Sometimes the best laid plans go severely awry. The plan for the weekend was to visit Potsdam for its big castle festival. I spent the day on Saturday with a colleague of mine and got a wonderful tour of the city before we attended the festival. The plan was to spend the day on Sunday wandering Berlin before flying back to Basel.

The days preceding, I was suffering from tooth and jaw pain that I ignored because it was no different from the pain I get periodically from the fact that I grind my teeth.

And as the pain got worse, the plan went from leaving Potsdam early for a Berlin tour to spending a very low key day in Potsdam before heading to the airport. Then it went to me looking for trains back to Basel so I could get to a clinic in Basel. Then, when I woke up with half of a swollen face, it was a scramble to find an English speaking clinic in Berlin. If I couldn’t, it was the first train back to Basel.

I had trouble finding one online that was open on Sundays, but the people at the pharmacy at the Berlin HBF were incredibly nice and sent me with an address to a dentist I could go to.

After all was said and done, it was 11:30. I had a clean bill to take the plane back, but by that time, I was exhausted, hungry and a little disoriented from the numbing stuff they used when they did the work on me. I could have spent the next four to five hours wandering Berlin as planned, but I didn’t want to explore Berlin looking like a sad chipmunk. My colleague offered to let me stay with her until the flight, but I didn’t really want to impose. Besides, what I think I really needed was to sit on a train, play MarioKart and listen to podcasts

So, here I am, writing to you from hour two of the seven hour train ride from Berlin to Basel. It’s been an eventful day for sure.

I will post about Potsdam and the festival, which were both so much fun (toothpain aside), later this week.