I usually don’t do anything too taxing on my birthday. I consider it a personal holiday and tend to avoid work or anything too regimented. It just so happened that the apartment I had rented in Split wasn’t available through May 10th, so I went ahead and booked my travel to Albania, figuring travel is one of my very favorite pastimes. What could go wrong??
I don’t even pretend I can make a flight any earlier than 9am for personal travel so when I found a 12:45 pm flight to Tirana with a short layover in Vienna, I figured it was meant to be. What I had NOT counted on was a pending strike by Bolt drivers (the equivalent of Uber in Split) nor the sympathy strike at the Split Airport that had been hinted at for the last two weeks I was in Croatia, which was causing a spike in callouts.
I’ve talked to enough Uber drivers to know the exact amount they get from my reservation (40% to Uber) and in the case of Split, if a tourist books a ride to the airport, it’s a 60km round trip with a fare only one way, so once you figure gas and car wear and tear, the driver makes about 10 euro for almost an hour of drive time. In Split, there are taxis EVERYWHERE and the taxi drivers all use both Bolt and Uber apps, and it’s easily 50 euro if I hail a taxi vs 27 if I book Uber, so of course I’m going to continue to book Uber. I was so engrossed in the latest free market conversation with today’s driver, I didn’t realize that my carefully packed art kit, with all the postcards I’d painted so far plus 10 different projects I had planned to do with my brother on our cruise in June, stayed in the Uber. By the time I realized it was missing, I couldn’t get ahold of the driver and had to forge ahead on baggage drop off without it. First birthday blunder.
Turns out, despite culling my wardrobe to what will fit in carry on and a personal item bag that fits under my seat, my worldly possessions are still too heavy for most of the smaller local airlines in Europe. Even without the art kit and my puffer jacket (lost on the plane in Copenhagen) and even leaving all my allergy medicine back at the Split Apartment (antihistamines don’t mix with long covid lungs well), I was still 1.3 kg over when they weighed my carry-on. I was trying to figure out how stretchy my personal item bag could be when the agent who gave me such a hard time realized I booked a ticket WITH a checked bag, and they let it ride. Second blunder averted.
I was three hours early for an airport that only has 9 gates total and I spied a legit restaurant at the end of the baggage area but, assuming there would be other restaurants once I got through Security, I powered through. I was wrong. Once you went through Security, you couldn’t back track to the restaurant, so the locals all dined on English breakfasts and other hot foods, while us tourists were left with the one coffee stand that served all 9 gates. Third blunder.
The only food offered at the coffee shop, with at least 40 people in line, were some baguette sandwiches piled haphazardly on the top of the case. I considered myself lucky because in 99% of the coffee stands I’d been to in my month in Split, IF food was offered it was usually one type of cake or some other random sweet. As with most sandwiches in the EU, these sandwiches were more about the bread, and once unwrapped, sported one see-through slice of prosciutto married to an anorexic sliver of white cheese topped by a few arugula sprigs, no mayo, no mustard. Paired with my usual tiny coke zero, it would have to do.
Oh well, I figured when I get to Vienna, I’ll have a real meal and find some cake for my birthday. Did I mention man plans and God laughs?? When we landed in Vienna, we camped out on the tarmac because no bus was available to take us to the entrance and it was too far and too dangerous to walk. A good hour passed before we finally were freed and could continue our trip. At this point, I was pretty hungry and was not going to be picky.
I had seen a small Leberkase kiosk on my last layover in Vienna but wasn’t sure what it was, so ate elsewhere. I had since learned that Leberkase was a Bavarian meat specialty, essentially a finely ground meatloaf made from corned beef, pork, and sometimes bacon. It’s baked until it develops a golden brown crust. If I was going to have to eat a second sandwich today, I might as well go local.
I ordered the original with cheese and received a very fresh hamburger roll slathered in too much mayonnaise, mustard and bavarian pickles (similar to bread and butter pickles) with a generous slab of shaped meat. The one bite I snuck before heading to the newest gate change tasted like a cross between Spam and Oscar Mayer cheese hot dogs.
What I forgot from that last layover in Vienna was that beer is twice as expensive as coke zero, only at the airport, so not a cheap snack. Had I eaten said sandwich while it was still relatively hot, and the beer relatively cold, I probably would have enjoyed it more, but that is when Gate roulette started for my connecting flight. The gate changed 4 times in the next 15 minutes, which required me to trek from the F wing to G wing, back to F and then again to G in the first hour.
While I was on my unofficial tour of the Vienna airport, I spied many delicious cake stands and was on the hunt for black forest cake, my absolute favorite german cake. I was still carrying the sandwich and beer and just couldn’t make it work, so I passed the first three without stopping. By the time I got back to G, and figured I had about 20 minutes, I stopped at the fourth cake kiosk for my birthday treat. Unfortunately, they had quite a selection but no Black Forest, so I settled for pistachio chocolate instead.
The cake, through the glass of the case, showed thick layers of chocolate ganache, pistachio filling and even a small chocolate medallion in each cello-wrapped slice. I eagerly dug in as soon as I found a seat (Life’s too short not to start with dessert, at least on my birthday). My fork resisted way more than I had expected, with the cake feeling like Play Dough that had sat out all morning but was discovered in time before it dried out. Ok, so it’s dense, that just means it’s full of flavor, right??
Once I chiseled off a piece and popped it in my mouth, the fourth and probably worse birthday blunder materialized. This cake sat on my taste buds like a heavy piece of styrofoam had been soaked in weak chocolate milk, was wrung out, and then cut into triangles and wrapped in cellophane. It was beyond stale heading into biohazard. I politely spit the chunk out into my napkin as discreetly as I could and walked over to the trash can without hesitation and tossed it. A healthy half-bottle swig of Coke Zero cleared the styrofoam/Play Dough taste out, and I proceeded to finish the Leberkase sandwich, which was cold but still very tasty.
We boarded our first plane, only to be taken off 20 minutes later for “issues” and returned back to our gate. 45 minutes and one more gate change later and our weary group of passengers were on our way to Tirana, only five hours after I should have checked in to my guesthouse.
I’ll just have Groundhog Day and try to celebrate my birthday tomorrow.