Foreign 9: Trans-Europe Express

It happened again. The restaurant last night played an excellent Greek pop/rock song, somewhat reminiscent of indie-Natalie Imbruglia, and I have no idea what it was called. Last time that happened I was in the duty-free shop in the airport on Gran Canaria and they kept playing this catchy song. A few months later Las Ketchup topped the charts across Europe. I can only hope the same happens again. I'll recognise it if that happens, but until such a time I'll keep almost remembering how the chorus goes.

I managed to sleep from 0030 to 0215, until I had to get up for the bus to take us to the "airport" - aerodrome would be more accurate. As the beach is frequented by large turles, all the lights within 200m must be off by 2300, in addition to the beach being closed from 1900 to 0700. Most of the lights beyond the 200m mark are automatic, so at 3AM it's very dark. I was standing against the first floor rail looking at the stars, when a meteor just happened to streak across the centre of my field of vision. By the time your brain computes what you just saw, it's long over - especially when half-asleep. Not even time to make a wish.

Thankfully it wasn't far to the airport - even with the stops at the other hotels (4 of which were beside each other). What did take forever, instead, was the queue to check-in. The rep on the bus notified us that there might be delays because the check-in desks are not computerised. Not the fucking half of it. The queues stretched outside the main building. 4 queues of perhaps a thousand people. We spent an hour without moving. Why were there so many people there? Why were they all 18-30? Step up "Club 18-30" bound for Gatwick.

The 18-30s were like toddlers. Hyperactive, in a huff, stamping their feet, tired and emotional. Some sort of argument ensued between two groups, and one of the young women in the group asked them to mind their manners. It's possibly the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen: this self-styled 'wideboy', Derek Trotter-wannabe, walks up to them in a Liam Gallagher-esque swagger and says in the worst Cockney accent you've ever heard (ie, probably real) "Manners? My mother never taught me manners!". What a fucking pratt. If I'd had gloves with me, I'd have slapped him.

Anyway, we reached the check-in desk after 80 or so minutes standing. The rep was wrong to say it wasn't computerised - it was... just to 1960s standards. I've never seen such a long CRT monitor, it must have been a repurposed X-ray machine. Speaking of which, all your luggage must go through the X-Ray machine before you get to the check-in. I was paying more attention to the luggage scan than the police officer. As usual, I could have hidden a katana down my trousers and still not set-off the metal detector (probably related to the unusually low electrical resistance of my skin, I'll tell you about that some other time). I calculate our average speed whilst in the queue; from getting off the bus, to collecting the boarding passes, at 0.04m/s - I think the outbound plane went faster when it sat at the gate.

So having stood upright for 90 minutes, I was looking forward to sitting down, thereby preventing my spine from becoming a steel rod. Oh, for fuck's sake...

View of the departure "lounge" from the Duty-Free shop stairs.

You know, aerodromes can't cope with that sort of serious overcrowding - I'm confident that it was a serious breach of health and safety. In the event of a fire, for instance, the sheer number of people in such a small area would almost inevitably lead to a stampede in which a large number of people would likely have been trampled - although I noted the police were carrying HK MP5s. Crowd control? Not only does the above picture depict the so-called lounge, the area behind the mounted monitor to the right is actually Gate 1. To the left is Gate 2. Gate 3 is out of frame to the left along with an enclosed smoking area. There was a sandwich bar and the Duty-Free shop up some stairs (which were also being used as seating areas). The plane was scheduled for a 0600 take-off, at the same time as the 18-30 flight. Neither would launch at that time because 1) There's only one runway 2) There is a minimum of 2 minutes between launches/landings 3) We hadn't yet boarded the plane.

We finally boarded the plane around 0615 local time (UTC+3). The climb to cruise altitude was nice, early morning mist in the troughs of valleys. Lo and behold, we'd launched at sunrise, and what side of the plane was I on? Once again, the side not facing the rising Sun. Just once I'd like to see a brilliant red disc rising over the sea at true horizon (technically, from the air it's below the horizon at sea level). The outbound film was Aquamarine - apparently it's a recent release. By the way, the screens weren't flat panels that drop down from the roof - they were mounted CRT displays straight out of the late 70s microcomputing scene (ie, they were huge). I lost count of the number of times I saw the introductory message, 'This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen', and the 20th Century Fox ident.

Play, Pause... 'we'd like to tell you about Thomas Cook's offers', blah, blah... resume, pause, resume, 'if you wish to purchase...'... resume, rewind, play... Get's to the opening credits... pause, rewind a few seconds, resume... ad nauseum...

That took up the first 20 minutes (in which the in-flight radio was similarly interrupted constantly), until the pause actually parted some interesting information. Namely, that we were already over Tirana. It was a bit like in Jurassic Park, when the cars pull up to the Dilophosaurus paddock and see... nothing. Total cloud cover. I already felt like I was back home. El Capitan then detailed our flightplan for the morning: From Tirana, to Sarajevo, over Ljubljana, across Southern Germany, over Amsterdam, and landfall somewhere in Yorkshire, landing at Glasgow Airport in roughly two hours. I saw even more nothing due to my brother taking the prized window seat, plotting our course on the back of the sickbag, scribbling the notes for this post, sporadically watching the movie (I thought Emma Roberts looked cute), falling asleep until the final ten minutes of the flight.

The return flight from Zakynthos (green)
Second half of the 1999 route to Crete (red)

Plotting our course proved to be difficult for 5 minutes. Having drawn an excellent map of Europe from memory (including the locations of capitals) and drawing straight lines over the mentioned cities, I began writing the ETAs for each. Somewhere over Croatia we encountered severe turbulence and my penmanship was assaulted. I had my seatbelt on long before the sign lit up as the turbulence had us pitching, rolling and generally shaking quite a lot. I noted that we were flying over the [former] Yugoslav republics; whereas when flying to Crete in 1999, we had to take an alternate route over France and Italy due to the restricted airspace over Yugoslavia.

Now it gets confusing. I slept from roughly 0830 to 0930 (UTC+3) and there was another 10 minutes until landing. But we landed around 0830 (DST/UTC+1) and I had woken up from an hour's sleep. What happened to the time? Were we a self contained capsule of Greek local time flying over Western Europe? Or did we gradually subtract X amount of seconds/minutes as we flew through two time zones? It's so much easier just flying South to the Canaries.

A prompt departure brought us to Passport Control where I embarrassed myself:

PC: "Where are you traveling from, sir?"
Me: "Glasgow"
PC: "Sir, you're in Glasgow"
Me: "Oh, sorry. Um, eh... ... Zakynthos"

Firstly, I'm an EU citizen, I should be able to cross borders without being harassed by Strathclyde Police. Secondly, I've just got off an early morning flight, having had about 3 hours sleep in the past day. I'm half-a-fucking-sleep! It was an unconscious reaction - I had been asked by Wave-Through Control on arrival at Zakynthos if I was on the Manchester flight. The officer wasn't grilling me like Strathclyde Police, just asking which flight we were on for his logbook, as both Glasgow and Manchester flights had landed a few minutes apart. I replied 'Glasgow'. Now arriving back in Oceania, my mind jumped back to that scene and answered automatically. I didn't even realise I'd said 'Glasgow' until she pointed it out. There were 2 awkward seconds in which I struggled to remember what the island I was standing on only 2.5 hours ago was called.

Rather than stop at the WH Smith in the arrivals lounge, we pressed onward to the minivan which would take us to the long-term carpark, where we would collect the car. If you remember, I listened to Autobahn on the way to the airport. However, I only got to 11 minutes before I had to put the CD player away. This time I put it on at the junction off the main carriageway. The whole glorious song played for 22 minutes 43 seconds, climaxing only a dozen blocks away from home.

Home! Finally, internet access! If only my swivel chair's back-support hadn't snapped the night before we left, I could sit back in a chair and maybe relax. Nice to see I've written a 1500 word piece on something as trivial as my last 7 hours.

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