Travel – we’re getting the hang of it

I’ve chronicled our travel debacles since Nuha’s birth in a couple of places now. Travelling with multiple pieces of luggage, frustrated and harried at airports, struggling to console our daughter on planes. But I have to say, we did real well this time. As we left home for Paris, and eventually Istanbul, we did so with two medium sized suitcases and a small carry-on, all well under the weight limit. Beyond that, I had a small backpack that I planned to use during our treks. We were ready before the shuttle arrived to pick us up, patiently waiting by the door, which in itself represented a marked change from our previous trips, where I’d usually be busy with last minute things, praying for the taxi to be late.

But the hot streak didn’t end there. Security lines, which once used to be child’s play, had become terrifying ordeals that we hated. This time around, however, it was like a finely choreographed dance - eliminate liquid containers before the line, grab multiple bins in one go, deposit jackets/belts/shoes in one, laptop in another, and backpack in the third. Shoes off, ticket in one hand, baby in another, deliver strategic ninja kicks to expertly collapse stroller, and walk through. Done!

Actually, the entire journey was a series of high fives between Saeeda and I. All except for one incident. We had boarded our KLM flight from SFO to Amsterdam, and the flight attendant, sitting in a jumpseat directly in front of us, asked us to buckle Nuha in. Nuha, however, wanted nothing doing . And so began a Class A, Premium Quality Meltdown of the 1st Degree. We’re talking writhing, hollering, hell-raising screaming, with tears and snot streaming out in copious amounts. Our neighboring passengers did their best to ignore the tirade, and we did our best to control Nuha, but to no avail. We were “those” parents with the uncontrollable child, and I could tell everyone was doing mental math to figure out how long they would be stuck beside us. Thankfully, the tantrum stopped the moment we reached cruising altitude and unbuckled Nuha. I think the flight attendant figured out what was in her best interest too, because during landing she turned a blind eye as we waited until the last possible minute to buckle Nuha, and then unbuckled her the first opportunity we got.

Still, all in all this was one of our most successful trips ever, and I’m hoping that it’s something that we can build on.

A volcanic disruption in review

My European travel adventures finally came to came to a successful end on Tuesday. On that day, the authorities in charge finally relented and airspace opened back up, allowing stranded passengers to start making their way to their respective destinations. All in all, this experience was an interesting and not entirely unpleasant one

Traveling in Europe is fun at any time, but doing so by relying completely on your own wits, rather than the boring predictability of planned schedules – there’s something exciting about that. Of course, I was blessed throughout this experience in that I was traveling on business, and hence was the ward of my multinational employer with covered expenses and dedicated travel agents ( albeit ones who refused to pick up the phone). There was also never a pressing emergency that had me desperate to be home, although it has emerged since my return that my wife and I have different definitions of “emergency” - a wailing, inconsolable toddler constitutes an emergency, I now know. Finally, my contact with stranded families aching to be home, or of stranded students running out of money and living off airport cots was sobering, to say the least.

Perhaps most interesting was the dynamic that was in play between the airlines and the governing authorities. At the outset, the public saw the decisive action taken by the EU as reassuring, despite stranded passengers grumbling about the delay - visions of planes with clogged jet engines falling from the sky made sure that few questioned the initial decision. But then something interesting happened. Airlines began to bleed money. As the shutdown stretched from hours to days, it became clear that grounded air traffic was going to lead to a severe financial impact. Airlines began taking “test flights” to check if it was ok to take to the skies, although I found it interesting that none of the test flights took place through the ash clouds themselves, or flew at much lower altitudes than normal. CEOs began exhorting the authorities to open up the skies, that the shutdown was draconian and excessive. There was even talk of bailouts.

And the EU relented. Despite any conclusive evidence that proved it was safe to fly, the Net Present Value swung in favor of letting planes off the ground. Someone will write an interesting analysis on this someday, but you could sense the equation changing on a daily basis.

Day 1: Planes crashing as a result of volcanic ash = no planes allowed to fly.

Day 3: $200 million in daily losses = hmm, is this volcano thing really that bad?

Day 5: Screw the volcano. We need to get s#%* moving again!

Ah economics. What a truly dismal science.

I leave you with a few pictures I was able to snap on my crappy Blackberry camera as I decided to make the most of my stay in Germany and Switzerland:

Chili flavored chocolate? Really, O Swiss people? Have desis so pervaded your society that you feel you need to cater to us?

Entrance to Dachau. "Work will set you free"

Surfing(!) in Munich. This is in the middle of the city.

With Mike's Bike Tours

Marienplatz - the old town center at night. Much prettier in real life.

Me, the Autobahn, and Lady Gaga

The norm for “seeing Europe” is usually after one’s college graduation, and before the start of one’s first job. It is an American rite of passage – a last hurrah before one has to buckle down and begin worrying about things like contributing enough to a 401k to make sure to get an employer match. But given this stupid volcano, I’m now living every fresh college graduate’s dream European vacation.

Today I bid goodbye to Munich, and headed to pick up my rental car for the journey to Zurich, which is where I had managed to find the next available flight out on Swiss Air. Driving in Europe is a ton of fun – you invariably get a German car with a great engine, and you get to speed on autobahns where it’s easy to push 100 mph. Picking up the car was just as much fun for me, though, because the rental car agency I had found was at the main train station in the center of the city, which meant having to use zigzagging alleys and one-way streets to get out of the city and on to the highway.

It’s hard not to feel a little like Jason Bourne during the process. Ok, maybe it’s hard for me not to feel a little like Jason Bourne. But come on! I don’t speak the language, but I’m at ease in my alien environment. I’m at places of mass public transit, wending and weaving my way through strangers who know nothing about my mission. I convince agents to lend me a car, using one of my many credit cards linked to offshore accounts. I locate my vehicle in a non-descript, off-site parking structure, load my minimalist belongings, rev the engine, and zoom my way across narrow roads, knowing where to go only by instinct … and by the aid of my GPS (which I set to speak at me in a haughty British accent).

Driving is indeed a lot of fun in Europe, even putting aside the great highways with no speed limits. The countryside is so ridiculously postcard perfect. In my case, I passed countless small villages clinging to valley riversides, with the Alps soaring in the background. Farms flew by, with cows lazily lounging in the fields. And every now and then I’d pass through small towns where I’d pull up next to an old church, built an impossibly long time ago.

The only blemish on this driving experience was the music. Europop itself is fine – I kinda like the catchy pop-tunes that make up most continental hits. And I really enjoyed listening to German, Italian, and French songs, even though I didn’t understand a word. It was part of the experience of being in a foreign land. But that’s what made the amount of American crud playing on each and every single radio station absolutely infuriating. I don’t claim to have a trained ear, nor do I claim to have any deep knowledge of music, but even I can tell good American music from formulaic, vapid crap. Among the songs that were on infinite replay on all the radio stations was that ludicrous song by that guy who would like to make himself "believe that planet earth turned slowly” and for some reason wants to “get a thousand hugs, from 10,000 bugs” (why is he asking each bug to hug him ten times?) Or something like that. Owl City, is the name of the band, I think. And then there was Lady Gaga. You know that song – the one where the chorus sounds like she’s trying to gargle while singing – “rah-rah-ah-ah-ah, roma roma-ma, ga-ga ooh la la.” WTF?!

Both these vomit inducing songs played with such regularity that I eventually just had to turn the radio off, and resort to my trusty British GPS guide to entertain me the rest of the way. The three and a half hour drive went by a lot quicker than I expected, and I pulled into my Zurich office in the afternoon, surprising my coworkers who thought they had seen the last of “that corporate guy from California.”

Tomorrow promises to be another exciting day – will I get to fly out? Will I be moving to yet another city? Will I have to endure more Lady Gaga? Who knows.

Unpronounceable volcanoes

My ability to withstand infuriatingly unhelpful travel agents continues to amaze me. Yesterday I stopped living in 90 min. increments (average wait time for an operator), and resigned myself to the fact that I will get home when I get home. This means that I'm no longer splitting time between keeping my bags packed in case my flight leaves from Munich, walking around the city entertaining myself, and wasting away on hold on the phone. This is a better approach anyway, since now I can relax and catch up on email, and spend time surfing the web again.

I arrived in Switzerland last week, and eventually moved to Germany for meetings. I was supposed to fly out of Stuttgart on Friday, connect to Munich, and then go straight to San Fran by Friday evening. That's when that silly volcano with that unpronounceable name started to mess with a finely tuned aviation system, and all air travel went haywire. Since then, I've taken a train to Munich, scrambled for a hotel over 1,000s of other people (and with the year's biggest convention starting here this week), sat around for three days while my rescheduled flights were cancelled repeatedly, contemplated taking the 8 hour train to Greece or Turkey (only places functioning close to normal), commandeered a rental car, and will be driving to Zurich tomorrow.

We have an office there where I should be able to camp out - perhaps literally as I have not found a hotel room yet. The second-biggest problem right now is finding lodging. People who were supposed to leave, haven't. And people who were in transit have arrived, which means availability in cities is tight. Still, being productive in an office, surrounded by my coworkers who speak the language and can help with travel arrangements is bound to be better than being useless in Munich.

I was on the phone with our travel agent for the umpteenth time this morning, re-booking yet another flight, when she mentioned that I should look into cruise lines. Apparently some forward-thinking passengers booked themselves on ships last week when the airports started shutting down, and many of them are already arriving in the US. Craziness. And it's not like the airlines know more than the rest of us - yesterday I ran into a pilot from Delta and stewardesses from Continental who had no idea when they would be leaving. When I used my Blackberry to look up the latest info on Lufthansa's website on airport closures, they were grateful because it provided them more of an update than they were getting from their HQ. I learned that flight crew are provided with company-issue laptops or cell phones, and instead just rely on wherever they get internet access.

By the way, I'm looking forward to my 3.5 hr drive tomorrow, since the only car that was available, and which I snagged, was a Mercedez sedan. The problem is that it's a manual transmission, which I last drove when I was in high school in Pakistan. I'm not worried though - I maintain that anyone who learns to drive on the streets of Karachi can out-maneuver James Bond in a car chase. I'll get to put my theory to the test tomorrow as I try to navigate out of Munich's old-town , with its classic windy, narrow, European streets, and onto the autobahn.

Possibly the worst part of all this (other than trying to convince my wife that no, secretly I'm not having the time of my life) is that I can't swear at this f#$%!@* volcano properly. It's not like, "Damn Mt St. Helens!" or "shit Pinatubo, why did you have to screw things up?". No, the ridiculous name of this volcano is impossible to pronounce, which makes venting of anger near impossible.

Maybe I'll dial my travel agent again.