Our trip’s drawing to an end: flying back to London today and America tomorrow. It’s definitely time for this trip to conclude: not much money, energy, or ability to sleep in cars remains. Even Mona’s exhausted: her GPS couldn’t find the car rental place to which we returned her and I could almost swear that her gears now make a grinding sound they didn’t before our hours on the Autobahn. Our time in Dusseldorf was basically wasted: we’re too tired of travels to even put any enthusiasm behind our destinationless wanderings. I threw in more than a few minutes of naps born of equal parts exhaustion and boredom during our killing of the day.
Our third close call at an airport would have been especially ridiculous even if it didn’t end up costing us anything, but taking a taxi ride that cost 99 euros ($120!) to get to our airport on time because we wasted the day and then went to the wrong airport is nothing short of absurd. In my defense, we went to the main Dusseldorf airport; Ryanair flies out of Dusseldorf Niederrhein, which is a former Royal Air Force base so in the middle of nowhere that it’s not even serviced by public transportation. The main building’s a hangar with no carpet, a few walls that reach all of a quarter of the way to the ceiling, and total lack of an ATM. This last feature must have been our taxi driver’s favorite: it results in us having to pay him with a mixture of euros and dollars.
A flight so short that it’s little more than an ascent and descent got us back to London, where we had an exciting set of shows to make up for the day’s doldrums.
First was eating fries and a veggie burger near King’s Cross Station when suddenly 3 police officers came into view as they tackled a suspect. One slammed the offender’s neck flat against the concrete, pushing on an area that made him stop struggling frighteningly quickly. in between fries, I snapped a phone of my live screening of “Cops” through the restaurant’s door-sized window.
Even more unexpected was the internet cafe patrons. A group of Chinese guys dominated the place, arriving before and leaving after my 6 hours of typing up part of this shitty journal. To say they were gaming enthusiasts wouldn’t quite capture the volume and enthusiasm of their multilingual battle yells and insults. All night long, they kept animatedly annihilating virtual others, often waking Riad up from his desk bed. We’ll call this a day with me on the subway around 8 a.m., finally about to crash.