Traveling!

I made it! I’m in Budapest! My flights went extremely well and all was smooth. There was very little turbulence on my flight from Vancouver to Frankfurt. I flew with Condor, an airline that I have never heard of previously. It was a tight fit. I barely slept on the flight. Max an hour in short bursts throughout the flight. It didn’t help that I was seated by the washroom and people kept brushing past me to get to the washroom. The worst part of the whole flight was probably the washroom. It smelled disgusting and it wasn’t ventilated properly. In fact, the whole plane wasn’t ventilated well. It was extremely warm, to the point that I was only wearing a t-shirt (and for those who know me well, I get cold way too easily). If you have plans to go somewhere – visit Aerobell.com and find something that suits you down to the ground.

Food was interesting, but definitely not very good.

Dinner on the Plane – tasteless. Needed salt.

Breakfast – that brown thing in the package is rye bread. Not very tasty, but apparently popular in Germany?

Finally after 10 hours, I made it Frankfurt Airport where I had a layover for 4 hours. I spent entirely way too much time wandering around trying to find it. I went through security at least 3 times and passport control 4 times. I have no idea why. I probably went the long way around and didn’t follow the signs properly. By the time I found my gate, I found out that the area wasn’t opening till 3:30PM. It was just after 2:00 at this time so I had to go find some other random gate to sit at and wait. Frankfurt airport doesn’t have free wifi so I watched a movie to pass the time.

Waiting at the gate

The gate I was flying from was in a separate section of the airport. You board a bus to be taken to you aircraft. You get up close and personal with the planes. Pretty cool. This process of being bussed to your flight is quite typical of the low cost airlines in Europe (ie. Ryanair, Easyjet) and I was pretty familiar with the process. Its weird that they were using it for Lufthansa though as they’re a large airline. Maybe there wasn’t enough gates the the Frankfurt airport. The second plane, despite it being a short flight, was much more comfortable. There seemed to be more room between the seats. Made such a big difference! Food was even worse. I don’t really know what it was. Some type of potato salad and meat that just tasted off. I was surprised to see that you can get a glass of wine or a beer instead of a soft drink on the flight! Such a strange concept to me.

Finally, after close to 16 hours of travel I made it to Budapest! My trainee buddy met me at the airport while on his way to travel to Bhutan. He had a sign with my name on it and everything! Pretty nifty. He drove me to my apartment and helped me get settled.

P.S. I’ll be putting up a vlog on my travels getting to Budapest. I haven’t figured out how to edit it properly yet and will leave that for another day to figure out! Keep posted!