One Week. Three Continents.
Flying international is always an experience. Today I’m on my flight from San Francisco to Munich, after having flown back from Perth just six days ago. I’m in premium economy. The rest of my boarding group was business class. I didn’t get the upgrade this time, but it will be fine.
Business class sometimes feels like it is more work. The flight attendants are super attentive and are always asking for meal preferences, drink requests, and anything else they can get to make you feel first class. Then there is the space. You have your individual cocoon that fits a lot of your stuff, but seemingly never comfortably. Premium Economy has less space but is still comfortable for a 10+ hour flight. The food is also better than economy but doesn’t have as many courses as Business Class.
One of the biggest downsides of premium economy is that the passengers are less frequent flyers. On this trip, the couple in the seats in front of me are rather…umm… age-rich. They struggled to put away carryon bags, to understand how the seats work, to board the plane and to get out of the aisle. They have asked the flight attendants for help multiple times and we have yet to take off. This may be a long flight.
Each flight I try to get better at how I prepare, how I pack and how I can stay comfortable. Today I’ve made a few changes. I have disposable slippers from a recent hotel stay. I have taken a lot of stuff out of my backpack and I’m using it as my under-seat flight bag. I have a bag in the overhead that has anything I may need later in the flight, along with pajamas and my first change of clothes when I get to the hotel.
The flight ended up being surprisingly fast. I had dinner, started a movie, stopped the movie, woke up hours later without enough time to finish the movie. A single-movie long-haul flight is a good thing.
My plan was to take a train to my hotel for about six euros. As I tried to figure out how to do it, all of the apps said there was a significant delay. The reason: “disposal of unexploded ordinance”. What is it about Germany and bombs? I seem to have this problem in Germany more than anywhere else. The six euro train quickly became a sixty-euro Uber ride. Moving forward I may need to budget for terrorism-related issues when I travel to Germany.
This is not the notification I wanted to see going to my train after a long flight.
