This review was supposed to appear weeks ago, but it took me that long to walk from our arrival gate A42 to the baggage claim to the train station. Which is not the only endless walk you can enjoy at Frankfurt airport. Two words: The Tunnel. It connects concourse A and concourse B at level -3 (or so). Which means you go six stories down, then walk and walk and walk and the light at the end of the tunnel really is only the staircase six stories up again. Actually, there is a Skytrain thing that connects the two concourses, but you will never find it, because there is no sign pointing to it.

Speaking of signs: Never try to end your journey in Frankfurt. The signs for the baggage claim and exit are extremely well hidden. When you leave your plane or come up the stairs from the bus gates, you would expect a sign indicating whether you have to turn left or right towards the exit. But, no, there is none. After all, how can any passenger travelling to Frankfurt not know the airport inside out. I read somewhere that the people in the tower expect the same from pilots and refuse to help them with finding their way around. At least they are consistent.

Oh, and did I mention the bus positions somewhere close to the Atlantic? You get on a bus. That bus goes past concourse B, then concourse A, then the aircraft maintenance facilities, then the fuel storage facilities, then some parking positions (no, not your’s), then the cargo terminal, then more parking positions. Only then can you finally spot the tiny silhouette of your plane on the horizon. Of course, the wind is all wrong, and after boarding you have to go all the way back. And further. Beyond terminal 2. Through lots of parking positions, most of them empty. Then swing in a wide arc around runway 25R and finally, half an hour later you are off.

Funny thing, though: Despite all this and despite the fact that as an airport with more traffic than Amsterdam it has only two and a half runways that cannot be used simultaneously, they run the show very much on time. Pretty much like the rest of Germany, then: Rather annoying, but at least efficiently so.

Oslo’s airport is one of the youngest main airports in Europe. Built in the 90s, Gardermoen lacks the cramped, claustrophobic school hall atmosphere of its older siblings. Especially the arrivals hall, first impression of a new country, often combines the cheerfulness of a nuclear bunker with the welcoming comfort of a fast food restaurant, which the architects of the terminal have quite successfully avoided by importing the airy feel of the concourses into the lower storeys.

The only mistake they did was to allow a pølser stand right next to the exit from the customs check. The smell of these dreadful sausage imitations has made many a delicate soul run up the escalators to check-in, never to be seen in Norway ever again. On the other hand, your trip can only go up the culinary hill from there.

Like cancerous flesh, the two duty free shops—for there is a second one right next to the baggage belts—are slowly but incurably growing. Not too far into the future, the airline agents will linger in dark corners guiltily interrupting the hunt for cheap substances with the profanities of air travel.

A small number of gastronomic enterprises bravely fight the tax-exempt onslaught. The international departures hall was the only place in the entirety of Norway where you could find a decent baguette, but now Upper Crust also has an outlet in Oslo’s central station.

People from a nation with a more careful attitude towards drink may feel put off by the amount of travellers enjoying a pint at six o’clock in the morning. Those of a more cheap upbringing may notice how blissfully they all ignore the fact that a mere two hour’s waiting will buy them the same pint for a third of its price. The anthropologist marvels at this display of two things so important for the survival in Norway: beer and the ability to ignore prices.

The designers of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport decided to go with a single terminal approach. This means that instead of having multiple terminals connected by an automatic train-esque vehicle with a pompous name, there is only one single terminal and you have to walk. All the way. To gate D87. Which is about as far as it sounds. And to make the experience fun for pilots, too, they invented Polderbaan, a runway somewhere close to Belgium. In some cases, it would probably be faster if the plane were to taxi directly to the destination airport.

Two more things make Schiphol stand out among its rivals as an important hub. One is the slowest, most unfriendly, and most incompetently done security check in all of Europe. But at least they love doing them. So much so, that in the non-Schengen part, they add an extra, secondary check right before the gate, making sure you can’t bring any water on the plane whatsoever. SAS and their ilk must love Schiphol.

The other is the announcements. That the moving sidewalks announce randomly “Watch your step” is a lame copy of American customer care. But the late boarding calls which end in “Immediate boarding please. We will proceed to offload your luggage” are truly unique. Not least, because they most likely have misplaced the luggage anyway, which is what Schiphol does best.

A long walk through endless duty free shopping. Confusing signing: not all signs show all concourses, so you have to search for your sign first. Designer chairs in the waiting area that make your legs and (strangely enough) arms fall asleep within seconds. An annoying habit of pre-boarding: In order to get to the seats near the gate, your boarding card is registered already and you thus can’t leave any more. But occasionally funny announcements and not just because they are in Danish. Known for reliable baggage loss in transfers.

The main goal of BAA, the British Airport Authority and owner of all London airports, doesn’t seem to be making your time on one of their airports as comfortable as possible but rather, to make you so miserable that you are in desperate need of an overpriced pint or, depending on your personal preferences, some shopping to lighten your spirit.

You see, British airports have the lovely feature of telling you about your departure gate roughly two minutes before boarding starts. Until then you have to stay in a waiting area which, surprise, surprise, is right in the middle of the airport shopping mall. Naturally, the waiting area is packed. Naturally, about four fifth of the waiting groups have little kids with them. Naturally, they are either treating the whole thing as a giant adventure park or are as miserable as you and cry their little hearts out. In any case, don’t even think you can sit there and read in peace. The din even wins over the trusty old iPod.

Being Europe’s most busy airport and having only two runways, flight operations aren’t particularly smooth either. “We are number sixty nine for take-off and will be in the air in about three hours.” On arrival, your plane will always be stopped for twenty minutes somewhere boring because the gate has not been vacated yet. Being this busy, the first sign of any form of weather other than your regular London drizzle greatly endangers operations. Where else would an airport be effectively closed for an entire day because of half a meter of snow?

And then, if you are a lucky passenger of BA, there is the shiny new Terminal 5. Shiny it is, indeed; pretty, too. Built in the airy and spacious way all new airports seem to be, the kids can now wreck the waiting area in healthy, natural light. From a functional perspective, the design is a disaster (so, it is likely to win several architecture prizes). The tube arrives in level minus six or so, whereas the check-in area is, as always, on the top level. However, the architects managed to squeeze two floors of offices between the arrivals and check-in, so you have to go seven levels up (if I did count right). The main means of vertical transport thus is elevators, the least effective of all modes of transportation. For a busy airport: two thumbs up. Great choice.

Needless to say, the gates actually are one or two levels down from the check-in area. The idea behind this seems to allow more shops to be squeezed in. After all, this is what you came for. Or, as the Wikipedia author puts it, the main terminal building “contains a check-in hall, a departure lounge with retail stores and other passenger services”. Easy to imagine the design meeting: “Oh, right. Passenger services.”

I love being at airports. The air of big wide world, the clueless hectic of the people, the little rituals. But when going through for travel, there is one part which makes me rather angry: the queues. They always seem endless, not moving at all, and you are always stuck between the most obnoxious people possible.

Finally being free leaves one in the right mood to be annoyed by pretty much everything. The lack of signs when you need them. The duty free shop with idle shoppers being placed smack in the middle of the shortest path to the gate. The inadequate size and poor condition of the toilets. The price of a bottle of water. Well, everything.

A while ago, I started to write down all these things. In a vain attempt to be fair, I added the things I liked about the airport in question. Since I couldn’t come up with many, I decided to call the whole thing “needlessly critical” and be done with it.

So stay tuned for a lot of mostly unfair bitchin’ with a bit of truth at the core.