It was rainy.
The ferry arrived almost on time, but it took two hours for the border police to arrive to check us.
The passengers (including those with bicycles, motorcycles, and cars) were privileged to leave first. However, another officer was downstairs who urged me to hurry. So I said a quick goodbye and went out into the rain.
To find the guesthouse, I had marked it on the map and even looked at the street view. But the location and street view were wrong, and no photo on booking.com showed the truth.
No wonder – the house at the given address looked uninhabitable, but don’t judge a book by its cover, and the photos of the room had been fine.
So I opened the garden gate and was led into the backyard with a new building.
The owner was a funny one:
She could speak German, opened to door with the freshly cleaned floor and went in with her muddy shoes. She went back and forth, to and fro, there and back, explaining the obvious, but in German: here is the bed, here is the table, here is the blablabla and you could read on the floor what what she was talking about.
And then she told me to keep the room tidy and clean – “Do you understand?”
I understood well, and when she was gone, I took off my shoes to enter, balanced among her traces of dirt, and dug out an old napkin. (I always keep them after dabbing my lips and polishing my fingertips after dining, for more serious emergencies, like cleaning up after my Georgian landlady).
“The passengers (including those with bicycles, motorcycles, and cars) were privileged to leave first. However, another officer was downstairs who urged me to hurry. ”
The same is true for ferries in the Mediterranian. Pedestrians are asked to wait, and then out of sudden you have to hurry.