We believe ourselves smart; masters of our own destiny. It takes little moments to realize the hubris in all this. The truth is that life just isn’t fair.

Somewhere, in the bleak greyness of an airport, a mother and her child wait for a plane. They seem happy enough, chatting, joking. But all she has brought is a big envelope with too much paperwork. It’s her son who’s got a tiny backpack and a gigantic pouch around his neck. One of the gates calls a flight for pre-boarding. A flight somewhere else, a quarter-way around the globe. “That’s us,” she says. They pick up the envelope and the tiny backpack and march across the worn out carpet towards the gate. Her son proudly presents his boarding pass. She hands over whatever other papers will secure his safe passage. The agent, who has seen this so many times, has only a few words, a gaze, and a handshake, not least to comfort the chill she is feeling herself. Then down the passage and away. A quarter-way around the globe.

Lost in the grey bleakness stands a mother with nothing left but an envelope with too much paperwork.

Eventually, it does become quiet. The lights are still flashing, the whistles still blowing, the bells still rattling. But for the better part, they have the plush and glitter to themselves. Six o’clock in the morning. Daylight is seeping in and, like a tired entertainer staring into his whiskey at an empty bar, the city for once shows its real face. Some face. Who knows what’s real in a place built not to be.

Outside, the air is cool. Real, fresh cool, not the electric cold constantly spun around inside. The roads are empty, the sidewalks deserted. Undisturbed, the traffic lights on the intersection perform their proud red, green, and orange dance. If you listen very closely, you can make out its rhythm tapped by eager relays in an old cast-iron box by the roadside.

And birds. However lost a place may be in human ambitions, there is a always a small crack of nature at six o’clock in the morning.

I throw my bag in the boot of the car and drive off.

Leaving Las Vegas.

Two hands on a window pane.
Uncaring glass between skin.
One hand slowly slipping away
As the train pulls out.

Hours of numb nothing
Through a spring of young green.
The mind wanders off-limits
with self destructing certainty.

Tears on a crumbled ticket
Tumbling across a lonely platform.

She stops at the quadruple yellow line. Rocks back and forth impatiently, eager to run. She is let go and swings right in a wide turn. Stops again, just short of the huge “19L” painted on the tarmac: holds back to gather some breath and to consider whether to press on. Inside, senior frequent travellers, dignity dictating not to be impressed, look up briefly from the little spotlight on their magazine and their hearts skip a beat. The chatter of the cool crowd trails off. So encouraged, she makes up her mind. The engines come to life, trading decibels for trust. She jumps forward, unsteadily hurls herself along the runway; a swan on dry land. She passes the point, poetically called V1 in the calm lingo of the aviators, after which nothing will stop her from flying. Not much further and gently she rolls heavenwards, and then climbs, climbs, climbs.

The world disappears behind a curtain of clouds. And with it all its heart-break and misery. For an all too short time she shelters a hundred-odd people in her womb: Slightly crammed, watered and fed, waiting with a mix of anticipation and fear for the time when they will be spit out.

People may tell you of goals to collect millions of bonus miles if you ask them why they fly. They are lying. Despite all its lack of space and glamour, aeroplanes provide a hiding space of anonymity and solace only rarely provided these days; a tiny aluminium-grey hole in space and time always there as a much-needed retreat from the world and, no less, from yourself.

Coming up: Confessions of an Architect, or: How I single-handedly ruined Venice.

Tap, tap. Is this thing on?

Okay, so this is my first attempt at this blog-like thing. Since creativity is not one of my gene-given gifts, don’t expect anything readable or even vaguely interesting. Usually, the prerequisite for writing an interesting text is the presence of some form of inspiration. Inspiration flourishes from from all sorts of emotions: Euphoric happiness, falling in love, the death of someone close to you; all the powerful experiences of life. And from the exact opposite: utter, utter, excruciating boredom.

Currently, I am sitting—albeit not very comfortably (French fries in a cardboard pack at McDonald’s have more lebensraum)—on flight LX92 from Zürich airport to Sao Paolo airport. It is 04:03 CET time—five hours into a two-leg twelve plus five hour flight—tired, bored, sleepless, and even a bit hungry, en route to Pipa, Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil for a bit-over-two-weeks trip visiting a friend of mine who lives there for a while.

It is my first long-haul flight in a few years, and my first transatlantic trip in Airbus’ response to the Jumbo, more precisely an A340-300. I have done a fair bit of travelling by plane the last couple of years, but limited to relatively short European flights. The first thing that strikes you upon entering one of these things is the sheer size of it; she is basically a giant, airborne steamer. So huge and unsinkable that she eats turbulence for breakfast with her giant, screaming cutlery. After walking you through business class (they want you to feel like a cheapskate), it slowly begins to sink in how little you actually paid for your tickets. The classlessness of European flights is gone, replaced by a three-class hierarchical system with First ranking on top, Business in the middle, and far down on the bottom: Economy. They cram more people (most of them seem to be children) into Economy than First and Business combined.

The airliners have done a good job at illustrating that point with the symbolic letters they use: First is “F”, Business is “B”, Economy is “Y”. Feels more like a “Z” to me right now. This class-oriented hierarchy is reflected throughout the chain of events which takes place before, during and after the flight; from check-in, through posh lounges and security, and finally de-boarding. On the E terminal in Zürich airport, the First passengers have their own floor, and their own boarding gate to the airplane, so that they don’t have to mingle with the proletariat of Business and Economy. A friend of mine has had the opportunity to experience this, and just thinking about what he has told me about the experience fills me with envy. Viva la revolution!

I have had very little time to do any research before this trip – pointless Internet escapism like pictures of cheeseburger-eating kittens take up most of my recreational computer time – and I am putting my faith in the friendly and honest people of Brazil to guide me safely through the journey.

Weather forecasters promise thirty degrees C, sunny, and zero percent chance of precipitation. The end justifies the means, and suffering through another seven hours of soon-to-be-screaming, already-stinking kids is hopefully totally worth it.

I will try my best to post more of these. Unless I get drunk and forget.

Yesterday, I made a spontaneous train trip to Milan. As always, upon entering Milan’s central station, I looked out for the red cars of the German night train, parked there somewhere. But they were nowhere to be seen. Only then did I remember that the train was cancelled for good in December. Which left me with quite a bit of sadness.

A couple of years ago, when my love affair with Italy began in earnest, night train 301 from Dortmund, later Amsterdam, to Milan was a great facilitator of my obsession. It left Karlsruhe around midnight and many a Friday I was on it. Usually, I had a bunk in a couchette compartment but occasionally I treated myself to a sleeper. Hardly ever did it arrive in Milan on time. There was always something. Sometimes it would already arrive late in Karlsruhe, meaning a long and cold wait on a dreary platform. Another time, it would manage to travel on time all the way down to Chiasso on the Italian border only to have the Italian railways reject a car and require lengthy shunting procedures. Most likely, though, the last half hour between Chiasso and Milan would mysteriously take a full hour or more.

From Milan, I would go on with some other train, to Genoa, Pisa, Bologna, Rome, or elsewhere. I would spend the weekend there and then Monday scout out some new destination on the way to Florence. If the place was nice, I would visit again during the next trip. I always arrived exhausted in Florence, too tired to see much of the city and would spend the evening on the platform of the Santa Maria Novella station, the most beautifully named central station of any city, waiting for the night train back to Munich.

Later, when I came across the good fortune to live in Lugano for a while, I would sometimes stumble across the train at Lugano station. Leaving there around seven, it was the first train going to Milan and one of the last to come back. Sometimes, I would take it from Lugano back to Germany, enjoying a trip across the nightly Alps with glass of Merlot in a cosy sleeper compartment.

History, now.

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.

A while ago we went out and in the course of it I single-handedly discovered the number one rule of fine dining: If you run a restaurant, whatever you do, desserts need to be brilliant. Since they are the last thing in the whole experience, they are what people will remember and, what’s more, their quality will influence the memory people will have of the entire meal.

Then, this week I travelled back from Canada (more on this soon) and thereby discovered that this rule holds for all sorts of enterprises. Let me explain. While I was waiting in queue for boarding, the agent called me up and swapped my boarding pass for one with a large C on it. In the world of compulsive travelling, we call this the joker: The airline deemed you worthy enough a customer to upgrade you into business class. And so a dreadful night in cramped mass quarters turned into a nice and comfortable session with plenty of Pinot Grigio and chocolate.

Unfortunately, this experience ended with the passport checks at Zurich airport. The immigration hall for long-distance flights has very little waiting room and the airport operator doesn’t deem it necessary to install any crowed control mechanisms, such as the zig-zag rows you find in America or the UK. Instead they dump the entire content of seven wide-body jets into this room. You can imagine the ensuing chaos, waiting times, and general frustration.

And thus what could have been the memory of being treated very nicely by the airline turned into a memory of the failure of the airport operator. Had the security checks at Montreal airport been horrible, I wouldn’t even remember that. But since they failure was at the end of the journey, it overshadows everything.

Which also answers the question when the people handing out the airport awards are doing their surveys. Zurich always scores top ranks.

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.