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.

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.

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.

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.

She is not a pretty lady. Although there are signs of honest beauty, most of her face is thoughtlessly ugly. Her body feels older than her age would suggest. Run-down, over-used. Neither is she an easy lady. A boiling temper yet a cold heart. Two souls. Living contradiction.

Not the kind of lady, you would fall in love with. But as the plane lifts off, back, to wherever your life is, a sadness grips you heart. A very special sadness. Wrong, then. Once more.