Flying the striped way (Europe 2025 part 2)

Finally, time to get on board! You can just about see the fancy backlit welcome sign behind the flight attendants. 

Even when onboard, boarding was a hassle, with a bunch of clueless (my parents thought drunk) people who couldn't figure out which seat was theirs. I used to think that people flying business class would actually know what they were doing, but I guess money can't buy sense. 

 

At least Condor was using the mood lighting to its full potential (though a custom version with blue and while stripes to match the livery would be cool!). 

 

 

Stripes, stripes everywhere! 

Condor does amenity kits a bit differently than pretty much any other airline. Normally you get the amenities packed in a nice bag (like the Delta one on the right that I was using for electronics); on Condor, you get the amenities in a paper bag, and then you get a travel bag separately. I don't really get it, and I don't see myself using their bags (even though I love the stripes!). I don't think I even opened the amenity kits themselves that I got on either leg of the flight. On the left, that's the back of my boarding pass, advertising buy-on-board drinks -- definitely seems a little tacky (though I don't think business class people have to pay for drinks).  

Speaking of food and drinks, here's the menu. Not much that appeals to me here, unfortunately. 

 

Saying goodbye to our blue neighbor! 

I was quite surprised to see that the safety video still featured Condor's old Thomas Cook-era branding -- they even made A330-specific scenes to match, despite these planes having been delivered after the orange-and-grey branding was dropped in favor of the current stripes. The end of the video even shows the old livery for a split second (though this picture makes it look more like the old Southwest livery!). Other oddities: the video was rather blurry and clearly lower resolution than these screens are designed for, and it played twice -- once in German with English subtitles, and once in English with German subtitles (when I've flown on overseas airlines in the past, the audio language and subtitles normally match). 

Also of note, the screens were locked to only display ads until the safety video played, something most airlines stopped doing ages ago. When I was finally able to get to the map, I was disappointed to see that they didn't bother making the aircraft graphic match the color of the plane you were actually on. Say hi to Point Roberts in the bottom center of the picture! 

Right after takeoff, we flew over Lansdowne Centre, a retro mall that I really need to post on here some day. 

Say hi to Point Roberts again! It's the forested area in the middle distance; the treeline pretty clearly delineates the border since the Canadian side has become quite built up. 

Down there in the center is Coquitlam Centre, probably my second-favorite Vancouver mall (and a place I really should finally get around to posting in 2026!). 

After takeoff, they overrode the screens again to show even more ads, this time for buy-on-board duty free and snacks. (And yes, the flight attendants did actually come around later to try to sell this stuff.) This felt extremely cheap and tacky for what's supposed to be a high-quality business class product, especially the fact that apparently you had to buy snacks if you wanted extra mid-flight (most major airlines have free snacks available even in economy class these days, and some (like Turkish) have a full menu of food that you can order whenever you want). Things like this make it feel like Condor still can't decide if they want to be a low-cost airline or a proper full-service one.  

Eventually, the drink service came around, with carts featuring an ancient version of the Condor logo that, oddly, uses the same color scheme as the old Lufthansa logo. Condor and Lufthansa already have logos that are very easy to confuse, and it seems crazy that they used the same blue-and-yellow colors at one point too! This picture also shows how beat up the seat shell looks, not great for an airplane that's just a few years old. 

It took quite a while after takeoff (around half an hour) for the crew to even start the food service, with the appetizer course. As is typical, I wasn't excited about most of this food; however, the pretzel was a nice touch, and the crew was very generous about giving me tons of bread and rolls from the bread basket (which included garlic bread, pretzel rolls, and plain bread in addition to the pretzels), something I've been disappointed in on all the other airlines I've flown -- and the bread was a lot better than what I've gotten on other airlines too! 

 

 I skipped the main course since I wasn't interested in any of the options, and instead went straight to dessert. The menu said we were getting a mango tart, but instead we got strawberry cheesecake -- I'm not a big fan of strawberry, but I do love cheesecake, and as you can probably tell by the fact that it was already half eaten by the time I remembered to take a picture, I quite liked it! I remember my Air France flight out of Vancouver having something similar where the menu didn't quite match the food we got -- what's going on with Vancouver's catering?

 

While I love cheesecake, my dad hates it. Apparently he wasn't paying attention when this was dropped off and started eating it, thinking it was going to be the mango tart from the menu -- oops!  

 

Unfortunately, the food service was probably my biggest gripe with Condor. Despite it being a much simpler service than the other airlines I've flown (just three rounds: an appetizer trey, an entree -- which I skipped -- and a dessert), it took over two hours from takeoff until they finished the dessert service. On a flight that leaves pretty late (after the boarding delays, we took off around 6), people are going to want to go to sleep pretty soon to be able to get any real sleep on a 9-hour flight, so I found this pretty frustrating. Admittedly, I'm not all that interested in food when I'm traveling, even business class food, so maybe I'm not representative of everyone, but still. Looking back at my pictures from previous trips, Air France and Turkish both managed to get through meal service in slightly less time, but with much more elaborate services (and better food). 

 So by the time dinner was finally over, apparently I was so ready to go to sleep that I didn't even take any pictures in bed mode. Condor probably had the best bedding of any of the airlines I've flown so far, including a mattress pad (which Air France and Delta don't provide) and a decent pillow (unlike Turkish), though you have to figure out how to set it all up yourself (unlike Turkish, where the flight attendants set up the mattress pad for you). Unfortunately, this was the first time I've ever noticed a business class bed being uncomfortably narrow, something that I always thought was an overblown complaint on other airlines. The other three airlines I've flown all had armrests that can be lowered to make the bed wider, but Condor didn't bother with that. 

  I was a bit frustrated with how early they woke us up for breakfast too. I wasn't interested in anything in the breakfast menu either, so I had some more rolls -- airplane croissants are never particularly good, but I remember this one not being as disappointing as the ones I've gotten on other airlines (even Air France, though maybe I just had unrealistic expectations for that one!). 

On the plus side, being awake early meant that I was able to see the coastline as we flew into the Netherlands. Fittingly, this first picture from Europe is IMG_0001, meaning it's the 10,000th picture I've taken with this phone (since early 2023)! I'm pretty sure every phone I've ever had (work or personal) has rolled over the picture counter at least once. 

Lots of funny lines of clouds over the Netherlands and Germany! 

 

 On final approach to Frankfurt, we were paralleling a cargo 747. It's always weird to be on a simultaneous approach like this! (Or maybe I just feel that way because Seatac doesn't normally run simultaneous approaches.)

 

 This Opel factory is so large that it has its own dedicated commuter train station! I like the houses in the foreground for scale. 

Planes, trains, and cruise ships (I wish there had actually been a train on the tracks when we passed overhead)!

More cargo planes greeting us on the ground, plus more Condor stripes. 

I'm not sure what this building is with those highly reflective windows, but it looks cool with this plane reflected in it! 

Even more Lufthansa Group airlines on our way over to the terminal... 

... where we're greeted with the Lufthansa 747 that had just flown in from Vancouver an hour or so before us on the gate next door! What a crazy coincidence... well, hold that thought for later. 

Even some of Condor's ground vehicles are stripy (though the one in the background just has pictures of stripy planes on it -- how disappointing!)

Having my parents with me made me a bit uncomfortable taking pictures in "weird" places, so no pictures of the terminal this time (not that there's all that much to see on the arrivals side of things). We were some of the first people off the plane, and everyone was confused because the signs were pointing us to go upstairs for arrivals, but the doors were set up to direct us into the departures area (I guess so people making connections might not have to go back through security, though the way FRA is set up means you would still have to go through security to get to most other gates). Eventually we found our way to passport control, where we were the first people to get to a completely deserted line -- at first that felt like hitting the jackpot, but as always, it's no good getting a bored security/passport control person, and this guy was not happy that us Americans had flown in from Canada and had return tickets to Canada instead of the US (this is the first time I've ever had a European passport control person even want to check on return tickets and of course it had to happen when we were doing something slightly complicated). And in the end even that delay didn't matter, since we had to wait forever for our luggage to show up. I guess long waits for luggage are just universal in Europe, no matter what size of airport you're flying in to or what the country's culture is stereotyped as!