Airport Benches, Airline Food, and the Friendliest German I Met

I’m writing this entry at around 3am Namibia time at around 30,000 feet. I should be landing in Johannesburg in about four hours, and then I’ll just have a four-hour layover before I get on my final flight to Walvis Bay. So out of a total of 42 hours of traveling, I only have about eight and a half left!

Phase one: Halifax to Montreal – check

This was a pretty short and uneventful flight. No airlines incurring rage yet.

Phase two: Montreal to Frankfurt – check

This was a longish and somewhat more eventful flight. First off, I’m seated next to a mother and her two to three year old daughter. I actually felt really bad for the mother by the end of the flight – she was obviously extremely tired and her daughter was not about to let her or anyone in the vicinity get any sleep. At one point she asked me how much time was left until we landed and I think she almost cried when I said about four hours (we were only half way through an eight-hour flight). Next, we had a certain airline behaving very much like itself. The flight was delayed taking off, but this was because two passengers had checked in their baggage and not gotten on the plane. That’s not the airlines fault, so I dealt with it. Then there was the entertainment system. I have to say, the plane itself was beautiful. It was a brand new 777, state of the art everything – the business class seats were especially cool. But the problem with this particular airline is that as hard as they seem to try, they just can’t get anything right. The entertainment systems were extremely confusing to use, and with the absence of any flight staff, I helped the people around me to figure out how to use the thing. Also, once you finally got the movie or TV show you wanted to play, you had to sit through about five minutes of commercials! Then, about five minutes into watching my movie, the whole system shut down. They said they were having problems with the system and would be resetting it. Whatever. Ten minutes in on my next try, same thing. This ended up happening four times at different points throughout the flight! I couldn’t help but laugh though when the flight attendant (whose first language was obviously French) apologized saying “a thousand excuses”. I’m pretty sure he meant “a thousand apologies” but I think “a thousand excuses” is bang on when it comes to this particular airline. Finally, the food – almost inedible. It was a chicken breast, mashed potatoes, peas and corn. The problem though, was that they were bathing in a “sauce” which I’m pretty sure was 90% ketchup. All in all though, this was one of the better flights I’ve had with this airline! I watched two movies that I’ve been wanting to see but couldn’t because Megan hates Nicholas Cage and Will Smith – National Treasure: Book of Secrets (trash, but enjoyable on a certain level) and I Am Legend (pretty good, but Will Smith didn’t look even close to fifty-two years old). I started to watch “There will be Blood” but it seemed a little deep for the last three hours of an eight-hour flight, so I shut it off and got some sleep.

Phase three: Frankfurt (fourteen-hour layover)

I got into Frankfurt around 7am on Tuesday. The first thing I wanted to do was find an internet café to see if Megan’s friend would be able to meet me at some point and maybe offer me a bed and a shower which were much needed by this point. I eventually found a sketchy place that had Internet. It was actually a shop of VLTs and only had a single computer available for Internet use. Unfortunately, Megan hadn’t heard back from her friend yet, so it seemed that I would spend the fourteen-hour layover on my own. I did manage a quick chat with Jessica Wu on facebook though! After walking around the airport shops a few times, I decided I had better do something with my day in this city that I had never been to. And here came my first mistake – asking for help. I found the train station without any difficulty, and suspected that the train I wanted was the “City Train”. However, being completely ignorant of this city, I wanted to make sure that this train a) led downtown and b) that downtown was where I wanted to be. So I asked the lady if that was the train I should take to get to some shops and restaurants. After a few moments of glaring at me as if I had just killed her puppy she said very curtly, “Downtown, track one”. “If looks could kill” would be an understatement here. So at that point I figured it would be best not to ask how to use the ticket machines that were all in German and simply thanked her and moved on. The ticket machine wasn’t actually too bad to figure out. I was then on the train and headed downtown. When I got downtown there were tons of business people on their way to work, so I figured I’d just follow the stream of traffic and see what I could find. Second mistake – following people aimlessly. About a block away from the train station I was surrounded by brothels and strip clubs and was approached by someone I presume was a prostitute. Deciding that this probably wasn’t where I wanted to be, I tried the next block over. This looked more promising – fancy hotels, and hark! Hoards of Japanese tourists! I little ways down this road and I reached the River Main and a nice park that went either side of it. Starting to grow tired I found a bench and just relaxed and watched people go by (tons of people running and riding bicycles). I also snapped a few photos of things that caught my interest. After a while I crossed the river and a footbridge to check out some of the interesting looking buildings on the other side. There were a couple museums and galleries, but I was far too tired to be interested. So I found another bench, snapped some more pictures, and eventually fell asleep. After dozing for about half an hour, I decided that I probably looked like a bit of a bum sleeping on this park bench, and I also wasn’t entirely comfortable falling asleep in the middle of a city that I’d never been to before in a country where I didn’t speak a word of the language when I had a flight to catch later in the day. I definitely needed sleep though, so even though it was only around 10:30, I decided to head back to the airport. This is when I met the guy who I’m pretty sure was trying to rob me. I was back at the train station, probably looking like I had no clue what I was doing (which I didn’t) when this guy came up to me and said something in German. Seeing my lack of comprehension, he said, “you’re American?” “Canadian” I replied (I took my backpack off, and made sure I was paying attention to where all my valuables were in my pockets). He asked me if I could spare a couple Euro because he was very thirsty and needed to buy some water. I told him I was only here for the day and barely had any money. He didn’t seem deterred though, and started questioning me as to where I was from and where I was going. He also gave a strange story of how he was a medical student, but that his mother wouldn’t give him any money (which was why he needed money from me). He also mentioned that he needed to go “caca” and uttered a profanity directed at the “Po-lice”. It all seemed rather far-fetched (though I believed him about the “caca” part). However, being in some need of assistance, myself, I asked him if he could tell me which train to get on to get back to the airport. It was very interesting as he showed me and helped me to buy my ticket the things he did to try to manipulate and distract me. I was one step ahead of him on everything though, and he seemed to realize that I knew what he was trying to do. In the end though, since he did help me to find the right train (which would have taken me a lot longer on my own) I gave him two euros to buy a bottle of water. Despite the fact that he was trying to rob me, he was probably the nicest German that I met that day. So I made it back to the airport and sought out somewhere to sleep. It was very crowded and noisy so I would get at best half an hour of sleep before moving on and finding a new spot. I didn’t particularly feel like anything to eat, so I just waited until around two hours before my flight and went through security. And that was my day in Frankfurt.

Phase four: Frankfurt to Johannesburg – in progress

Wow, this has been a long entry. It’s now past 4am, so we should be landing in about three hours. I’ve gotten a bit of sleep on this flight, and feel like I have a bit of energy left. I think once I finally get to Swakop and see a bed for the first time in two days, I’ll crash.

-Joel.