Over the years, I have been all over and have dealt with just about every kind of pain in the ass that an International Traveler has to deal with. Here are a few highlights.
The Lufthansa vs. Continental stalemate: If you fly on a Continental Airplane into Frankfurt Airport and are then, per your itinerary that you paid for, expected to catch a Lufthansa flight out of that airport, just run out in the street and let a car hit you because it’s not happening. Not once, not twice, but three times I have been a victim of this fiasco within the Frankfurt Airport. You get off the first plane, go through immigration and security which in Germany is about as organized as a monkey shit fight at the zoo, then you have to go get your luggage because Continental won’t transfer to Lufthansa, for some reason. After this pride swallowing marathon of a journey through the Frankfurt airport, you can go to your gate, where the ticket that was issued to you 8 hours earlier will not be accepted by the Lufthansa people. You are then asked to go to the “Continental Counter” and sort it out. Unfortunately, the Continental Counter is about a mile away, walking, from Lufthansa. So you get stuck, having to walk miles around an airport and you will eventually miss your flight.
In an amazing turn of events, the last time I went there, my Lufthansa ticket was accepted however, the flight, which the ticket was issued for, didn’t exist. It was just never a flight that was ever going to happen according to the attendant. I’m not sure how my company paid for it or booked a non-existent flight, but it happened. Therefore, I had to take the train from Frankfurt to Nurnberg for a fourth time. Now, the train station is technically part of the Frankfurt Airport but it is nowhere near the airport part of the Frankfurt Airport. It is halfway to France, walking. Then you get a good 5 hour train ride, not something you want to endure after a 6 hour flight and 4 hours wandering around a foreign airport, but it must be done in the name of business and progress!
To top it all off, you end up in Nurnberg, but nowhere near the Nurnberg Airport where your car rental has been waiting for you for the last 8 hours. So you must facilitate some sort of transportation across town to the Nurnberg Airport on your own, surrounded by a bunch of people who don’t speak English, without a working phone and nothing but an American Express Corporate Credit Card that nobody accepts. The last time, I made the mistake of hitching a ride with some dude I met on the train. Only, I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying to me, and I ended up hitching a ride with him and his parents. So there I was, in the back seat of an Opel Station Wagon, cruising around Nurnberg Germany, with a strange German family, after 10 hours of travel and their 37 year old son, who I now believe to be criminally insane, showing me digital photo after digital photo of his recent trip to the United Arab Emirates on his camera. It also quickly became apparent, that these people had absolutely no fucking idea how to get to the airport from the train station. So the ride took a good hour and a half and only traversed about 14 miles on a map. Finally, I end up at the Nurnberg airport and am presented the unique opportunity of walking into an airport solely to use their rental car service all with some jackass trying to get me to look at more of his vacation photo’s and asking me to become his Facebook friend. I would rather fly through Kabul next time I connect to anywhere in Europe then ever have to see the Frankfurt Airport again as long as I live.
Cultural Differences: If you ever find yourself in Manchester England, at the “Hewley’s” suites next to the Manchester City Soccer Stadium; don’t go to Burger King while they are in the middle of playing Celtic Glasgow.
I was there for weeks for work. I couldn’t deal with room service anymore. So I took to the streets in search for food, after all this is England, these people are our friends, what’s the worst that could happen? I spot a Burger King across the street and head over. All the while I can hear singing and cheering and glass breaking from the massive Soccer Stadium that I am walking around.
The line at the Burger King is at least 25 people long but I deal with it. You would be amazed how great Burger King sounds after weeks of eating boiled meat and rye bread and just general hotel garbage. I get my food and leave, just as the game ends and the “fans” begin to file out of the soccer stadium. Now when people in the United States exit a football stadium, sure they are drunk and kind of rowdy but they generally walk in some kind of orderly fashion to their vehicles and leave. This is not the case after an English/Scottish soccer match. Everyone run’s out of the stadium, in all directions, like it’s their last day of high school; half are engaged in some sort of an active fight or brawl, they all have glass bottles and they are all absolutely shit faced. Needless to say, some guy in a 3 foot top-hat, that said “Bring it to Glasgow” (will never forget that) fell down drunk and knocked my Burger King out of my hands and it was immediately trampled. I then ended up having to physically grapple my way back to the hotel, where I sat on the corner of my uncomfortable bed, and ate more boiled, hotel, meat wondering what the hell I was doing with my life.
Japanese guys can’t handle bourbon: I love Japan; I would go back to Tokyo in a heartbeat. That said, those guys, while friendly and fun-loving party goers, cannot handle Bourbon.
I had been working with these guys for weeks. We had established a wonderful level of trust and respect for each other. It was to the point where they were all calling me “Matthew-San”. We went out to the Ropongi Hills section of Tokyo. Each one bought a different kind of Sochi, some hot, some room temperature, some chilled and we all enjoyed it and were having a great time. I couldn’t understand what the hell any of them were talking about, but the language of drunken fun is universal. Finally, we end up at this place literally called “The Tokyo Sports Café” , it was a sports bar and incredibly, they were playing a rerun of the Cleveland Cavaliers game from the day before. I remember thinking how crazy awesome it was to be watching my home town team, in a sports bar, on the other side of the International Date Line.
Now I was already drunk and I felt that I had to return the favor to these guys for buying all that Sochi earlier. I quickly spotted a bottle of Jack Daniels hidden behind the bar. It looked like it had not been touched since the Reagan era. I ordered 6 shots and brought them back to our table. I did a quick cheers that only I could understand and we all downed the shots. Two of the men immediately vomited on the floor under the table. A third managed to run about three steps before vomiting on the wall where he must have thought there was a door to something or somewhere. The other two managed to keep it under control, but did not look happy. I have never in my life seen such a spectacle, before or after. In Japan, when you vomit in a bar, it is considered a dishonor and you have to clean it up yourself. The bar tender provided us with a mop and a bucket and we all cleaned up puke and then said an awkward goodbye and went our separate ways. I never spoke to any of those men again.
Food that would make a Billy Goat Vomit: It is important to not offend anyone by showing them how offensive you find their food. In Japan, I had dinner with the CEO of a major retailer at a ridiculously nice restaurant on the 58th floor of a skyscraper. I was forced to share ala-cart sashimi with our table. Sashimi is just a big uncooked filet of recently dead fish. I can’t eat this, I just can’t cant. I don’t even eat sushi which is at least dressed up with everything to mask the flavor of the raw dead animal that you’re eating. In an incredible sleight of hand display, that David Copperfield would have been impressed by, I managed to cut my sashimi into small enough pieces to either throw under the table or hide under my rice, without anyone noticing. I left hungry, but I left happy and without risking mercury poisoning.
The German’s eat sausage and sauerkraut. I know it is prejudice but this is really what they eat. They eat these items in such mass amounts that it is truly incredible. There is not a pork product, known to man, that the German’s don’t absolutely love. Pigs, literally stand no chance of survival anywhere near that country. Every little burg in Germany has their own “special” type of sausage that doesn’t taste any different from Jimmy Dean or Pepperidge Farm sausage. It is so weird to listen to someone talk up sausage. As though we are expected to believe that sausage is some sort of a difficult, complex food item. I could see a country of people, who all took pride in filet minion tooting their own horn but sausage, really? It would be like if everyone in some country took pride in Chicken Tenders and everyone had their own kind, and they all tasted the same as Swanson’s. Then everything comes with a ridiculous amount of Sour Kraut. Whether you like it or not, you’re getting a shitload of it with anything that you order.
Germans also eat something called Blood-worst. This is exactly what it sounds like. A disgusting sausage casing filled with animal blood. I think the guy who ordered it in our party, only ordered it in an attempt to gross me out. It didn’t work, I wasn’t eating it afterall. I don’t even think he liked eating it. So he just had to sit there, looking like some kind of shit-head vampire, eating a tube full of blood, while getting absolutely no reaction from me.
Dealing with phones and currency: Your phone doesn’t work when you’re in Europe or Asia. I don’t care what your phone company tells you, it won’t work. We even had company cell phones that were labeled “International Cell Phones”, purchased specifically for the purpose of working in Europe, that didn’t work in Europe. So, when you get off the plane, you’re on your own, until you find your way to your hotel or find a way to make your phone work. This is a tough proposition in a foreign country where you can’t read anything or talk to anyone.
Team this inconvenience with the financial fiasco that will quickly ensue. American Express has a veritable monopoly on the US Corporate Credit Card business. The only problem is that nobody outside of America accepts American Express. So you wind up having to use it at ATM machines, at foreign banks to take out foreign cash, if you can find one. You then, have to somehow get this to all tie-out on an American Expense Report when you get back. This usually requires something like; help from 5 different people, three separate pieces of software and a scientific calculator.
Generally, when you get off of a foreign flight, there is a 2 or 3 hour period of time, where you have no money, no way to buy anything and no way of communicating with anyone. You feel like a bum and everyone looks at you like some sort of poor vagrant.
The Traveling Smoker: I have recently quit smoking after a lot of years, which is nice. However, all of my international travels took place while I was a smoker. Sitting on 6, 8, 16, 18 hour flights is tough for a pack a day smoker. So you get creative, you chew tobacco you find where you can smoke in airports; you get as many cigarettes in whenever you can while traveling.
This leads to some interesting situations. On the way to Australia, I had a two hour layover at LAX. I decided to use this layover to get as drunk as humanly possible. When I am drunk, I make poor decisions. About 30 minutes before my flight was to board, I decided, that I was going to go back out through security and have a smoke outside. No way was I not going to be able to make it back through security and the concourse before my flight left. I didn’t make it.
So I had to catch the next flight to Sydney, four hours later. In the meantime I got drunker at the airport. It was to the point where I could barely stand in the line to get on the plane. To this day, I can’t believe I got on that flight. As soon as I sat down, I put a massive chew in my mouth and then passed out drunk. I didn’t wake up until we were almost over Australia. I was passed out drunk, on that plane, for nearly 9 ½ hours. I missed 3 meals, who even knows how many beverages, and I had a huge lipper of Kodiak Wintergreen in my lip the entire time. The lady next to me was absolutely terrified when I woke up, she told me that she thought I was dead. I had to immediately run to the bathroom and take the biggest piss of my life and get that chew out of my mouth.
If you are lucky enough to locate one of the new aged, smoker death chambers within an airport you are in for treat. There is no environment, on Earth more unhealthy then the inside of one of these things. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a dead body in one someday. These things are just a glass, gas chamber, chalked full of people trying to smoke as much as they possibly can before they get on airplanes. The exhaust system is cranking, but it can’t possibly handle the volume of smoke billowing out of these people. You don’t even have to light your own cigarette in that thing it is so thick. Someone always has a beer in there. People always want to have a conversation with you. They are made out of glass for some reason so that all of the non-smokers can look at you while you smoke, like some kind of zoo animal who’s addicted to nicotine.
These are just a few examples. I could go on forever, but this was more than enough complaining for one day. International travel is fun and sort of exciting but also very inconvenient. You sacrifice a lot of comforts for that privilege. I personally think it is worth it.
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