Last night, I’d attempted to just stay up, since I’d reached that state of exhaustion where I felt that falling asleep at 2:30am would just make things worse when I had to wake up at 4am to catch my flight. This backfired a bit when I fell asleep around 3, and to make matters worse, I’d set my alarm wrong, so it failed to wake me up. *Very* luckily for me, at 4:25am the very nice hostel receptionist shook me awake to let me know the taxi was waiting outside. Feeling like something out of the ninth circle of hell, I nonetheless hurriedly got dressed, grabbed my bags, and stumbled my way outside. I suppose I should’ve been more relieved at the near-miss, but in all honesty I was too tired to even know which end was up.
Riga’s airport is larger than Vilnius’s, but not by all that much. I checked in, boarded the flight to Frankfurt, and did my best to catch a couple hours’ sleep on the plane. I wasn’t entirely successful, since the flight was cramped and noisy. I dozed on and off until we landed in Frankfurt at around 7:30am local time.
My connecting flight wasn’t until 1:30pm, so I had five hours to kill. The first thing I did was to make my way to the Air Canada counter to inquire about the possibility of getting on their 10:30am flight to Montreal instead. No dice; it was completely booked up except for business class. I knew that already, of course, but I figured it was worth a shot. Oh well. I set about finding some coffee and breakfast while looking around for a place to wait out the layover.
I’ve been through Frankfurt Airport several dozen times, since it’s the main Star Alliance gateway in Europe, and this has to be said: This airport is seriously frustrating. There are endless duty free and luxury goods shops, but almost no seating areas for weary passengers to sit down and have a rest. There are mobile charging stations but none of them have any seats nearby, so people are just clustered around them, hopping from one foot to the other while they wait for their devices to charge. Of course, all the food is overpriced, but that’s universal to all airports. However, the layout in Frankfurt is just baffling, with sprawling gate areas miles apart, and endless security and passport checks in seemingly random places when walking from one place to another.
At one point, I was waiting at a security check when the officer walked over and roped off the line right in front of me, and said that the open lines were “business class only” from that point forward. However, there were only two open lines and he had arbitrarily just designated both of them for business class. So me, and everyone behind me, were now in line to nowhere — there weren’t any economy security check lines open, and no signs of any opening anytime soon. Meanwhile, both business class lines were now empty. We called him back over after about 10 minutes and he angrily informed us that he was “just doing his job” and “they have priority because they are business class”. Not sure who “they” were since there was nobody there. Finally, he seemed to arbitrarily let us go into the empty lines, all the while informing us that we weren’t supposed to be there because we weren’t business class. I’m really feeling the love, Lufthansa.
Anyway, I finally made it to the gate, and stretched out over a set of chairs and closed my eyes for a bit. Sleeping was futile, but I was too exhausted to move. So I’m updating my blog and answering a few emails and pretty much just waiting it out.
To my family: I’ll see you all at home soon.