A Series of Unfortunate Events, Travel Edition: The Ugly Side of Wanderlust

Welcome to my travel nightmare.

Since leaving Kyoto, Joel has lost his Aggie ring, we missed our bus to Tokyo, one of our flights was cancelled (without us being notified), our apartment in Venice was cancelled (with only one week's notice), and I left my phone in the Frankfurt airport. Kyoto was lovely, but we seem to have left all of our luck behind there.

Let's start at the very beginning.

Friday, February 28
After leaving Kyoto, our plan was to spend three nights in Tokyo before flying to Europe. In his extensive planning, Joel found a great deal on an all-day bus from Kyoto to Tokyo for only 5,000 yen (about $50) that left at 9:40 a.m. - early, but not impossibly so. We did laundry, packed our bags, and talked to Joel's parents on Skype the night before, and woke up on Friday morning with plenty of time to strap on our packs and go.

And then, at ten to nine, Joel realized he couldn't find his Aggie ring.

We turned the room upside down looking for it. We took the bed apart and unpacked and re-packed all of our bags. I even checked the laundromat where we'd gone the night before, but no dice. We left our contact information with the French couple in the house in case they found it, but by the time we gave up the chase we'd missed the bus. Dejected, we headed to the train station and proceeded to take regional trains for the next twelve hours: Kyoto to Gifu, to Nagoya, to Toyohashi, to Hamamatsu, to Numatsu, to Atami, and finally to Tokyo. For about the first half of the trip, we weren't even sure we were going in the right direction, but Joel's memory of Japanese geography served us well.

I am optimistic that the ring will turn up (he had it in the house the night before and didn't take it anywhere), but we wound up spending over $150 on regional train fare, on top of the lost bus fare. The only high point of the day was discovering that Joel was accepted to the Master of Global Policy Studies at UT.

Monday, March 3
After a pleasant and uneventful three nights in Tokyo, we headed to Narita airport on Monday afternoon to begin our journey to Milan. The original itinerary was to go from Tokyo to Shanghai, fly overnight to Frankfurt after a short layover, and then take the final leg to arrive in Milan Tuesday morning. We went to check into our flight to Shanghai, where we began to get nervous as the flight attendants searched unsuccessfully for our reservation. Finally, they figured out why: that night's flight from Shanghai to Frankfurt had been cancelled, which meant that all three of our reservations had been cancelled. Naturally, we were never notified.

We explained that we were trying to get to Europe and would be willing to land anywhere in Italy or eastern Germany, and the flight attendants began frantically making phone calls to a travel agent to remake our flight arrangements. Finally, we were booked on Tuesday's overnight flight to Franfurt and a different flight to Milan on Wednesday evening. We decided to take the originally-planned flight to Shanghai and spend that night and the next day in the city, and the airline was decent enough to put us up in a hotel.

When we arrived in Shanghai, we called our hostel in Milan and explained our situation, and they agreed to modify our reservation (rather than cancel it) to stay for only two nights. Due to China's recently-relaxed visa restrictions, we were able to spend the day in Shanghai without purchasing a visa (normally $160 for Americans), which was very pleasant - we wandered around the old city center, had tea and dumplings in the famous tea house by the Yuyuan Garden, and haggled for a pair of (probably fake) elephant jade earrings.

I would love to post pictures, but all of them are on my lost phone - more on that in a minute.

Wednesday, March 5
We caught our overnight flight to Frankfurt with no problems. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that, because our bags had been checked through to Milan, we didn't have to take them through customs in Frankfurt. ("This isn't America, we do things right here," the baggage claim attendent cheerfully explained.) After some minor trouble with the train ticket machine, we went into the city center and walked around for a bit after going to an Ash Wednesday service at the Dom Cathedral. We saw a couple of churches, climbed a bell tower, grabbed a light lunch and decided to sit down for a drink to pass the last few hours until heading back to the airport for our flight to Milan. We found an Irish pub with free wifi and Joel checked his e-mail to see if he had gotten a decision from the graduate program at American University.

Instead, he found an e-mail from AirBnB saying that our month-long booking for the apartment in Venice had been cancelled - with only one week's notice.

We proceeded to spend the next two hours frantically searching for places to stay in the same price range anywhere in Italy. Joel was haggling with some Chinese guy for an apartment in Venice while searching for hotels, hostels, and other apartments/rooms there and in Rome. I asked around on Facebook - no dice. After giving up on the apartment in Venice we contacted several listings on AirBnB in Rome and got a prompt response from an Italian couple renting out a room in their house in Rome near the Villa Borghese. The reviews spoke very highly of her and her husband as hosts, and it was quite a bit cheaper than our original booking, but all those months of looking forward to an apartment of our own for a month just...vaporized.

We got to airport, checked into our flight, and had an overpriced dinner of airport sandwiches. I plugged my phone in to charge at one of the free charging stations and, exhausted, dozed off in one of the uncomfortable chairs by the airport gate. Finally, we boarded our flight and headed off to Milan. We arrived, grabbed our bags, and hopped on the bus into the city center, where we planned to catch the subway to our hostel. We got off the bus, only to find that the subway stations were unexpectedly closed - at 9:30 p.m. Dejected and irritated, we got in the massive taxi line and proceeded to wait another 40 minutes until we got to the front of the line. I reached into my backpack to check the time on my phone.

It was then that I realized that I had left it charging in the Frankfurt airport.

I felt the last of my energy and optimism ebb away. The Galaxy S2 smartphone - the gift from my boisterous and exceptionally helpful Korean priest, with two years' worth of messages from friends and family, not to mention all of our pictures from Tokyo and Shanghai and Frankfurt - was just gone. All those years I spent resisting the urge to get a smart device for fear of having my entire life on it, and I finally fell into the trap I always told myself I would avoid.

By the time we made it to our shady-as-hell hostel in Milan (which, in a slight silver lining, gave us a private room when we had booked beds in a mixed dorm), I wanted nothing more than to sleep off what had become a five-day bad dream. There was no soap at all in the bathroom anyway, so I couldn't shower. I stripped off my clothes and collapsed into bed, taking refuge in dreamless sleep.

By the time we found shampoo yesterday afternoon, I hadn't showered for three days.

I am trying to be hopeful that our lost items will turn up. There are only two places Joel's ring could be: in the house in Kyoto, or buried in our stuff somewhere. The Frankfurt airport has a lost-and-found department, and if anyone can track down my stuff in an airport, it is the Germans. But sometimes lost things stay lost, and my love of travel and adventure may soon become one of them. I know that our situation could be so much worse. I know that things can always be replaced, and that we shouldn't be terribly attached to them anyway. I know that even the best-laid plans of mice and men can come unravelled, and that we should be flexible and grateful that we were able to save a little bit of money. But I hate it when carefully-made plans, which are designed to ensure that things go smoothly, go to waste...and I have also discovered that I hate moving to a new place every day or couple of days. Also, I hate not bathing every day.

Apparently, the nomadic life is not for me.

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Update: They found my phone at the Frankfurt airport and will ship it to me, for a fee. Huzzah!