nick responded by pulling a present (wrapped in printer paper hehe) out of his bag and said “Happy Birthday.” He told me I should open the present because everything was going wrong for us and I could use a pick me up. Dazed and confused, I told him that I could wait until my birthday and I didn’t want to open it. He insisted so finally I gave in –who doesn’t love presents, right? It was an English/French dictionary. He explained that he knew I had always wanted to go to Paris, so he wanted me to be there for my birthday. He then explained to me that we NEEDED to take the 3 hour bus in order to get to the airport and catch our flight out at 6. Well, Jeez. It was such a romantic, hectic evening. One thing the info office failed to mention was that the bus would be dropping us off in the middle of London IN THE COLD at 2 am. There was no bus station to wait in and we were not impressed.
There was a Romanian girl on our bus who was in the same boat as us. She needed to get to the other airport, so we walked with her from the corner where bus #1 dropped us into the cold, dark night to the bus stop where we would catch bus #2 and we decided we would try to find a café or something to wait in. When we found bus stop #2, there was a bus parked there ready to go the airport. It wasn’t the same but as the one we had on our tickets, but we decided to beg the driver to let us on. After some debate, the guy finally said OK and we were off. We got into the airport at 3:30 am but c'est la vie, we were off to Paris!