24 December 2009
Fun Times at the Flughafen
My flight was scheduled to leave Frankfurt flughafen (airport) at 1100 in the morning. I had set my mobile phone alarm to wake me at 0700. I was enjoying a nice sleep in my cozy little room when the phone went off. I picked it up, looked at the phone as I always do in the morning, and saw that my friend, Dan Morrison, had called me at 0210, obviously he had not realized that I was still in Germany. I thought to myself, “Wow! I must have been really sound asleep not to have heard that phone call! How unlike me! Usually I wake to a pin drop.” I got up and began getting ready. My stomach was grumbling already; I couldn’t wait to dig into my free hotel breakfast! After showering and getting dressed, I checked the time on my mobile phone to see if I needed to rush or could take it slowly. The time read: 0245. “That can not be possible!” I thought. It then dawned on me that when Dan had called me at 0210, half asleep, I had confused the ring with my sound of my alarm. My first thought was, “Wow, I am an idiot!” The immediate next thought I had was, “But I am so hungry!! And the breakfast doesn’t start for 4 more hours!” I changed back into my pajamas and tried to get a decent sleep until the morning came.
Hotel Concorde had the best hotel breakfast I’d had all week. When I arrived downstairs to the breakfast room at just after 0800 on Christmas eve morning, I was the only soul in the place. This is unusual for hotel breakfasts. It looked as if no one had touched the buffet all morning too. Clearly everyone was heading out of the city for the holidays. I was greeted by a friendly server, “Guten morgen!” who took my order for hot tea. Despite the disgusting amount of encased meat, sugared waffles, and sweet wine I had been consuming all week, my stomach was still ready for more food! I had a smörgåsbord of fluffy pastries, fruits, jams, and cheeses at my disposal. It was my last day in Europe for who knows how long, for god sakes, I was going to indulge myself! I had chocolate croissants, pretzel rolls, quark cheese, plain croissants, bread with pumpkin seeds, yogurt, fruit salad, jams galore, honey and butter on bread. After all of this, I even contemplated trying the apple and cream cake with vanilla bean sauce, but I knew I would regret this later.
I brought my keys up to the front desk. The man said, “Going back home to America?” I confirmed this was the case. He reassured me that the chaos at the Frankfurt flughafen was since resolved. He asked if I enjoyed my time in Germany, to which I of course responded emphatically, “Yes!” I told him I had been supporting the German economy by shopping all week at the Weihnachtsmarkt and showed him the huge duffel bag I was now dragging around with me. After wishing each other a “Frohe Weihnachten” I was on my way to the train station!
I had stashed away just enough Euros to be able to catch the S-Bahn train to the flughafen. I think the only people that were also out and about on Christmas Eve morning were the other travelers. The subway car was filled with other people dragging large suitcases. I imagined all of the places they may be heading for the holidays: catching a bit of sun in the Canary Islands, rendezvousing with a lover à Paris, back home to the English countryside to see the family. I was happy to be heading home to see my own loved ones. As much as I adore traveling and being in new places, its always a comfort to return home.
In under 15 minutes, I was already at the airport! I juggled three large bags as I tried to get out of the subway car without knocking out any of the other passengers. They were probably thinking, “What a silly American! Look how she over packed!” They didn’t understand that my dad had sent me on a mission to buy up every last tchotchke across Germany. I found the Continental check-in area with ease and was pleasantly surprised to find the Frankfurt flughafen functioning much more peacefully than the Newark flughafen had been a week ago. I expected the level of travel anxiety to be inversely proportional to the time left until Christmas. Thankfully, no one was pushing or shoving, I did not see anyone popping Xanax or breathing into a paper bag to treat hyperventilation. Travel anxiety must be an American thing!
As I made my way to the security checkpoint to enter my terminal, I was happy to also find that there were no long queues or irate airport personnel. I don’t know when I have seen a security line so short! For this being the largest airport in continental Europe, it was a breeze to navigate through. As I passed through the metal detector barefoot, the security woman asked me where I was from. I told her “New York” which is my usual response abroad as most people overseas have not heard of New Jersey, or now, Connecticut. She said, “New York!! I like your socks, they have glitter in them!”
As I walked through Frankfurt flughafen I passed not one, but two, yes, two, men on bicycles. No, they weren’t Tour de France hopefuls transporting their $20,000 bike to the check-in gate. These were airport employees who were navigating the biggest airport in Europe by bicycle. They were not delicate gentlemen either, but burly men of hearty German stock. And the bikes on which they rode were hard to take seriously as they were clearly too small for these large men with child-sized wheels. I had never seen anything like this! Not even in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and I thought the Dutch were really crazy for bikes. As silly as it looked, you have to hand it to the Germans for this healthy, green and economic practice. In the US, the airport employees lazily ride around on golf carts. Here, these men were getting around with the same speed but all the while burning calories and adding no additional cost to the airport! Some greedy lawyer would probably have a field day if we began doing this at home. First of all, there would have to all kinds of helmets and safety gear involved. All we’d need was one fall, one passenger getting a toe run over or some gear grease on their designer jeans and it would all end. I applaud the Germans and am jealous that our uptight country would never be able to accommodate such an idea as simple and great as using bikes to traverse large airports.
I found my gate in a fairly quiet wing of the airport. There certainly was no airport chaos today; I was pleasantly surprised at the travel conditions on Christmas Eve. Once at the gate, I overheard another American ask where the first class lounge was located. It then dawned on me that as an Elite passenger (thanks to my dad’s status), I too could spend the last hour in Germany eating fresh fruit and mixing gin & tonics in the airline’s lounge! The man at the Continental gate told me I should have no problem getting in to the Lufthansa lounge and so I wasted no time heading for it. There was a tall man in a suit playing the bouncer outside the elevators to the Lufthansa lounge. I showed him my ticket and he said, "I’m sorry, but this is Econo class. You can not come in." I went on to point out how on the ticket it said I was an "elite" passenger and was assured I was allowed in. He insisted that I must have some sort of card proving that I am truly "elite." I continued my attempt at sweet talking him. At last he said, "I let you in this time, but next time I do NOT allow it!"
Up in the Lufthansa lounge, I first helped myself to free internet connection. Next, I perused the food bar. I have to say, I have experienced better lounges, particularly with All Nippon Air and China Air, but this one was decent. I had some fruit and tea. Considered one of the breakfast paninis but decided I would just be eating for the sake of eating. I grabbed a bunch of newspapers for the flight: The International Herald Tribune (aka New York Times when abroad), The Independent (UK), and Le Monde (French paper). I had barely opened the first one when they made an overhead call for my flight back to Newark.
My elite status helped me to be able to board the plane along with the first class passengers at the beginning. As I handed by boarding card to the man at the gate, he looked at it and said, "Whitehouse!" (which sounded more like Vitehaus) and then turned to his colleague and said something in German. It could only mean one of two things, either I was being apprehended and sent back for full body cavity search, or I was being upgraded. He finally turned to me and said, "Would you like to be upgraded to business class?" Emphatically I said, "Yes!" After a few clicks on the computer keyboard, I was transformed from one of the masses to one of the privileged.
I happily settled into my oversized leather chair in the second row on the plane. I had enough leg room for two sets of legs, in fact my short little sticks couldn’t even reach the seat in front of me when fully extended! The man next to me was in the same predicament, happily upgraded. It seemed that the overbooked flight worked out in our favor. My seat companion was on his way back from Afghanistan where he works for one of those agencies that got contracts in Afghanistan. He seemed pretty exhausted, understandably. When in Afghanistan, he gets a 40 person security detail and wears a Kevlar vest. And I thought my job was stressful!
The nine hour flight back to New Jersey sailed by! I think I spent half of that time just eating! We started off with hot towels, followed by warm salted almonds. For a starter, I had a lamb kebab, a seafood puffed pastry, and a demi-tasse of cream of mushroom soup. Next up, was a salad with almonds, cherries, and cheese. For my main course, I chose halibut and shrimp with spinach, eaten with some good German butter and pretzel rolls. The cheese course came next which I had with large purple grapes, washed down with port wine. Dessert was a choice of a sundae made to order, but I went for the assortment of parfaits. It seemed as if I had barely digested my large meal when they started bringing freshly baked white chocolate chip cookies through the aisles.
I passed the hours by finishing the novel I’d been working on for weeks. Then I finished all of the magazines I’d taken from the Lufthansa lounge. I hadn’t been this up-to-date on current events in months! I love how the European papers don’t sensationalize everything as much as the American ones do. I was shocked to read about the atrocious theft of the "Arbeit macht frei" sign from the entrance to Auschwitz. The British paper, The Independent, had a fun Christmas section with some interesting bits of info from around the world, filled with British humour:
The North American Aerospace Defence Command will be tracking Santa’s journey around the globe using Google Earth; kids can get Twitter updates. (Do our tax dollars pay for this?)
In Cyprus, as is an illegal custom, people would be killing and eating migratory robins for dinner. That just seems wrong, and honestly, how much meat can you even get off of one of those tiny birds?
In Prague, anti-Santa activitists burned a Santa figurine outdoors. They said, “We hope that one day this country will be void of Santa…Santa is trivial.”
In Britian, Santa got bad publicity in the British Medical Journal; the journal reckons that Santa is a bad role model for children. After all, he is obese, doesn’t exercise, and “his red face can be attributed to all those glasses of sherry he knocks back on his journey.” Dr. Nathan Grills also “strongly suspects that as dawn approaches on Christmas Day, Santa must be drunk in charge of a sleigh. And even before the day itself, there are also those kisses he receives from children, which threaten to spread disease.” Leave it to the field of medicine to take the fun out of everything!! In Edinburgh, a reindeer called Eskimo “will be able to join in reindeer games for the first time after having a trapped testicle removed by keyhole surgery. The condition, which he had from birth, impeded his flow of testosterone. This made him very submissive and caused other reindeer to bully him. The vet who performed the surgery called it, “A great advancement in veterinary surgery.”
Back in the USA, in the classy state of Tennessee, a man robbed a bank dressed as Santa. He justified it by saying that, “Santa needs to pay his elves.” A drunk girl was arrested in Indianapolis after ripping of a Santa’s fake beard. “Had it been real, he could have joined the 300-strong Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas, formed last year after a splot within the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas.” Check out their website at: http://www.forbsantas.org/ As an added treat, here is a picture of the Orange Country, California branch of the group, having fun at a beach BBQ. Only in California…
Before I knew it, I was being served my last meal in business class on fine china. The last warm hand towel was wiped across my face. Pretty soon we were hovering over Newark Airport. From above, I could see all of New Jersey covered in a thick layer of white snow. New York City glistened on the horizon. It’s fabulous to travel, but it is always great to come home, especially for the holidays! Merry Christmas!
