Day 47 – Visitors

In the past 3 weeks I’ve had 10 different people visit me here in Berlin. This is a much higher number than I had anticipated. A good 80% of these people were here for other reasons and their travel just happened to intersect with my journey. But 20% were here just to see me (and some churches).

There’s a certain overhead that one has to deal with when hosting people. It takes time to get familiar with a new city and it can be doubly-bad if you have a local “tour guide”. You guide has most likely gone through the steps of figuring out how everything works and if you just follow him around you run the risk of getting lost if you are out alone.

This is why today when I went to collect the rents at the Flughafen and it was time to leave, I simply gave them a subway map and told them the name of the station and the subway line it was on. They had to work through the whole exercise of finding the station and figuring out the connections. When we got to each station they had to use the signs to determine the location of the new line as well as the direction we needed to go.

It’s slow going and it’s more work for me in the short term. But the payoff is that once they figure out how the system works, we can take the training wheels off and they can graduate to free-range tourists. It’s better for everyone. Especially me.

Here is your cab fare.