Frankfurt

Depressed, genuinely depressed, not because of the ordeal, the waiting, the frustration – no, depressed because I’ve just been reminded what Christmas is supposed to feel like, by tasting a sip of a Starbuck’s Toffee Nut Latte™ in Frankfurt airport. An American woman and two German ladies (all white) nearby are in frantic agreement over immigration and the nationalization of immigrants: “they sweep in and take our jobs” etc. Everywhere in this airport travelers are weeping, employees are shouting – and someone from Maintenance is doing laps on a bicycle while I sip Starbuck’s Christmas Cheer™. Is this the world you were dreaming of, Walt Disney? Look what we’ve become. I hope you’re turning in your grave/fridge.

The last few days, if nothing, have given me ample opportunity to witness something I have never seen before: the Germans in action, for better or worse. What is most surprising is their ability to communicate, their communication skills, which are truly woeful. No, that’s not fair: their communication abilities are entirely efficient. If they can’t help you, they won’t try. If you can’t ask the right question then you clearly don’t deserve the effort it takes into producing the right answer, or the answer itself. Not a word wasted. Efficient, and infuriating. In Buenos Aires, we queued for two hours to be told our flight would be delayed by six; in the end it was delayed by seven. Why, we were not told.

The flight was, surprisingly, incredibly painless. I hadn’t slept the night before and was out like a light. The plane was old enough not to have screens in the back of the seat in front of me, ridding me of a major distraction. The food offered looked exactly like economy class fare is supposed to look like but was actually very good. Everything about the trip itself reassured me that, on the continent, in civilization, all would be well. Lufthansa’s trans-atlantic crossing was the scene of my return to innocence and naivety as I left the New World and returned to the Old.

It was on the flight that I saw several further examples of German communication: often firm, always polite. When the food cart was being wheeled up the aisle in-flight, a woman tried to get past. The Valkyric attendant didn’t budge. The woman tried harder but Brunhilda stopped her with a staying hand and said, smiling brightly as one does to the deranged: “it weighs 90 kilos”… so good luck chum, she didn’t have to add.

When the plane crossed France I opened the window a crack and saw green below. Where was this snow that was causing so many people problems? And then I opened it fully and saw white. Everywhere was white. Endless fields, a la The Snowman, coated in white. And it was beautiful. From here one could appreciate the majesty of a world covered in a delicate spray of icing. This is Winter as seen in postcards, Narnia and Coca-Cola adverts. Two and a half decades of almost entirely snowless childhoods gave way to a squeal of delight that I kept deep inside but harkened to a part of me that had always dreamed and known that this is how the world should be.

All it took was our arrival in Frankfurt to remind me of how it actually is.

The 1st Officer started jabbering away on the speaker as we approached our descent, before stopping abruptly: “New information has been received!” he barked and promptly disappeared. The new information, it has to be said, was a surprise for all concerned: Frankfurt was closed. Like a shop or a bar. Except we were in a plane hovering above the airport, and couldn’t get in, which was the equivalent of being left out of a lock-in, only several hundred feet off the ground. I had already missed my connecting flight to Kuwait so I had absolutely no idea what would happen next when we arrived on the ground – it could only be a new adventure. We circled Frankfurt for a while, and I chatted nervously with the Swedish ball bearing salesman to my right, desperately trying not to look out of the window to my left – because there was nothing to see. Clouds swirled around and below us, small lights twinkling somewhere on the ground, impossible to tell at what distance. I have never been in a snowy landing before, and had no idea what to expect, but luckily my over-active imagination was providing me with some suitably disturbing thoughts.

After a while the plane descended. The window became covered in tiny icicle snowflakes, beautiful in their intricacy yet unnerving in their promise. Clutching my chair and by now talking utter gibberish to avoid the “OH MY GOD!!” thoughts running merry havoc in my brain, which I get every time a plane lands but were multiplied tenfold by the current situation, I occasionally glanced out. We had by now broken the snow clouds. The trees, unmistakably German snow-covered pines, grew closer and closer, the tires grunted below us, the buildings became bigger … and then we landed. And the landing was perfect, perhaps the best I’ve ever experienced. Smooth. No twisting and sliding at all. Spontaneous applause burst out around the cabin. Why? I thought. What has the pilot done? The plane is designed to land; he is employed to land it. Just because he does it every day normally with the minimum amount of fuss, why should he be applauded when he does it when it’s difficult? I realized that I was tired, angry, unsure of what was going to happen next, and that the plane was full of Argentines, who sometimes clap when they don’t know what else to do, and always applaud landings.

A semi-elderly Russian gent got up straight away; a torch beam shot out from the Valkyrie to my right: “Sir! You must please sit down!” came the command across the cabin. The man continued, oblivious, and another beam shot out like a bullet. Caught in the headlights, the Russian gave in and meekly sat down like a chastened schoolboy.

When we eventually got onto the ground, everything was chaos. Nobody had the first idea of what was going on. This was the end of Day Two of a continent-wide natural disaster, not volcanic ash but snow, possibly the most pathetic and debilitating natural disaster since the former, and nobody in ‘busy international hub’ Frankfurt had a clue about what was happening. We wandered hallways, sometimes in packs, sometimes alone, occasionally snatching at pieces of information that we thought, we believed, assumed was useful, because it came from someone in a uniform, but nobody was useful, nobody had the answer we were looking for and the uniforms were empty, devoid of authority.

Where can I get my bag from? I asked. “Yes, you must get your bag,” nodded the woman of African descent in a Lufthansa uniform. From where? “I do not know,” she shook her head, mournfully. An Israeli man had found an attendant that spoke his language – were they fighting or agreeing? Easily could’ve been either.

And nobody cared.

I’ve just crossed the Atlantic and I don’t speak German. “Um…would you like a medal?” No, I’d like a flight, my bag and a shower, in the order. “You can share a shower; you’ll never see your bag again; I can’t help you with your flight.” What level of Hell have we been flown into?

I started to follow an American tour guide, partly because there was a chance he’d know or be able to find something out and partly because I needed a Mother Goose. He was utterly useless, but he was wearing a pretty red jacked so at a pinch he could pass for Santa Clause; my brain was really very tired.

After some false starts down cavernous and deserted hallways, we found a queue. A queue! That most international of symbols! If people are queuing, there must be a reason – there must be something at the end. A pot of gold; a flight; a Kit-Kat. Whatever. So I joined the back with Mother Goose/Santa Clause. However, a well-coiffeured and impeccably dressed little German whose eyes darted and mouth rattled as if he’d just taken a line of speed was decimating the queue from the back with a clipboard.

“You!” he barked at three tall blond lads. “Going to Norway? Go to Gate 67B this instant. Your flight will be taking off shortly.” The three Scandinavians hadn’t really registered what had hit them but off they scurried.

“You!”

“Yes?” I offered meekly.

“Where you going?”

“Kuwait.”

“Ha. No, you’re not.” I blinked at this response, unsure as to how to react. Is this German customer service?

Mother Clause started to remonstrate with this communications guru in what seemed to be a jokey way for our benefit (not in front of the kids, darling) but was layered with vicious meaning:

Mother Clause: Ha ha, wouldn’t it be nice if you told us what was going on.

Communications Guru: Ha ha, wouldn’t it be nice if you got off my back, rolled into a cave and died, ha ha.

MC: Ha ha, leak me some information, think of yourself as Julian Assange for Frankfurt airpot, ha ha.

CG: Ha ha, look where Julian Assange is now, accused of rape and locked up on the behest of the Americans, he’s lucky he’s not in Guantanamo, ha ha.

MC: Ha ha, go **** your ******, ha ha.

CG: Ha ha, I would do but I was busy finishing up with your…
And so on.

But I looked at Mother Clause in light of this new information. He had no idea what was getting on and was getting in the way. This coiffeured coked-up Kraut (with a peculiarly South African English) had all the information I needed and was prepared to give it to me. I ditched the red-jacketed buffoon and started firing questions at Lufthansa’s finest.

1. What happened to my flight? “Cancelled.”

2. Where’s my bag? “You won’t see it for five days.”

3. Why not? “Because it’s being held where we wash our luggage carrying buses. Along with thousands of others. You think you’re in the shit, take a look around. You’re just a number, a statistic in a news story.”

4. So what do I do? “Take this voucher, get in a taxi, they’ll take you to this hotel. On the house. When you get there, call this hotline. They’ll re-book your flight. Good luck.”

He may have been an odious little prick, but I entirely appreciated his honesty: efficient, no-frills, take-it-or-leave-it communication. I took it, suddenly less angry, bewildered or confused than I had been when I got off the plane, and jumped into a cab.

The cold outside the plan was unreal. I had no clothes apart from what I was wearing, what I had been wearing since Friday night (amid those distant steaks and wine on a hot summer evening with friends in Latin America – had it only been two days?) and only had a coat. The snow was falling thick and fast, and was not attractive as it had been from the plane, but dirty and corrupted. I got into the taxi and zoomed into the night.

The driver was jovial and slightly chatty. I thought the hotel would be in Frankfurt itself but it was actually about 70km away, in a small town called Bingen. The snow was thick on and off the road, and several times the driver lost some control over the car and you could feel the tires sliding. Luckily this was happening to everyone so everybody on the road was aware and attentive to each other; considerate Germans.

The hotel was located at the far end of a pier in Bingen, a small industrial riverside town. The only guests in the hotel were stranded passengers, courtesy of Lufthansa. On the final approach to the hotel my taxi got stuck. Another taxi driver stopped and got out to push; after a while I got out as well to help, my Converse gently absorbing the snow caused by two days of solid snowfall. All to no avail. My driver got out and found a rubber sheet which he placed under a wheel to give it grip; the first time he started the car after this the sheet spun out from under the car and struck the assisting taxi driver on the shins. He hobbled off into the night, cursing. Someone came dashing out of the hotel with a shovel and got to work on the front wheels; at the same time, my driver got out and started spanking the back of the car with the rubber sheet to get the snow off. The sight was ridiculous beyond belief, like some sort of taxi-related bedroom game. Eventually, the taxi was freed and rolled off into the night.

The hotline to Lufthansa was engaged all evening. My hotel room looked disconcertingly like [the artist’s impression of] a cheap whore’s boudoir, right down to the plastic sheets. The ‘meal’ provided by the hotel and paid for by Lufthansa was disgusting and insufficient. I met some former US military lads (now civilian ‘contractors’ – euphemism for ‘hired killers’? One never knows…) on their way to Iraq or ‘Afghan’ via Kuwait, we started on the beers and Johnnie Walker, and that pretty much saw off the rest of the evening.

The next day I rose to a breakfast that was just like a boarding school Sunday breakfast – lavish, fantastic, excessive. I ate too much, but in my mind I justified it easily – after a night of watching BBC and CNN reports in which I had, as the Lufthansa man had predicted, become a number in a news story, when would I next be eating a meal like this again?

On the trip back to the airport, Germany was stunning. The countryside was lent an air of beauty by the snow that almost served to wash away my irritation at having been stuck and with little idea of how I would get out. But I was tired, and wanted to leave. This was my holiday. Frankfurt was just as crowded as it had been the day before, the people just as useless. But at least it wasn’t snowing anymore. I waited to get a new ticket, and suddenly everything was fine – flying out in the afternoon, with my bag. Success, at last.

Which was when I headed to Starbucks, took a long drag, and realized: this is Christmas, for everyone. The reason why this snow has caused so much chaos is that, at this time of year, people care in a way they simply don’t at other times. At this one point, on a hard day at the end of a hard year, we are all just trying to get home. I can’t believe it took me a sip of Starbucks to make me realize how important that is. What’s next? A sip of Coca-Cola and I’ll suddenly believe in Santa Clause again?

PS: It seems I was wrong – it isn’t just Maintenance that cycle about in Frankfurt airport, it’s everybody. Gotta love the Germans.