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My immediate discovery on sitting down in my seat on this United flight is that there's almost no room under the aisle seats. I've had similar troubles on other flights, but usually I can manage to get my backpack under; here's there's just no chance. Go United.
(There's also no leg room, and barely room to walk out in the aisle, but that's a whole other story, and about what I recall of United, though I'd hoped for better on an intercontinental trip.)
My backpack is forced to go in the overhead, which I hate, but I pull out my six necessities: laptop computer, iPad with 10 comic collections on it, novel, hand sanitizer, funky airplane pillow, and water bottle. I enumerate them several times over the course of the flight so that I won't forget anything when I get off.
Our plane leaves SFO about 30 minutes late. As far as I can tell, we spent the whole time taxiing. Honestly, not bad for my least favorite airport in the area. We're told we should still get in on time.
Shockingly, United is serving three different complementary meals: dinner, midnight sandwich, and breakfast (it's so intercontinental that they serve French toast). The dinner is BBQ chicken along with some goolash that I think might be potato and spinach but I'm not sure. It's surprisingly tasty, but about two-thirds of the way through the meal, other things interrupt it. I'll regret eating it anyway, down the road.
The interruption? That's when the lady at the window starts vomiting. Fortunately, she gets to a bag in time. She'd earlier spoken about not flying much, so I make the same assumption the flight crew does, which is motion sickness. But she says she was just getting over a "stomach flu". Two of my favorite words in the English, especially while trapped on a plane. (It's probably just one word in German; yep, Google says "Magengrippe".)
She heads off to the bathroom, and my seatmate in the middle suggests we should all switch over and give her the aisle. I hate doing so, but she's of course 100% right, so we arrange that when she returns. We have to juggle food trays to do so, but none of us are eating any more at this point.
Here's why I absolutely hate red-eyes: I have a lot of problems sleeping on planes. So, a night spent in the air, which some people might find a nirvana where they can go asleep and awake at their destination is for me a hellish purgatory. I read and write until 10 or so. But I've been heading toward a 9pm bedtime in the last week, which means that I'm getting groggy. Thus begins a bit more than two hours of me putting away my computer or iPad, grabbing my head pillow, trying to sleep, and giving up.
Finally, a bit after midnight, the miraculous occurs. I sleep.
I manage about two hours of not-bad sleep, but then I'm woken. I don't realize why at first, because I'm sufficiently uncomfortable after seven hours of sitting in an airplane seat that I generally feel ill at ease. But I eventually figure out that some food is disagreeing with me. I blame the goolash, which I increasingly think of as having as a gross texture, which may or may not have been true at the time.
Waking up feeling sick? Bad. Waking up feeling sick on a plane? Priceless. Waking up feeling sick on a plane while trapped in the middle seat after giving up your aisle seat for someone who was feeling sick earlier in the flight? Yep.
The previously sickly lady in my aisle seat also sleeps like the dead. It's quite an effort to wake her the couple of times I get up and come back. She also wakes up with a shock every time. We eventually trade seats so I get my aisle back and she can sleep in peace.
All I can say is that at least I got sick while most of the plane was asleep, rather than when the long lines queued up at the lavatories around breakfast time.
When I'm feeling my worst, we seem to be crawling past Iceland. But time speeds up afterward, as I read through another comic and get back to some writing. Soon the maps are showing us over Frankfurt, albeit with 33 minutes of flight time (flugzeit!) left.
My seatmates and I have to juggle lots of stuff as we get off due to the seating hijinks. Meanwhile, the plane offloads amazingly fast.
A Lufthansa woman with a clipboard stands outside the plane, saying "Connections …" I vaguely recall this happening in the US in the '80s, when US carriers still cared about their customers. I tell her my flight and she tells me gate A19 and points me in exactly the wrong direction. I stare at the signs for a bit and figure it out despite my increasingly punchy state.
The reason for clipboard woman soon becomes obvious, because there are no departure boards this side of passport control, and obviously plenty of opportunity to go in the wrong direction!
Passport control takes three minutes, tops. There are about that many people in each line, and the curt passport officer asks them each, "Where are you going?", "Reason for trip", and "length of stay". I'm sufficiently sleep deprived that I actually can't do the math for the length of my stay.
Funny story. A few days before the trip I got confused and thought I was transferring in Hamburg, but it was Frankfurt instead. Easy mistake to make.
Anyhow, after that I looked at maps and discussions of Frankfurt, and people generally said it was a labyrinthine maze. Which is kind of redundant. But concourse "A" isn't at all. It was big. I picked up a couple of miles when I walked its length and back. But it's just a big V. So, it was easy to find Gate 19. Though I was grossly early at this point.
When I wandered around, I looked for food, deciding that I was ready to dare that dangerous substance again. Strangely, ever single food stall seemed to mostly have sandwiches. Tasty looking sandwiches. Strangely, they didn't seem to have grossly inflated airport prices either.
One other thing struck me unusual about the Frankfurt airport: it was quiet! You'd hear the very occasional announcements for the gate you were right next to, and the even more occasional announcement of gate changes, but that was it. No "don't leave your bags unattended" or other TSA-style scare tactics. No hearing every announcement for your entire concourse. It was actually … pleasant.
Part of the quiet in the terminal is apparently due to a lack of gate pestering. Thirty minutes before our flight to Berlin is to take off, everyone suddenly gets up with no prompting and starts queueing up in front of the entries. Some gate agent comes up and does something, and then everyone starts filing through.
These are fully automated machines at the entries, I should note: you scan your boarding pass, and the gates open. Another example of TSA-like FUD not being tolerated here.
I only hear one quiet announcement, saying that our flight is boarding.
(You'll note a lack of 1%ers getting early entry too.)
This flight is on a real Lufthansa plane, and the difference is obvious. The United flight was 10+ hours of tightly cramped agony. There wasn't enough room in the aisles or especially in the seats. I keep being afraid I'm going to hurt my knee from the obnoxious angle I keep it at.
Usually I expect puddle-jumpers to be worse than the big planes, but this little plane going from Frankfurt to Berlin has spacious seats. It's a whole 'nother world.
Another bit of German efficiency: they hand us our snacks as we board, rather than trying to do the speed-food-service that always cracks me up on the similarly short flight from Honolulu to Lihue.
(I hope, hope, hope that this means that when I fly a real Swiss Air plane back on Saturday it'll be more comfortable, but at the least it won't be a red-eye.)
At the airport in Berlin, as we wait for our luggage, we're told not to leave our bags unattended. Ah well.
The bus trip to the Hotel de Rome was simple and cheap.
Arriving there I found the plaza in front of the Hotel filled with thronging crowds looking in awe at digital images being projected on all the buildings around, including the opera house, a cathedral, a library, and the hotel. Saying they're light projections, however, just doesn't tell the story. They're absolutely amazing images that complement the buildings and sometimes are even animated as well.
Inside I check-in and am puzzled for several minutes by how to get my own lights on. It turns out that you have to plug your card key into the card key socket in your room to make everything work. Wacky. It's apparently the European way.
Afterward I wander down to the terrace lounge where I hang out with some Blockstreamers for a while, then Chris grabs me and a few of us take a tour of other light shows on nearby building. The most amazing is the Berlin Cathedral Church, over on Museum Island, which has a dozen or so shows by different artists. We see the last several.
Finally, we get apple streusels because it's Germany, and then I call it a night, while some others dive back into the Blockstream burly.
(There's also no leg room, and barely room to walk out in the aisle, but that's a whole other story, and about what I recall of United, though I'd hoped for better on an intercontinental trip.)
My backpack is forced to go in the overhead, which I hate, but I pull out my six necessities: laptop computer, iPad with 10 comic collections on it, novel, hand sanitizer, funky airplane pillow, and water bottle. I enumerate them several times over the course of the flight so that I won't forget anything when I get off.
Our plane leaves SFO about 30 minutes late. As far as I can tell, we spent the whole time taxiing. Honestly, not bad for my least favorite airport in the area. We're told we should still get in on time.
Shockingly, United is serving three different complementary meals: dinner, midnight sandwich, and breakfast (it's so intercontinental that they serve French toast). The dinner is BBQ chicken along with some goolash that I think might be potato and spinach but I'm not sure. It's surprisingly tasty, but about two-thirds of the way through the meal, other things interrupt it. I'll regret eating it anyway, down the road.
The interruption? That's when the lady at the window starts vomiting. Fortunately, she gets to a bag in time. She'd earlier spoken about not flying much, so I make the same assumption the flight crew does, which is motion sickness. But she says she was just getting over a "stomach flu". Two of my favorite words in the English, especially while trapped on a plane. (It's probably just one word in German; yep, Google says "Magengrippe".)
She heads off to the bathroom, and my seatmate in the middle suggests we should all switch over and give her the aisle. I hate doing so, but she's of course 100% right, so we arrange that when she returns. We have to juggle food trays to do so, but none of us are eating any more at this point.
Here's why I absolutely hate red-eyes: I have a lot of problems sleeping on planes. So, a night spent in the air, which some people might find a nirvana where they can go asleep and awake at their destination is for me a hellish purgatory. I read and write until 10 or so. But I've been heading toward a 9pm bedtime in the last week, which means that I'm getting groggy. Thus begins a bit more than two hours of me putting away my computer or iPad, grabbing my head pillow, trying to sleep, and giving up.
Finally, a bit after midnight, the miraculous occurs. I sleep.
I manage about two hours of not-bad sleep, but then I'm woken. I don't realize why at first, because I'm sufficiently uncomfortable after seven hours of sitting in an airplane seat that I generally feel ill at ease. But I eventually figure out that some food is disagreeing with me. I blame the goolash, which I increasingly think of as having as a gross texture, which may or may not have been true at the time.
Waking up feeling sick? Bad. Waking up feeling sick on a plane? Priceless. Waking up feeling sick on a plane while trapped in the middle seat after giving up your aisle seat for someone who was feeling sick earlier in the flight? Yep.
The previously sickly lady in my aisle seat also sleeps like the dead. It's quite an effort to wake her the couple of times I get up and come back. She also wakes up with a shock every time. We eventually trade seats so I get my aisle back and she can sleep in peace.
All I can say is that at least I got sick while most of the plane was asleep, rather than when the long lines queued up at the lavatories around breakfast time.
When I'm feeling my worst, we seem to be crawling past Iceland. But time speeds up afterward, as I read through another comic and get back to some writing. Soon the maps are showing us over Frankfurt, albeit with 33 minutes of flight time (flugzeit!) left.
My seatmates and I have to juggle lots of stuff as we get off due to the seating hijinks. Meanwhile, the plane offloads amazingly fast.
A Lufthansa woman with a clipboard stands outside the plane, saying "Connections …" I vaguely recall this happening in the US in the '80s, when US carriers still cared about their customers. I tell her my flight and she tells me gate A19 and points me in exactly the wrong direction. I stare at the signs for a bit and figure it out despite my increasingly punchy state.
The reason for clipboard woman soon becomes obvious, because there are no departure boards this side of passport control, and obviously plenty of opportunity to go in the wrong direction!
Passport control takes three minutes, tops. There are about that many people in each line, and the curt passport officer asks them each, "Where are you going?", "Reason for trip", and "length of stay". I'm sufficiently sleep deprived that I actually can't do the math for the length of my stay.
Funny story. A few days before the trip I got confused and thought I was transferring in Hamburg, but it was Frankfurt instead. Easy mistake to make.
Anyhow, after that I looked at maps and discussions of Frankfurt, and people generally said it was a labyrinthine maze. Which is kind of redundant. But concourse "A" isn't at all. It was big. I picked up a couple of miles when I walked its length and back. But it's just a big V. So, it was easy to find Gate 19. Though I was grossly early at this point.
When I wandered around, I looked for food, deciding that I was ready to dare that dangerous substance again. Strangely, ever single food stall seemed to mostly have sandwiches. Tasty looking sandwiches. Strangely, they didn't seem to have grossly inflated airport prices either.
One other thing struck me unusual about the Frankfurt airport: it was quiet! You'd hear the very occasional announcements for the gate you were right next to, and the even more occasional announcement of gate changes, but that was it. No "don't leave your bags unattended" or other TSA-style scare tactics. No hearing every announcement for your entire concourse. It was actually … pleasant.
Part of the quiet in the terminal is apparently due to a lack of gate pestering. Thirty minutes before our flight to Berlin is to take off, everyone suddenly gets up with no prompting and starts queueing up in front of the entries. Some gate agent comes up and does something, and then everyone starts filing through.
These are fully automated machines at the entries, I should note: you scan your boarding pass, and the gates open. Another example of TSA-like FUD not being tolerated here.
I only hear one quiet announcement, saying that our flight is boarding.
(You'll note a lack of 1%ers getting early entry too.)
This flight is on a real Lufthansa plane, and the difference is obvious. The United flight was 10+ hours of tightly cramped agony. There wasn't enough room in the aisles or especially in the seats. I keep being afraid I'm going to hurt my knee from the obnoxious angle I keep it at.
Usually I expect puddle-jumpers to be worse than the big planes, but this little plane going from Frankfurt to Berlin has spacious seats. It's a whole 'nother world.
Another bit of German efficiency: they hand us our snacks as we board, rather than trying to do the speed-food-service that always cracks me up on the similarly short flight from Honolulu to Lihue.
(I hope, hope, hope that this means that when I fly a real Swiss Air plane back on Saturday it'll be more comfortable, but at the least it won't be a red-eye.)
At the airport in Berlin, as we wait for our luggage, we're told not to leave our bags unattended. Ah well.
The bus trip to the Hotel de Rome was simple and cheap.
Arriving there I found the plaza in front of the Hotel filled with thronging crowds looking in awe at digital images being projected on all the buildings around, including the opera house, a cathedral, a library, and the hotel. Saying they're light projections, however, just doesn't tell the story. They're absolutely amazing images that complement the buildings and sometimes are even animated as well.
Inside I check-in and am puzzled for several minutes by how to get my own lights on. It turns out that you have to plug your card key into the card key socket in your room to make everything work. Wacky. It's apparently the European way.
Afterward I wander down to the terrace lounge where I hang out with some Blockstreamers for a while, then Chris grabs me and a few of us take a tour of other light shows on nearby building. The most amazing is the Berlin Cathedral Church, over on Museum Island, which has a dozen or so shows by different artists. We see the last several.
Finally, we get apple streusels because it's Germany, and then I call it a night, while some others dive back into the Blockstream burly.