My Egyptian Odyssey Part 1: The friendly skies
Flughafen Frankfurt Am Main, Germany 08:00 4 Nov 2004
My flight across the Atlantic was not
as pleasant as I had hoped. While United may be known as the friendly skies, I
guarantee I was not contributing to the name. Sitting in my row were three
crying kids, and we know how much I love children. Well, to be correct, they
only cried for the first three hours and the last thirty minutes. There were
four hours of relative quiet interspersed. Seated in the three rows in front of
the galley were 30 German teenagers who needed to take pictures with a flash
every five minutes. At least there was some eye candy in the group. We were
also about an hour late leaving because eight containers of baggage got
“misplaced” and we had to wait for them to load it onto our plane. When we
finally arrived in Frankfurt, thankfully only 15 minutes
late, we had an outside parking spot and had to take a bus into the terminal.
Since I am a “transit customer”, there is a small gate area in which I am
allowed. They won’t let me go to the restaurant because it’s on the other side
of the rope and the surly German man is…well…surly. So, I decided to try
connecting to a T-Mobile hotspot, but I keep getting error pages in German, and
I fear I have just wasted 8 euros.
Flughafen Frankfurt Am Main, Germany 08:30 4 Nov 2004
Apparently, Lufthansa checks your boarding pass before entering
the waiting area. This large group on seniors from Texas could not quite figure this out. The surly, and now angry, Lufthansa worker
announced it twice that we had to leave, and they all just sat there looking
stupid and giving American tourists a bad name. Finally, the man started
yelling and physically escorting all the Texans out of the gate area. He then
said a bunch of, what I’m sure are not pleasant, comments to his co-worker. The
Texans still don’t understand what is going on.
