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February 12, 2007

Notes On My Recent European Adventure

I'm back from Europe, and oh man was this an in-and-outer. Start to finish, I logged some 15,000 miles over the six days I was gone, jetting Seattle -> Washington, DC -> Munich, Germany -> Cologne -> Munich -> Basel, Switzerland -> Munich -> Chicago -> Seattle.

(Yeah, I was pretty pooped when I got home.)

The usual notes:

• Gavin's Secret To Surviving Air Travel #4,227: drink water. Lots of water. Plane air is dry air, and when you dehydrate it messes with your energy, your outlook, and your overall feeling of fatigue. I drank so much water on my cross-country United flight that I annoyed the stewardess.
• For some strange reason, Dulles was packed with people on Sunday. Lines were long for everything - bathrooms, food vendors, escalators - was something going on?
• If you do find yourself surviving a long, long line for the "California Tortilla" restaurant at Dulles, I recommend the wraps. I do not, however, recommend the salsa, which is the most weak-ass watered-down stuff you've ever tasted. Think "thin watery tomato sauce" (mmmmmmm) and you're in the ballpark.
• For some reason, the Wonderful United Crew that brought us to the East coast was replaced with the Evil United Crew for our leg to Munich. They were short-tempered, very brusque, and managed to do that "I will stare right by you, even though you are clearly trying to get my eye so you can have more water, you freakin' mutant camel" thing.
• (This may have been because I was seated in Economy, but still.)
• Gavin's Secret To Surviving Air Travel #684: booze helps knock ya out. It's true - a couple glasses of wine at 35,000 feet and I'm out like a light. Since booze dehydrates ya, be sure to observe Secret #4,227 and have water while you do it. NOTE: This may annoy the stewardesses.
• Long flights are awesome for getting caught up on the reading. I processed - no kidding - 3 inches of magazines that had been lurking on my shelf.
• It remains impossible to get anything approaching restful sleep in Economy, no matter how scrupulously you observe Secret #684. This is a real problem when your flight leaves Seattle at 8 AM one day, and arrives (with time shift) at 8 AM the next day in Germany.
• Munich is clean, cold (-1 Celsius) and gorgeous.
• I caught a taxi from the airport to my hotel. German taxis are very nice, very clean, late-model Mercedes with leather interior ... basically, nothing like American taxis. Everything is very understated: the taxis lack any kind of protective plexiglass or barrier between the driver and passenger, and the fare computer is integrated into the vehicle, with a read-out in the left-hand side of the rearview mirror. It all feels very cool and futuristic. Taxis also come with reading material - including Cosmo and Playboy(!).
• (Pity I couldn't enjoy the Playboy - being written in German, I couldn't understand the articles.)
• It's incredibly hard to keep your energy up and focus sharp when you're fighting jet lag. NOTE: focus and energy are critical for understanding the nuances of what customers are saying to you when English is not their first language.
• Jet lag is great for productivity. After being up for 27 hours straight (and subsequently crashing at the hotel), I woke up around 11:30 PM, local time, and crunched for the next three hours on a data-analysis project. (It's hard to imagine how I'd get such an uncluttered, non-interrupted time to work back home.)
• Note on late-night German TV: watching Urkel dubbed in to German is hysterical. And you know something? Family Matters is a lot better when you can't understand it. (I mean, you understand it just fine, but you don't know what the characters are saying.)
• Internet is expensive as hell here. The wireless is 5.95 Euro for 30 minutes, or 29.95 for 24 hours. To save a buck or two, I'm forever buying 30-minute sips, which means queueing up my mail and whatnot so I can be go-go-go once authenticated. A nice side benefit of this is that I'm not being distracted by a constant barrage of e-mail.
• It's hard to imagine how an overweight European would participate in society. Everything is tiny here - bathrooms, staircases, elevators, walkways, sinks, spaces in general. I'm not a big guy (tall, but not big), and yet I'm forever turning this way or that and finding myself a bit constrained - it almost approaches claustrophobic.
• Not to state the obvious, but German beer just rocks.
• (In other news: French wine is tasty, Italian cars go fast, and Americans enjoy hamburgers.)
• I met one of my International Product Planning colleagues and her husband for dinner on Tuesday night at the (world-famous) Wirsthaus in der Au. We had sausages, sauerkraut and beer - fantastic. Absolutely go if you get a chance.
• More notes on early-morning German cable TV: a local channel was running "space night" at 4 AM, which is basically, Earth satellite footage - the planet spinning in its blue glory - while set to funky mood music. It's utterly hypnotic, especially when you're not sleeping as much as you'd like. It was the sort of thing you'd see on the wall of a nightclub, but I found it to be completely captivating.
• Every German I met with was shockingly professional and polite. Taxi drivers, clerks, you name it - nary a trace of surliness or "I'm having a bad day"-ness. It's easy to chalk this up to "nice-hotel-itis", but it's everywhere - shops, restaurants, you name it. It almost feels like a national pride thing.
• Another thing about traveling in Europe is that you realize how insulated we Americans are from other cultures and languages. In Europe, everyone seems to speak (very good) English, in addition to their native tongues. As an example, one of the guys I work with at Microsoft Germany is a native German who speaks flawless English, has married a Brazillian girl and also speaks excellent Portugese. (Oh, and French.) There's nothing like being regularly confronted with the language, customs, and currencies of others to remind you that not everyone is like you.
• The introduction of the flatscreen monitor has, finally, made airports circa 2007 look like "the future" - go back and watch "Until The End Of The World" (set in a fictional 1999) to see what I'm talking about. It's about damn time.
• The Basel, Switzerland airport has two exits - one for France, one for Switzerland - just pick your country after you get your bags. (How cool is that?)
• Basel looks like Hollywood's Europe - the tiny, winding, cobblestone streets, the long, skinny windows and four-story buildings, the well-dressed Europeans strolling, the tiny Smart cars. If there's a film to be shot, here's where they're shooting it.
• The Swiss hotel gives out a complimentary transit pass when you check in. My inner transit geek just swooned ("You had me at 'light rail'.").
• Switzerland is the sort of place to make a fella feel massively underdressed.
• United charges 15,000 frequent-flyer miles to upgrade to Business Class. This is, without question, the best use of frequent-flyer miles in the history of the universe, especially after being nonstop for a week in a foreign country that's nine hours ahead of your native time zone.
• Inflight Entertainment Verdict, Pt. 1: "Man Of The Year" isn't very good.
• Inflight Entertainment Verdict, Pt. 2: "The Queen" is excellent.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at February 12, 2007 9:25 PM. Posted to Travel.

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Posted by: Allie at February 13, 2007 11:29 AM

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