Well, nothing enough for a post anyway. During the last week I've read The Emperor's Blades (it's good. really good.) and a couple of books for school so that I'll get one of the few exams I'd need to go take out of the way. When my eyes have gotten too tired of reading I've watched an episode or two of How I Met Your Mother, which doesn't really help with the tired eyes, cause then it's a screen I'm looking at instead of text.
My capoeira trainings began again, and I had a flute/piano lesson, and I'm totally psyched about my classes for the spring (interpersonal communication and communication in groups and argumentation and logic) and protu.
The point was, I haven't really had a week that would've given me anything to write about, so I'll just post the going-to-Australia-airport-mess that I mentioned last week. I thought you'd rather read that than a summary of my exam material.
It's really long, so I won't hold it against you if you don't read it all. Just want to show you that more can go wrong with airtravel than having to stay with your friend for another night.
So, it was the beginning of last February. It started off fine, I took bus to the city and train to Helsinki and another bus to the airport.
Then I went for check-in. The girl at the counter informed me that there was something wrong with the computers, and she couldn't get me the boarding passes all the way to Sidney, but just the first bit to Frankfurt and told me to go get the Frankfurt-Singapore and Singapore-Sidney boarding passes at Frankfurt from the transit desk. So I thought ok, it's only an hour and a half change at Frankfurt, it's gonna be tough, but I'm gonna make it.
A half an hour before we were supposed to land in Frankfurt, however, the captain informed us that there is a snow storm there, and the snow on the runways has to be cleared up before we can land. It might be that we can't land, that we'll run out of fuel and have to go and land somewhere else and just come back when we don't have to hang in the air and wait for it to be possible to land. Either way, it would be a while.
So great. I had a connecting flight, I couldn't miss it.
Well, some time after that the captain announced that we can in fact land, and we got to Frankfurt a half an hour late. So I had only an hour to find the transit desk, get my boarding passes, and find the gate. And on long flights, as I would come to learn, the boarding begins an hour before the plane leaves. So I ran to the transit desk (where a flight attendant nicely gave me instructions to before landing) and said, panicking,
"I'm flying to Sidney and my flight was late because of the snow storm and I don't have the boarding passes and my flight to Singapore leaves in an hour!"
And the man at the desk first told be to calm down and breathe, and once I did, he said,
"You'll get the boarding pass at the gate. Now, you're young, you can run. The gate is all the way that way and up the stairs and then a long corridor and then right and there it is. Run!"
So I ran.
And I got to the gate. A woman at the gate came to me (there were a lot of people just standing around) and I said, "I don't have a boarding pass!"
And she said, "Yes, ok, but you're here now, it's gonna be fine. You're here now."
And she took my name and put it on a list and told me to stand in a line with all the other people who hadn't gotten their boarding passes for that flight. So I stood in the line and waited.
When there were still a few people in front of me and many people behind me, the people at the gate informed us that the gate will close now, the plane has to leave so it won't be too much late. So the twenty of us in the line were like, "Ehh, what, hey, we're right here, we're supposed to be on that flight, come on."
But they didn't let us in, and so the plane left. There was a Finnish couple there going to Adelaide, and a young guy who was going to Sidney for exchange that kinda had to be there on time because his school term was beginning in two days, and a couple of Polish guys I ran into a little later that night too, who I think were going to Australia too. They just happened to be standing nearby, and we were wondering together about now what.
The twenty-or-so people still in the line were told to go to the Lufthansa counter (which was technically closed, it was a little past ten in the evening by then), where we would get new tickets for our flights. So we went. Someone ahead of me in the line got his ticket fast, so I got to the counter pretty quickly. I said I was going to Sidney, and the woman at the counter checked for the fastest flights, but I said they weren't very good, because I had a separate connecting flight to Cairns from Sidney a few hours after I was supposed to get there, it just wasn't on this ticket, because it was a whole other booking and only one way. So the woman searched, and searched, and searched. And finally she found me flights that were exactly 24 hours later, only going through Bangkok. So I said ok, and she said I could use the phone on the counter if I had stuff to call.
So first I tried to call and change my Sidney-Cairns ticket, but failed, because it was dad who had actually gotten me the tickets, so I called dad (at this point it was past midnight in Finland) and said,
"Yeah, hi, it's me, I'm stuck in Frankfurt because of a stupid snow storm and I need you to change my Sidney-Cairns ticker to 24 hours later." And he said he would. Then I called the hostel I was supposed to be arriving the next day that I was coming in a day late, and the shuttle bus that I had reserved the same thing. The woman at the counter then said she couldn't yet get me the physical tickets, because the place was officially closed, but sent me to a hotel and gave me some food coupons for the airport and told me to come in the morning to get the tickets.
So I went, and got some food at the hotel (where I ran to the Polish guys again, they had accidentally come to a different hotel they were supposed to) and went to sleep.
The next morning I got up, back to the airport, and to the ticket counter, where they said, "No, no, you already have a ticket, you need to go to check in," So I did. At the check-in they had some problems with getting me the ticket - apparently I didn't really have it yet - and would've wanted so send me to the ticket counter, but I said they sent me from there to here, so after a long waiting I finally got the tickets.
And then I spent the whole day (it wasn't even noon yet, and my flight was leaving at ten in the evening) at Frankfurt airport, staring at the screens and reading a book.
But on the way there, there weren't any more problems. I finally got to the hostel in Cairns after quite exactly 70 hours of travelling.
Six weeks later I got to Sidney airport, ready to go back home. I went to check-in, where I gave my passport to the woman and said I was going to Finland. She did something on her computer for a minute, and then asked,
"How long are you staying in London?"
"Umm... I'm not going to London."
"Yes, yes, but how long are you going to be there, a couple of hours?"
"Umm... I'm not going to London at all."
"That is the name with which the ticket is book with, right?" she said, pointing at my name on the passport.
"Yes," I dug out my papers (that were in Finnish) and showed her I was supposed to be flying Sidney-Singapore-Frankfurt.
"I can't find your tickets," she said after a moment, "Except one from Frankfurt to Helsinki. I need to go check this with my manager," and she left and went to talk with people at the end of the row of desks, and didn't come back for a half an hour.
"We're trying to get you on back on the flights," she said when she came back, "That's why it's taking so long."
"Ok," I said, "I think my tickets being cancelled might have something to do with the fact that I missed some flights when I was coming here and had to get new flights from Frankfurt, maybe Lufthansa cancelled all my tickets when booking me new ones, not just the ones coming here."
I soon got my tickets after that. Well, all the way to Frankfurt, because the last flight was fine. There I would have to go to the transit desk and get the boarding pass. I thanked the woman and left.
I arrived in Singapore at around 11 ant night, and started checking my next gate from the departures board. I soon found a flight to Frankfurt, but I figured I should check the flight number from the ticket, to see it matches. It didn't. And the boarding time was 12:55 PM. Now, as a person from a country using the 24-hour system I wasn't quite sure if that meant in the morning or in the afternoon, but either way it sounded weird, because the plane was supposed to leave in a couple of hours, at one in the morning, not start boarding then.
So I went to the transit desk and asked about it.
"Your plane starts to board at 12:55 the next afternoon," the woman at the counter said, and I said, "What? No, my plane is supposed to leave in two hours. I'm supposed to be on the flight that leaves in two hours, I have a connecting flight from Frankfurt tomorrow afternoon, I can't be just gotten on the plane here at that time."
And so I explained what had happened in Sydney, and that they must have put me on the wrong flight. So the woman began doing something on her computer, asked help from the man on the next desk, and I had to explain it all to him too. I just stood there and kept telling myself not to panic, it would be fine. But finally I got the ticket to the plane I was actually supposed to be on.
I was super tired at that point, but
luckily, there was a stall nearby where
you could rent scooters from guys with green wings.
Ok, no there wasn't. And the gate wasn't too far either. I had just the right amount of time to find the gate and go to the toilet and brush my teeth (which I did on almost all the airports).
Again, a little while before we got to Frankfurt, the captain had something to tell me. "Lufthansa is on strike today. If you have a connecting flight, please go and see, if your flight is cancelled. If it is, go find another flight for yourself."
Awesome.
So, I got off the plane and saw that my flight was cancelled. The airport was full of people not knowing what to do, because they way way majority of flights from and to Frankfurt are Lufthansa flights, and there was only a few people working. So I went out there, into the lobby, where there was a huge line that was moving nowhere.
From somewhere in my head I got a brilliant idea. I went to one of the self-check-in machines, which weren't crowded at all, for some reason. The machine said,
"Your flight has been cancelled. We suggest this flight for you."
It was a flight four hours later than the one that was cancelled. So I said, oh, yes, if I get home still today, I'll take it. So I got the boarding pass. It didn't have a seat on it, which was weird, so I went to the actual check-in counter (the line in the lobby was actually just standing there, it was a line in front of the lining area to check-in. I wasn't sure what was happening there, but I was checking in and the rest of the people clearly weren't, so I just walked past all of them) and said.
"Hi, I got this new ticket cause my flight was cancelled, but it doesn't have a seat on it, why is that?"
And the woman at the counter said "Because the flight is overbooked. You're eleventh on the waiting list, see, right here. But don't worry, you'll get on the flight now you have a ticket."
So I thanked her and went to spend another six hours staring at the screens of Frankfurt airport, saying "Great to have you here!"
At some point the gate area just got flooded with people, and I started to realize that in fact not everyone wanting on the plane will get on the plane. So I was going to go ask, if I would and when I'll know, but there was a huge line and a single young woman behind the counter trying simultaneously to do the job of everyone who didn't show up for work that day, and she was trying to shout to people to just sit down, they didn't know anything yet, and that she just tried to do her job when no one else would. So I felt sorry for her, and went to sit.
The boarding started, and they first called in the people who actually had seats on the plane. When all of them had gone in, they started to, one by one, call people off the list in order to fill the still empty seats. I knew I was eleventh, so I counted the names and hoped so hard that the plane wouldn't fill up before I got in. I couldn't stand staring at the "Great to have you here!"-signs for a moment longer. It wasn't great to be there. One name. Two. Another two.
And then, finally, they called out my name. I don't know how to express the relief. I was actually getting home that day. And so I did, just a few hours later than I was supposed to.
But there are two things I decided on this trip.
1. I will never fly Lufthansa or go to Frankfurt again, if there is any way of avoiding it.
2. What I said last week. Don't panic is the best advice you can ever give anyone.
Ok, I'll come up with something cool write about again next week.
Bye.
~matu
Ok, I'll come up with something cool write about again next week.
Bye.
~matu
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