Almost Stranded in Berlin

I had a layover in Berlin, spending the night for an early morning flight back to Tallinn. I booked the Moxy Berlin Airport hotel, which I naively believed would be on the airport premises. Once I arrived, I discovered the hotel was a ten-minute drive away. It seemed sensible to take a taxi.

Well, I thought it was sensible. The taxi driver seemed to think it was a great hardship, complaining that he didn’t know where it was or why I wanted to go there. I helpfully looked up the address and route on my phone. He snapped at me to be quiet. I watched (quietly) as we drove, relieved to see that he was going the right way. After we left the highway, he diverged slightly from the Google Maps routing but it seemed like he was going to the right place.

Except that just before we arrived, he stopped and got out of the car. Then he waved at me to come and look. “It’s impossible! There’s nothing I can do!”

There was a large barricade with flashing red lights blocking the road. On the other side of the barricade was a construction site. The hotel entrance was on the other side.

As I took this in, he dropped my bags at my feet.

I was going to have to walk the last bit, he told me, and I owed him nineteen euros and thirty cents.

I pulled out a twenty, briefly distracted as I considered whether this was a reasonable rate for an airport taxi (probably) and wondering how I would tip. The driver snatched the twenty euros, got into the cab and, before I even had a moment to think straight, threw the car into reverse and disappeared into the darkness. There was only the soft sound of music from the hotel bar in the distance.

Initially, I thought that I could go around the construction site through a grassy area — it would play havoc with my luggage wheels but it really wasn’t the end of the world — and the hotel was just a few hundred metres ahead. But now I realised that the entire grassy area was fenced. It would take me at least half an hour to walk around the field to get to the hotel, which is Right There In Front Of Me. As I watched, a man came out the front door and lit a cigarette.

I pushed the barricade to the side and stepped into the soft dirt of the construction site. After only a few steps, I saw a large, deep ditch in front of me. I backed up carefully, hoping not to slide into the darkness.

Once on stable ground, I phoned the number to the hotel to ask how I could get from here to there.

“I have no idea what you are talking about or where you are,” said the customer service person. “I’m in a call center in Frankfurt.”

“If you can call the front desk, they just literally need to look out the window and they will see me.”

But he had no way, he said, of contacting the hotel or telling the staff that I was stood there in the red flashing dark, wondering what to do.

The lights of a car appeared on my road. I hung up, thrilled that my taxi had returned and ready to take back every nasty thing I had said about my driver. But no, it was a different taxi, with a different driver and a different passenger, who was getting out of the car. “It’s your lucky day,” he told me, a young gung-ho entrepreneur type with a ready smile and a can-do attitude. I resisted the urge to shove him back into the cab.

“Don’t leave,” I begged the taxi driver. “We are trapped here. We cannot get across.”

“Of course, you can,” said the driver. “Look. Someone has already pushed the barricade out of the way.”

“But there’s a ditch,” I said, at the same time as the young man said “Let’s just try. I’m sure it’ll be no problem.”

And he paid the taxi which disappeared into the darkness.

I stood there, feeling despondent, while Mr Entrepreneur reassured me that he was very familiar with construction sites and scouted the area.

He returned. “There’s a ditch,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“But look. There’s a ladder balanced across the side of the ditch.”

I gave the man a look of utter disbelief, but maybe he couldn’t see it in the dark, because he continued. “We can cross there,” he said. “It’ll be fine,” he said. And then he lost his footing and I screamed.

But he was young and in good shape and caught himself on the ladder, using his upper arm strength to hold himself above the ditch. He crossed like this, feet barely touching the edge of soft dirt. “See, it’s fine” he called from the far end. And then he disappeared.

That’s it, I thought. I am alone again. I will just die here.

But he came back and explained that no, there was not another way across so I was going to have to cross at the ladder as he had done. “Or,” he said with a dubious look at my arms, “maybe you could just balance on the ladder and walk across it.”

It seemed churlish not to at least try. I edged towards the ditch edge and placed one foot on the ladder. As I inched forward, the ladder began to shake. I threw myself backwards, landing in the dirt to feel something prodding my behind, possibly sharp. I wondered when I’d last had a tetanus shot.

“I’m too old for this,” I muttered.

“No you aren’t!” Mr Entrepreneur was adamant. “Don’t be silly. You aren’t old. You’ve got this!”

Apparently, this was some sort of magic incantation to make me forget that I was definitely old enough to know better. I stood up and brushed the dirt off of my jeans while he took my bags across for me. I began edging across the ladder the way he did, except I had nothing like his upper-arm strength. “You’ve got this,” he said again from the far side. As I reached the halfway point, he leaned forward and held his hand out. I grabbed it and the man literally dragged me across the rest of the ditch and dropped me on the other side.

“You did it!” He beamed at me.

“This is not normal. This is not something that normal people do.”

Still beaming, he took my arm to lead me the rest of the way across the construction site to the street where my luggage waited for me. “Now at least you have a story to write down in your diary,” he said.

And he disappeared into the darkness.

I limped into the hotel and tried to tell the man at reception.

“You took a taxi? Why would you do that?! How much did he charge you?”

I tried to explain that that was not actually the bit that I was upset about but he was too busy explaining to me that the number 22 bus went from the airport to a bus stop just around the corner from here and I should never, ever take a taxi at Berlin airport, under any circumstances.

I told him that the driver had left me stranded on other side of the construction site. He was irate. At me. “Why would you let him leave? You should have stayed in the car. You should have called the police.”

I didn’t dare tell him about the ladder; I was already in enough trouble. He did give me a glass of Prosecco on the house, though, which almost made the whole escapade worthwhile.

I took a photograph of the construction site and sent it to my daughter with an arrow pointing at the ladder. I’m glad I sent it after I had crossed because if I had sent it before, she’d have been on the phone to the local police to please pick up her mother who was a danger to herself and others. As it was, she simply messaged me to say “Thank you for not killing yourself at a construction site in Berlin.” She seemed mostly concerned about how she would explain it to the rest of the family.

I assured her that they would not be surprised.