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.

“You do know what you forgot, right?”

“Er, no, what?”

“The bridge.”

One of the revelations of driving through the North American desert is that tumbleweed actually exists and is not just a figment from the stereotype drawer of Hollywood script writers. Seeing these balls of dry plant, well, tumble across the street is such an inspiring event, that a new rule of travel demands invocation: On any such occasion, you have to yell “Tumbleweed” at the top of your voice.

And no, driving hundreds of miles all alone through the desert does in no way affect sanity. Why are you asking?

Question: If a child grows up constantly changing time zones, will it as an adult not suffer jet lag or just be completely fucked up and become a mass murderer?

My guess would be: both.

When I was still living in Oslo, my daily walk to work took me by the KNA hotel and for some reason every time I wondered, how the hotel would be. Might have been the odd name. While planning my most recent visit to Oslo, the hotel suddenly had a good offer and I took the chance to get my curiosity quenched.

First things first: KNA is the Kongelig Norsk Automobilklub, the Royal Norwegian Automobile Club. It appears that the club used to have its headquarters where the hotel is now.

This mystery solved, there still was something odd with the hotel. It took me a full night and a breakfast to figure it out. There is not a single right angle in the building’s layout. Whether it was designed by an apprentice architect who hadn’t gotten as far as rectangles just yet or whether this is an example of the praised Scandinavian design, I cannot say. However, it is actually quite a brilliant idea. By subtly using obtuse angles, you can mess with perspective just enough to make the room appear larger.

Which may or may not have been the reason why I repeatedly ran into things.

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.

Very often you hear people complain that style and glamour have long left air travel. What they prefer to forget is that if you fly across the Atlantic twice for less than four hundred euros, you can hardly expect much more than the smallest amount of space allowed by the Geneva convention and a nondescript blob of biomass for food. What they also forget is that if you are willing to shell out the relative amount that a trip cost back in the days of style and glamour, you can still have them. Alternatively, collect enough frequent flyer miles and you can have them, too.

The enterprise is called First Class and a return ticket from Frankfurt to San Francisco sets you back eleven thousand euros. So, what do you get in return?

It starts long before the flight. Lufthansa’s First Class Lounge is so special, it is actually in a separate building half a mile away from the terminal. Once you arrive, someone will be assigned to your case and will look after you for your entire stay. The lounge has its own security checkpoint, so don’t expect any queues. Thereafter follows a bar, an a-la-carte restaurant, a buffet, and the usual amenities of a lounge, such as office rooms, newspapers, comfy chairs and soft cushions.

Once your flight starts boarding, you are guided downstairs and asked into one of these Porsche SUV chimeras and driven to the plane. Now follows the altogether best part: You are taken upstairs to the boarding area and walked straight through the hordes of lowly economy passengers. Great feeling. Must. Resist. To. Stick. Out. Tongue.

Inside the aircraft the most remarkable thing is space. Lots of it. Whereas in economy you have usually a bit more than one window, in first you have four. In Lufthansa’s 747, First Class is in the upper deck, safely away from all the riff-raff. You, on the other hand, are important enough that first the Captain and then the head purser make their rounds to greet you personally.

Afterwards, things are so subtly different from business class that you only notice them in direct comparison. Everything is just this little extra bit nicer. Your seat is a little bit more comfortable – while both form a flat bed, the business class seat is tilted whereas the First class seat is horizontal. The small number of fellow passengers ensures that there is no annoying business people nearby or giddy upgraders trying to get the most out of the experience. The restroom is of a proper size, more like the ones you always see in the movies and wonder where they get the idea from. The wine list is longer, the food is better – looks, feels, and tastes like food cooked by actual humans. It is served off a real cart decked in linen, not a galley cart. Not a single aluminium container anywhere in sight. You get proper porcelain tableware and normal size cutlery. And as the little extra, your table is decorated with a real rose.

In essence, everything is as it should be. Somehow, you forget how long haul flights usually are. Even in business class, you always remember that you are on an aeroplane and that everything is a compromise. Not so in First. There are no compromises in First.

The jump from economy to business is the jump from bare survival to civilization – to be done whenever remotely possible. Going First is the step from civilization to culture. Is it worth the extra dough or raiding your mileage account? Rationally: Certainly not. But where it matters: Totally.

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.”

One of the things you might come up with when being in San Francisco may be to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. Here is a tip: Don’t. It is a four kilometre walk alongside a most busy motorway. And you will have to walk back because there is virtually no public transport available at the other side. So you end up deaf and lame.

But the view sure is stunning.