Even though our flight back to Vancouver wasn't until the afternoon, my parents wanted to spend the last night at the airport instead of in Frankfurt proper. To be specific, we stayed in the Gateway Gardens area, one stop away from the airport (technically you can walk to terminal 2, but Condor uses terminal 1 and by this point we had an extra duffel bag each to carry all of the food we bought, so we went for the train). Gateway Gardens station is one of the weirdest I've been to -- it opened at the end of 2019, yet 5 years later it's still incomplete. It seems like every year or two, they come through and finish another chunk of the station, with the canopy over the central entrance being the last (obvious) unfinished part.
Arriving at FRA wasn't too bad (apart from the cranky immigration guy), but departing showed me why people hate this airport. After going around in circles trying to find the Condor check in desks (the route from the train station to the terminal is a maze of underground passages with a complete lack of helpful signage, and even though I sort of knew what part of the terminal we needed to go to I lose all sense of direction when underground), we got there to find insane lines everywhere. I took this picture after 10-15 minutes of waiting in line and barely moving; in the end, it took 30-45 minutes to get to the front of the line. Even more frustrating, the premium economy line turned out to move much faster than business class; I can't say for sure since it was further away, but I wouldn't be surprised if even the economy line was moving faster. There are two reasons that I fly business class: the seat and the ability to skip waiting in line. Condor massively failed on the second of those (in both directions of this trip -- remember the disaster that was the boarding process at YVR), and that's the main reason that I don't intend to fly Condor again (unless I can get a similar absurdly cheap, borderline error fare, price like we did this time). I would gladly pay a few hundred dollars extra to fly an airline that has its act together when it comes to ground handling.
Frankfurt is not a particularly interesting airport; really, its only cool feature is the massive split-flap display boards still present (and operational!) in the T1 ticketing lobbies. These are pretty impressive to see these days -- most airports don't have "big board" signs of any sort these days (instead generally having a larger number of smaller, human-scaled, signs), let alone split-flap ones! FRA seems to be making an active effort to preserve these, since at this point I'm sure it would be much cheaper to replace these with off-the-shelf TVs than to keep these intricate mechanical signs, which have long since been abandoned by their manufacturers, running. Also of note, these signs display trains in addition to flights -- all of the T "gates" listed are actually track numbers! And the bike in the bottom right corner is an official airport bike -- the employees use them to get around the terminal. It's weird being passed by bicyclists in an indoor space!
After a brief trip on the people mover to see the Terminal 2 viewing desk, which was closed for no apparent reason (and which involved me getting chewed out by the security guards running the "automated" system for trying to not get separated from my parents when the train doors closed -- seriously, why does everyone in Germany seem to hate me?), we headed over to security. There was a business class line, but people from some other line kept getting cut in front of us, and the security process was the slowest I've ever seen -- it seriously took at least a minute per person to get through the scanners. And I got yelled at again by the security guy running the body scanner, who didn't like how I was holding my hands (and who was very irritated that I don't speak German). Then it was time for exit passport control, which was a little bit smoother -- there were only a few people in line in front of us (I guess that's the advantage of security not letting people through at a reasonable rate) and three booths open... but only two of the guards were actually checking people. After a few minutes, someone with a fancier uniform (I'm assuming a supervisor) came by and had some words with the guy who was just sitting there on his phone, and he suddenly started letting people through. As luck would have it, he ended up calling us over, and just stamped our passports while hardly saying anything. I like lazy passport control guards!
Once you get past all that, the terminal itself is extremely boring, though I will give it credit for not seeming too crowded.
Concourse B (which is the only part of the airport we could access -- annoyingly, FRA still has separate security checkpoints for each concourse, which is part of why people hate connecting through here since you're pretty much guaranteed to have to go through security) is divided into two wings, one primarily used by Lufthansa and the other primarily by Condor. The Lufthansa wing had a gift shop featuring a life-size stuffed cow, which is super cute! I had to drag my parents over here to look at it; now my mom wants one! 😃
Wandering around, I spotted the Lufthansa 747 that we would be following to Vancouver. You'll see this plane again later! I suppose the one good thing about FRA is that you're all but guaranteed to see 747s there, something you can't say about other airports.
Culture shock time: Not only does Frankfurt have indoor smoking lounges, they're sponsored by a cigarette brand! I'm always amazed by how common smoking still is in Europe compared to the US.
Bizarrely, Condor passengers at Frankfurt (Condor's sole hub) use the Lufthansa lounge. Condor still doesn't have any lounges of their own, despite having a fairly well-regarded business class product, and Terminal 1's only third-party lounge is, bizarrely, landside, so Condor really had no other choice... on the other hand, I'm surprised Lufthansa was willing to play ball with their primary competitor! I'm guessing the situation will change when Terminal 3 opens (supposedly this year, but it was originally supposed to be done by 2020), but I don't think it has officially been confirmed that Condor will move over there. Anyway, the Lufthansa lounge, like the rest of the terminal, is boring but at least it was uncrowded. Frustratingly, it's completely surrounded by the arrivals walkway, so the view is of a narrow patch of gravel with another building beyond (at least the walkway has glass on both sides, but it's difficult to see through three layers of glass!).
Eventually, it was time to board -- which was significantly less painful than in Vancouver, but still significantly more chaotic than I was expecting from Germany. Frankfurt has those automated boarding pass-scanning gates instead of having a person checking boarding passes, and one of them apparently decided it was going to reject everyone's boarding passes (which the staff hadn't figured out yet since we were some of the first people to board).
Getting onboard, there's nothing much to report -- all of Condor's long-haul planes are completely identical. Sadly, we weren't flying directly to Seattle -- and unfortunately, their Seattle promo video, flying around the Space Needle, never quite gets to the right angle to show where I live! (In this picture, it's quite a ways out of frame to the right.)
Three Condor planes and only two liveries! At least they're my two favorites.
The red is definitely Condor's boldest livery. Too bad they only use it on narrowbodies.
There was some sort of cool plane following us as we started the takeoff roll, but I have no idea what it was at this point since my phone refused to focus on anything other than the rain on the window! It's always fun taking off in the rain.
Here's the menu for this flight. I was excited to see that there were actually some things I was interested in this time, so I could actually check out Condor's food.
I don't understand why airlines insist on always having a seafood appetizer, though. Other than the bread (which is absolutely the highlight of Condor), the only thing I ended up eating from here was the chicken on the salad -- normally I would eat the whole salad, but the lettuce was sad and far from fresh, and the croutons were beyond stale, just cold soggy bread. Massive fail on Condor's point -- that was the worst food I've been served in business class up to this point. Looks like even the salt and pepper airplane agreed with me, since it was doing a faceplant!
As far as the actual meal goes, it was... fine. I'd say it was on par with what I've gotten on Turkish and Delta short-haul (in fact, it was quite similar to what Delta fed me on the JFK-Seattle leg), and certainly far behind what Delta, Turkish, or especially Air France serve on long-haul flights. So that was a bit of a disappointment.
Dinner was another cheesecake, and again I broke into it before remembering to take a picture, so I was clearly excited! My dad was highly disappointed that we got cheesecakes both ways since he doesn't eat cheesecake.
After dinner, I put my bed down for a bit of rest (I always end up sleeping on the daytime flights on the way home since I'm just so drained from the whole trip) while more tacky ads played on the IFE.
In the middle of the flight, they came around with little cups of Haagen-Dazs. (No, not Haggen-Dazs, which is how I want to pronounce it at this point thanks to one of you saying that's how you pronounce Haggen! I wonder if there are Northwesterners who actually pronounce Haagen-Dazs that way since they knew Haggen first... and because one of the only distinctive parts of the Northwestern dialect is the overuse of the long a sound.) This is a real blast from the past -- I remember getting little cups of ice cream like this, including the wooden spoon, in economy class back in the day (though I feel like they were generally generic brands). I'm not sure how many airlines still do that in economy, but in business class, ice cream seems to be a fairly uncommon dessert and the airlines that do serve it tend to have it in real bowls rather than single-serve packages. And that's just not as fun!
Eventually we started descending over the cloudy Cascades (which are pretty, but nowhere near as pretty as the Alps!).
There's always something fun about seeing an airport you aren't going to from the air.
Vancouver was pretty as always. I honestly think it's the only city in the world that I would prefer over Seattle when it comes to actually living there.
Trolleybuses galore!
I promised you we'd be seeing that 747 again later -- here it is, in the gate right next to ours!
And that's it for this trip. The international arrivals area in YVR is really nice and worth some photos, but that will have to wait for some time when I'm on my own. Immigration to enter Canada was completely painless -- we were the first people off the flight and it didn't seem like there were any other flights at the same time -- but I wish I could say the same about getting back into the US, where there were only two lanes open at the Blaine border crossing (thanks to the combination of current US policies and the ongoing government shutdown) and the officer in the lane my dad chose was being absurdly strict, searching everyone's car and just taking forever. Normally it's the Canadians that give me a hard time, but (perhaps because I was traveling with my family this time) they had the easiest border crossing this time around. Also, the baggage claim belt at YVR kept jamming, so it took forever for our luggage to come out. (I've learned that getting off the plane first isn't as nice as it sounds -- on every flight I've taken recently, the extra time I saved was completely eaten up by the baggage claim wait!)
At this point, I don't have any vacations planned, though I'm considering finally going on an Amtrak trip this spring/summer -- that will be a big change from the vacations I've been doing lately! So it's back to normal retail posts for the foreseeable future starting tomorrow.
Sadly, having United priority baggage tags didn't help us get our bags any quicker on vacation this year or last year really either. Things are especially bad at IAH, though things were pretty slow at BOS last year too. That said, we didn't have the problems you had going through the baggage drop lines and all of that!
ReplyDeleteI suppose you never know where we might end up traveling to this year, SEA and YVR are certainly possibilities! We'll see, I've only lightly been scouting travel spots so far. I'm not sure where you'd go on Amtrak, but I assume it'll be somewhere in the land of Safeway so we'll have to see about that!
For my trips so far, it's probably been around 50/50 whether the priority tags have done anything. But even when the priority bags come out first, that doesn't help all that much when it takes half an hour to an hour-plus from the time I get to baggage claim to the time the bags start coming out! Ironically, as messy as Seatac is, it's the only place I haven't had to wait an extended time for my luggage so far.
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