On our trip to Greece we had one stop in Frankfurt on our route. The first flight was delayed in SFO by 30 minutes. Lizy thought it might cause us to miss our connection, but I felt confident that we’d still make it. It was only a 30 minute delay and I knew that other people on our plane were making the same connection as us. I assured her, her fears were misplaced. How wrong I was, we would soon see.
The flight was mostly uneventful. We were flying overnight. My original plan was to stay up for both flights, so I could adjust to the time change by falling asleep that evening in Athens. I stayed up for a while reading Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, which was the first long Dostoevsky novel I had read in maybe 15 years and kept me engrossed for a while, but before long I couldn’t concentrate on the book and sleep quickly followed. I ended up sleeping for about 5 hours. After I woke up I kept reading.
Lizy slept for about 6.5 hours, but she told me she was never completely comfortable and that she was a jealous of the baby in the row ahead of us, because the baby was perfectly swaddled in a blanket.
As we were preparing to land, the baby’s mom was cheering her child by holding the baby to her chest and rocking. An older German flight attendant stopped at their row as part of her cross-checking for landing.
“Excuse me miss,” she said in an aggressive German accent.
“Yes,” said the baby’s mother.
“You need to have your baby seated for landing.”
“Ok.”
“I don’t think you understand. You’re endangering your baby. Don’t you care about your baby? I don’t want to see your baby die. Someone has to be responsible here. So put your child in their seat.”
Then she walked away. Lizy and I looked at each other in shock at what we had just witnessed. A man sitting in our row turned to his companion and said in a hushed tone, “Germans.” Everyone in our row had a good chuckle.
When we landed delayed, we assumed they would let passengers with connections off first, but it wasn’t like in North America. In Germany everyone gets off the plane in order of how close they are to the exit, regardless of whether they have to make a connecting flight or not. Strict fairness over societal accommodation for those in need.
Frankfurt airport was sprawling. Making the connection was going to be tight. We started running as soon as we got off the plane. We tried to get directions from airport employees, but were given conflicting directions. We had to go through security again. We tried to get an attendant to let us but ahead of the line to make our connection, but in an aggressive German she refused. Again we found that in Germany there was strict fairness over societal accommodation.
I bolted from security ahead of Lizy to hold the plane. When I turned the corner I thought I was going to see our gate, but it ended up being an elevator. And then when I got out of the elevator there was a long hallway. At the end of the hallway there was another elevator. And after going up the elevator somehow there was another hallway leading to yet another elevator. But now I was sure I was coming upon our gate. While I was on the elevator resting up to sprint to the gate, a man on a bicycle turned to me and said, “God help you. A38 is the very last gate.”
As I ran through the terminal sweat started seep through my t-shirt. I could feel my patagonia fleece becoming damp and heavier. I ran over the moving sidewalk. I planned my strides to dart between human obstacles. I wanted to stop running, but I really believed I would make our connection and save the day.
When I got to A38 I watched, through the window, as our plane drove away from the gate.
“Can you make it come back?” I asked in desperation.
“It’s gone.” The gate attendants said as they walked away. “You have to go talk to the Condor booth at Gate C now.”
Two other passengers had beaten me to the gate. They still missed the flight. A Ukrainian programmer who lived in Texas and a middle aged American woman. They let me know they had gotten there ten minutes before me. I wasn’t even close.
Walking back through the A gates, I found Lizy around A20 with a young woman from Seattle. She had been on her way to Greek island of Paros to join her friends on a boat they had rented.
“How much was your share of the boat rental?” I asked.
“They didn’t make me pay anything. My friends have some crypto money.”
Her boyfriend had flown 2 days before, and she seemed to be nervous flying alone.
Lizy almost broke down in tears in the airport. She kept reminding me that she had told me not to book a flight through Germany. We didn’t want to have to walk all the way to C, so we looked for Condor agents in the A section. But, there were barely any attendants from any airline in any of the gates, let alone Condor. We finally found a Lufthansa gate attendant who told us we could talk to a Condor rep at gate A12, but then when we got to A13, the next gate was A11. A12 did not exist.
In the end we had to go over to section C. The middle aged lady had beat us to the kiosk and was tying to negotiate switching her flight to the next morning as it was already quite late, but the man said management was forcing his hand. She had to fly tonight. And she had to make another stop in Serbia. She was going to get to Athens in the morning. She eventually gave in and we ended up on the same flight with her.
We took a shuttle bus with her to a different terminal and then experienced another protracted security check in.
The flight to Belgrade, Serbia was short. We got there around midnight and the one open restaurant was about to close, but we were able to order some pizzas for dinner. While we were eating Miro, the Ukrainian, told us that he luckily had predicted the Ukrainian Russia conflict. Six months before the war hhe had bought a house for his mother in a town near the border with Poland. Now that she lived in his house on the threshold of NATO she was much safer. Since the war, housing prices in the small border town had shot through the roof with everyone else scrambling to find a safe haven. One year ago no one could’ve imagined that dinky cottages in a border village would be more expensive than prime real estate in Kyiv. He was seeing his mother for the first time since the war started. He was meeting her in Greece, instead of Ukraine because he was worried if he went back to Ukraine he would be drafted into the army.
The flight to Athens from Serbia went smoothly and we finally got to Athens around 3 in the morning, five hours after our initial estimated time of arrival. I was glad I had slept on that first flight or else I’m not sure how I would’ve dealt with the complications. We took a taxi to our hotel and fell asleep right away.