Last Wednesday I had a bit more eventful trip back to Frankfurt than I had imagined. I was flying on Lufthansa (natürlich!) out of the Domodedovo airport. I had scheduled to have a taxi pick me up at the office at 16:30, but then a meeting I couldn't really skip (it was, after all, my first real week here in Moscow as the acting leader) came up. I asked my assistant if she could move back the taxi. "Yes, but not if you still want to make your flight." Good point, as I would then be in rush hour traffic, which is more ridiculous here than I can begin to explain. She noted, however, that it would be possible to make it if I took the train. Hmmm..... I had not experimented with non-taxi transit here other than, as a good friend would say, the Ten Toes Express (walking).
One of our managers said it was quite doable and the station from which the airport express (Aeroexpress) train leaves is only a 10 minute walk from the office or so. I had been at that station over the weekend when I was wandering around, but the idea of trying to find the right track, buying a ticket and the fear of everything being in Russian was a bit daunting. Not to worry - he said he'd have one of our interns help me make it. Okay. So off to the meeting I went.
When I returned to my office, the poor intern assigned to escort me was waiting, along with three other staff. They presented me with the most charming gift! They knew that I was working on learning the Cyrillic alphabet, so they had created an alphabet for our team. For each of the Cyrillic characters, there was a key to pronunciation, an example of the letter used in the name of one of our colleagues, and then a picture of said colleague. So with this document, I could both learn the Cyrillic characters, their pronunciation, as well as the names and faces of most of our professionals. I love it and have been showing it off wherever I go!
So off the poor, hapless intern (to protect the innocent, as always, I will call him Ivan, which is not his real name) and I went to the train station. Now, because I had learned the night before that I was going to have to move over my belongings from Frankfurt to Moscow solely via excess baggage, I left the suits and some other things (like the Sarah Palin doll I had with me) in my office.
However, I still had my large Rimowa (again, natürlich!) metal suitcase with me and, smooth roller that it is, it is still a bit large. Especially when dealing with the sometimes icy or snow-packed streets of Moscow. Ivan took one look at the suitcase and took over responsibility for its navigation, despite my protests. He even carried the brute at times when he thought that the sound of the rollers on the paving stones was a bit loud. Great guy. And I was glad to have him with me as we went into a different entrance than I'd seen on the weekend and would have been totally lost.
It turned out that the Aeroexpress ticket kiosks were actually multi-lingual, so I had no issue at all in purchasing a ticket. But after I purchased my ticket, Ivan looked at me quizzically and asked about his ticket. Ummm.... Apparently the manager who was looking out for my interests had told Ivan to go with me all the way to the airport to make sure I made it okay, got checked in, etc. Incredibly kind of both of them. But I told Ivan that since the Aeroexpress went directly to the terminal with no stops, it would be difficult for even me to get lost and I'd navigated my way around airports before and could probably figure that out, too. He needn't spend his evening (it was already 18:30) taking me to
the airport, getting me settled, and then going back into the city. And I was still horrified at the idea that I had become one of "those partners" with someone to literally carry my bag for me! He nevertheless insisted on at least waiting until I boarded the train. Very sweet.
The Aeroexpress was just fine. Nothing luxurious and not really all that fast (as compared to, for example, the Arlanda Express in Stockholm or Heathrow Express in London), but it was certainly faster than the drive from the airport to the city at around 2 AM when I had arrived, so I assumed it was supersonic compared to rush hour traffic.
I arrived in plenty of time for my scheduled departure, only to discover that the flight was delayed by about an hour due to mechanical problems. So I hung out in the Lufthansa lounge (not the Star Alliance Lounge, mind you - for whatever reason Austrian and Swiss both had their own lounges which seems like a bit of a waste of money and redundancy, but what do I know?).
I was a bit surprised by the decor - big wicker chairs with cushions that made you sink down to the point where it is a bit difficult to get up. But it was nice enough. There was some kind of hot buckwheat available as well as an interesting beet root salad and a few other things. Surprisingly, at least for Lufthansa, not a self-service bar for either coffee or adult beverages. I asked for a glass of red wine and was a bit surprised to get a white wine, which was poured out of the bottle using one of those narrow plastic spouts like one might see used for hard liquor at a bar. But I decided not to argue and grabbed a bottle of water for my wait (good call, as it would turn out). Then I returned to my deep wicker chair to stare out the window at the inky blackness broken by falling and blowing snow, but alas not by the sight of the familiar Lufthansa tail.
Our flight finally boarded around 21:45 (18:45 CET). I had managed to score the great exit window seat with now seat in front, so mad wicked legroom (you know, for my long legs and all). This also turned out to have been a good call, because after we pulled out of our gate position the captain announced that there was a different mechanical problem and so we were going to go chill out (literally and figuratively - it was around -20C at this point) somewhere out on the tarmac and the mechanic would meet us out. So I stretched out and read a bit, thinking (this is Lufthansa, after all) that we would soon be on our way. About 15 minutes into this, a woman with children asked what she was supposed to do because she and her family were supposed to catch a connecting flight to Argentina in Frankfurt and if they didn't make their connection, what would happen because they didn't have visas to enter Germany. The flight attendants tried to calm her down, but she was becoming a bit billigerant, as was her husband. Not really anything the flight attendants could do, though I hadn't really thought about that type of situation before in terms of canceled flights because I think all Lufthansa flights I had been on before were either within the EU or US, and obviously within the EU there's not a visa issue. Hmmm....
Probably another 15 minutes later, the captain announced that even if the mechanic arrived soon, there wasn't going to be enough time to make the repairs and get us into Frankfurt by 23:00 CET. Apparently effective 1 January as part of some negotiation for the airport expansion, there was a new noise abatement rule that prohibited flights in or out of Frankfurt between 23:00 and 5:00. WHAT?! He was waiting for more information on our gate back in the terminal.
Phones were still allowed as we waited, so I tried to call our corporate travel agent in Germany to see if they could book me on another flight out either that night or the next morning, either to Frankfurt or to Prague where I was slated to fly first thing the following morning. Just as they answered the phone and I was beginning to explain my situation, the pilot announced that the mechanic had just arrived, so the flight might still be on. Someone behind me said, "I'm going to kill you." I assume she was referring to the pilot and not me, but in any event I rang off to see what the new situation was. As I ended the call, my BlackBerry buzzed. It was a message from Lufthansa saying that my flight had been canceled. The flight attendant next to me asked me to please show it to the purser because none of them had any idea what was really going on.
They brought a bus out to our position on the tarmac to take us back to the terminal. It was a very cold walk down those steps from the flight, let me tell you. No one should be on the tarmac in -22 temps! They drove us to the terminal and let us out at a point where there were about 100 people inside waiting for other flights. Wasn't the gate from which we had departed. There was NO ONE there from Lufthansa. No direction. Nothing. Uhhh.... So I and the other passengers (it was a rather empty flight) started talking amongst ourselves to figure out what to do.
A few of us had been in the lounge together before the flight and so we headed back up to the lounge to see if they could help. When we got there, the attendants said that they do not work for Lufthansa, so they couldn't help us. Uhhh.... So one of the guys called Lufthansa in Germany on his cell phone. They weren't very helpful, either, but told us that we should go to the check-in desk outside of security.
The "outside of security" part of that proved a bit interesting. And I suddenly had a greater appreciation for the arguments that the woman headed for Argentina had voiced. I was traveling on a double-entry business visa and they had closed out and stamped the first entry when I had gone through passport control. So even if we could figure out how to get out of the general terminal area, how does one "undo" the departure and attempt to explain to passport control the next morning how I was leaving the country without having entered.
When you enter the country, you also have to complete an entry form and you keep that with you until you leave, so of course those had also been collected by passport control. Hmmm.... But certainly this happens all the time with canceled flights in Moscow due to weather, etc. (Then again, one might assume that Lufthansa would also be more prepared for a flight cancellation than was apparently the case.)
Somehow we found someone from passport control to assist us. Well, at least I think he was from passport control. We were on the wrong side of passport control and this guy in a uniform motioned all of us (we had a group of about 15 people who just stuck together the entire evening, it was quite nice) to a place off to the side and next to the side wall of one of the passport control booths. We then approached him one at a time, gave him the boarding pass and passport. He studied both, ripped off the luggage sticker from the boarding pass, pocketed the boarding pass, and put a different stamp diagonally across the departure stamp on the visa, and we were permitted back into the area before passport control. It was rather odd.
We then headed to the check-in desk. She said that she couldn't assist us and we should try the ticketing desk. So off we went.
There was a rather harried looking woman at the ticketing desk who did not seem at all happy to see us approach her. It probably didn't help when, simultaneously, people started addressing her in Russian, German, English and another Slavic sounding language I didn't recognize, all while the exhausted infant of the Argentina-bound couple began wailing. After a few minutes of this, she got up and walked behind the front area, apparently with no explanation. Uhhh.....
Quite a while passed, but then someone not wearing any sort of Lufthansa branding or badging showed up and we were apparently supposed to follow her to collect our luggage. Okay.... So she takes us to where one exits from baggage claim and, after some words she had with someone at the entrance, we went "in" the "out" door. But we were in, and miraculously our bags were there. What a relief. One minor difficulty - the guy at the exit wanted us to show our boarding passes to exit the area - yes, the same boarding passes that the guy on the wrong side of passport control had pocketed. More exchanges of words in Russian and our attempts in German and English and we and our bags were allowed out.
We went back to the ticketing desk, hopefully something would have magically happened while we were gone. Not exactly miraculous, but at least progress - they had our boarding passes ready for our respective morning flights. Good news as it was approaching midnight and we were a bit tired, not to mention hungry, as we hadn't obviously received our dinner on the flight. The woman at the desk passed out the boarding passes, and then we began asking about the hotel arrangements, etc. Around this time, the woman got very irritated and noted that it was midnight and her shift was over. And she went behind the desk area. Uhhhh.....???
One of the guys called Lufthansa in German again and was telling them in very strong terms that this was, well, bullshit. And we waited a while longer. About 30 minutes later a guy in his 50s approached from behind us (not from behind the desk) wearing a Lufthansa airport badge. And got right to work - albeit at a snail's pace. He let us know that that the restaurant wouldn't be open at our hotel, and there weren't really any other places open at the airport at this hour (we're now past 1 AM), but he'd give us food vouchers anyway. It took him FOR-EVER (foreva eva?) to get the hotel vouchers to us. I was the next to the last one to get mine and waited for the other guy who'd been seated in my row to head to the airport. The Lufthansa guy assured us that there was a hotel shuttle outside. "At 2 AM???!" Yes.
Liar, liar, pants on fire! But they'd be cooling quickly due to the frigid temps. We walked outside and a taxi driver asked if we were looking for Aerotel. Yes, we're looking for the shuttle. "No shuttle. I'll drive you." Now, I've been warned about potentially unscrupulous taxi drivers so who knew whether he was lying about the shuttle or not. But it's -20 outside and neither of us were in the mood to wait outside in the cold for 15 minutes to see if the shuttle showed up.
And our deluxe voucher didn't even contain the address or phone number of the hotel, so we couldn't exactly call them to ask about the shuttle status. So the guy I was with (still don't know his name or the names of the others in our merry band of angry sheep) negotiated transit for us for RUB 500 (over $15) for our transit. Which transit turned out to be about 700 meters. But we were there.The woman at the desk took care of some paperwork and then handed me the plastic card that in any other situation would be the room key. But this was unlike any other situation. She noted that this was NOT a key, but was for the lights. That my room was open, but lockable from inside, and if I left and shut the door, I would need to have someone f
rom the hotel staff to open it for me.
Ummm, really? Now, I understand the concept of putting the card key into a slot in the wall to turn on the lights. I'm a fan, actually, as I assume this has the potential to really save electricity (though is confounded by hotels that give you two keys and you end up leaving one in the slot the entire time). But when I got to the room, it really was open. As in the door was wide open.
Ummm..... I crept in, having visions of rapists lurking in the closets. Nope. Empty. Of virtually everything. Not even a cheap fake oil painting screwed to the wall. Other than the (very unexpected) presence of a hair dryer, it mostly resembled a type of cell. A rather cold cell. Twin bed with suspect bedspread. No independent temperature controls. And paper-thin walls or floors so I could hear a group of apparently drunk men singing something at the tops of their voices. It was now about 2:30 and I needed to wake up around 5:00, so I attempted to go to sleep. Wearing virtually every scrap of dirty clothing I had (which was all that I had in my suitcase) to keep warm. And every time I felt an itch (often), I was certain it was bed bugs or lice. I tried to comfort myself with the idea that even these creatures must not survive in these inhospitable temperatures. It didn't really help. Relatively sleepless night.
The next morning was literally and figuratively Groundhog's Day. In addition to it being February 2, I found myself back in the Lufthansa lounge. It was still dark. Still cold. Still snowing. I was in the same clothing. Same beetroot salad. Same white-wine pouring person at the bar (I was on coffee this morning). And even the prior day's newspapers (perhaps they arrive on a later incoming flight?). And the same passengers from the previous night, who by now seemed like friends. The only difference was this time, blessedly, the bird actually took off.
But I'm still not ready to forgive Lufthansa for such an incredible lapse in service. Even if this is Russia and things are different here, I expect German organization for contingencies to address situations like this that must happen quite often.
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