Flights

Flights can never just be simple, can they? It started off easily enough. I went to the airport, got on the plane, and arrived seven hours later in London after a night of pseudo sleeping. (Jet-lag still hasn't hit me, but the upright chairs and center seat awkwardness certainly made an impression.)

Unfortunately, for reasons unknown to me, my flight got in to Heathrow airport about half an hour late, giving me half an hour to find my transfer, make it through customs, and board the flight for the second leg of my three legged journey. I arrived at the proper terminal and made it through customs with five minutes to spare before my next flight was scheduled to depart, but I couldn't find the flight listed anywhere to give me the proper gate. In fact, ten minutes before when I'd paused to look for the gate number I still couldn't find my flight listed. When I asked someone about it, she replied that it was too late to board and I had missed it.

This was the first, if somewhat tiny, culture shock. In America, you've missed your flight if it has left and you are not on it. In Britain, you've missed your flight if boarding has closed, which seems to occur about ten or so minutes before the scheduled departure. This would be fine if they listed boarding times instead of departure times on the tickets, but they don't. I was far from the only person to have this complaint. Several people waiting in line to find a new flight had similar experiences on their flights.

Fortunately, missing that flight seemed to work in my favor. When I requested new tickets, I took a chance and asked if I could take a direct flight to Berlin instead of taking the originally scheduled detour to Helsinki. I walked off with my new ticket knowing that my life had just gotten much simpler.

Life Lesson: it doesn't hurt to ask, and it can help immensely.

However, this did not end my gripes with the Heathrow way of things. You see, instead of knowing which Gate the plane will go into ahead of time, they wait until it arrives and then announce the gate. This seems reasonable until you realize where I was standing, literally. The board that would eventually show me which gate I had to go to was at the intersection of about four different clusters of gates. The closest cluster took 10 minutes to get all the way through. I had 40 minutes between when I'd be told the gate and when the plane would leave. I had 10 to 20 minutes less time than that due to the early boarding closures. Thus, despite having three hours to kill before my plane arrived, I was still forced onto a tight timeline.

It all worked out in the end, of course. A bit of speed walking on my part and a conveniently tardy plane on the airport's part conspired to give me the time I needed. BUT the adventure doesn't end there. When I arrived in Tegel Airport (which is quite conveniently bilingual in its signs and instructions), I had to find the woman meant to pick me up and be my host. I had emailed her my new flight number, but she had apparently departed without checking her emails. For about an hour and a half, we both searched desperately on opposite sides of the airport for one another. I tried calling her a few times but could not figure out how to use European numbers. Do you enter the plus sign at the beginning? What about the parenthesized 0? What does the 49 at the beginning mean?

Finally, I found an employee who didn't seem busy and asked him to clarify. It turned out, all I had to do was drop the (0) and the + and enter everything else as written. My host and I found one another, took a second to breath, and hopped on the first bus out of the darned airport.

Second Life Lesson: if you can learn something ahead of time, like how to dial a phone, do it.

Overall: as nightmarish as airports can be for an inexperienced person who's had a bit of bad luck, it isn't the end of the world. The employees are there to help, and they generally know what they're talking about. Ask for their assistance as often as needed. Moreover, do as much preparing as you can beforehand to reduce stress, and try to build in a bit of buffer time in case of the unforeseeable.