A day of two halves

I did a last-minute check of the flight bookings just before leaving Sydney, and was disturbed to discover that the booking reference for the return flight from Svalbard to Tromsø was giving an error. I didn’t have time to investigate then, resolving to figure it out as soon as we were settled in Berlin. Today was that day.

Let’s back-track a bit, to the halcyon days of May-ish. We had booked return flights from Tromsø to Longyearbeyn on SAS back at the beginning, in February. In May SAS decided to reschedule the outgoing flight, moving it not by minutes or even hours, but three days earlier: from the 22nd to the 19th. Since that didn’t suit our itinerary, we hunted around for options and found that Norwegian Airlines had a flight from Tromsø to Longyearbeyn on the 22nd so we booked that and took SAS up on their option to cancel the changed flight. Their response email confirmed that we had cancelled the flight from Tromsø to Longyearbeyn. All good thought we: the return flight hadn’t changed date: it was still OK.

Of course it’s impossible to actually call SAS to check this sort of thing: they have an impenetrable facade of mechanisms and web sites. Only by diving into the “change booking” option does one get to contact options (FAQ, robot-chat or dial-a-human). The telephone-a-human number provided was disconnected. (I kid you not). So I went back through the bank records and actual ticket numbers and came to the conclusion that without telling us they had cancelled (and refunded) the whole return trip, back in May. We had no flight back from Svalbard.

Norwegian to the rescue again, with the catch that they flew a day later than the booking that we thought we had. They could get us all the way to Oslo though, and we would arrive on the same day that we would otherwise have, with the planned overnight in Tromsø that we had before. So we have to cancel an expensive pre-paid hotel overnight stay in Tromsø, and beg our hotel in Svalbard to let us stay the extra night there. That was complicated by the fact that we’d made the original booking through a service, rather than with the hotel, but by ringing them up and speaking to a person we were able to get an extra night in our existing room. At only double the previous rate. Whew!

That took all morning, of course. By midday we were frazzled and in need of a good coffee and some breakfast. So we walked the block to Father Carpenter, the place we breakfasted yesterday. It was great again. I had the poached eggs on sourdough toast with a side of pulled-pork braised in chipotle, which was delicious. Their flat whites were also excellent.

It wasn’t raining, out, but probably because of that it felt significantly colder than the day before, so we rugged up and set of on our walking tour towards the Brandenberg Gate via Alexanderplatz and the television tower, the museum island, and penultimately the historical steel bike cafe, for a sit-down and a drink. It did eventually rain, so we were glad we brought bags and umbrellas with us, but it also had some blue sky and sun. Very changeable, wintry day. Needless to say: all of the picturesque squares in town were either totally closed for renovation/re-paving or fenced off while the Christmas Markets were being constructed. Such appears to be our luck.

Being fairly walked-out by the time we got to the Brandenberg Gate we followed Cath’s plan of buying weekly train/subway tickets and catching the subway back to the hotel. This worked exactly according to plan and took hardly any time at all. Got back by about four PM, since when we’ve been looking at the day’s photos and resting up before tonight’s dinner excursion. That should involve goose, traditional Christmas fare, apparently. Looking forward to that.