"Snow storm" on departure

Dear blog community,
its been almost a year since my last entry here. Now that I'm back to the US, I decided to continue blogging occasionally about my activities. I hope you enjoy reading and viewing the pictures. Please comment to make this a more rewarding exercise for me... ;-)

So... every journey starts with travelling. However, this start was not one of the best. In fact we had a mid March "snow storm" in Germany on the very same day I should have taken the flight. Well, there were about 10cm of new snow falling over night - one might think that a developed country used to this kind of climate is able to deal with that. It's not...

First, it took me more than 2 hours to get to the airport (which is usually a 20min ride). The freeway was just covered with snow and the traffic jams skyrocketed to 40+ km... Having arrived barely one hour before departure at the airport (!) I learned that all flights are suspended. The whole airport was closed down due to the weather conditions... Well, that could be an interesting day.

About 1h after the official boarding time, we were finally ushered into buses to get to the plane. Sitting in the plane for 15min... nothing happened. Finally, the captain told us that the runway is still closed until further notice... He kept repeating this about every 20 min until after 2 hours the first aircrafts could take off again. However, we were still waiting for a number in the de-icing sequence...

To cut the long story short:
- we never got that number
- the pilot canceled the flight (he would exceed the maximum duty time)
- took a cab back to Darmstadt
- had (at least!) a good sleep in my own bed (quite a few people actually had to sleep on the terminal floor)
- more than 800 out of 1200 flights got canceled
- I came back the next day to catch the same fligh

Finally, I happily arrived in Philly an I'm staying at the same cozy place as last time. I'm looking forward to an interesting and fruitful stay. I'll keep you updated.

Enjoy the picture series "flier and ice" ;-)

Gamblin' in Atlantic City

Last Sunday I went together with my land lord to Atlantic City. For those who don't now: Its something like a cheap version of Las Vegas on the east coast of the US. I was told that I should go there at least once to see this place... Well yeah.

We took some kind of casino bus there: You get the price of the bus ticket worth free credit in the casino. So the first thing we did was to waste the $25 in one of the slot machines. I can definitely not understand why people find this fun or exciting. You sit in this dull, dark place and get constantly annoyed by blinking lights an noisy machines. You hit some buttons and then the counter of you money goes either up or down... After five minutes I got already bored and felt an urge to leave... Luckily it doesn't take long to get rid of 25 bucks. At least I got 15 bucks back which almost paid for the lunch.

The lunch buffet was good, but not outstanding. Anyway, I only ate as much as I possibly could. :-) Then it was time to stroll along the famous board walk. Most of the casinos are situated directly at the beach. The board walk runs along between the beach and the buildings. Maybe it is nice to take a walk there in summer... with cold and windy weather it wasn't really fun. The overcast sky was not the perfect setting for taking pictures either. Well, you see the result.

The most interesting part was maybe the interior of some casinos. One had this Wild West theme from the outside and inside. That looked quite cool - kinda underwhelming though when you have already been to Las Vegas. Some of the places were not that glittering and shiny - rather run down and shabby.

All in all Atlantic City is probably a place where you don't have to go. It might be nice with great summer weather. But I still think that I can't quite get the hang of the casino business...