Around Europe

My week back at work was a real drag, but I’m looking forward now to another trip next week, and it’s all going down in the diary again. This will be a slightly less exotic trip than last time. I’m going Glasgow-London-Prague-Vienna-Ljubljana-Vienna-Prague-Belgrade-London-Glasgow……..whew! That’s nine flights in 4 days, an organisational test for me and a test of almost everything for the various airlines that will have the dubious pleasure of my company.

It’s not too early a start for this trip and once again, my wife has kindly dropped me at the airport after braving the rush hour traffic. I’m flying on BA and it’s some time since I experienced their service. For several years I had a BA gold card but the demands of budget cuts and the proliferation of the low cost carriers put an end to that fur-lined mode of travel.

The flight to London is in a smart 737-500 and the food and service is excellent, albeit with a rather plummy-voiced Cabin Services Director who advises us to “fossen” our seatbelts on our take off from “Glossgow”. I have always felt that British Airways culture is a bit of a hangover from the days of Empire, part civil service, public school, upper class travel club for young ladies and gentlemen. I’m sure that given half a chance, they would make the Scottish passengers sit in the hold with a can of Irn-Bru and a pudding supper.

At Gatwick I spot a truly beautiful black girl having great difficulty with an extremely heavy bag. Gallant as ever, I offer to help, and I discover that she has come from Sierre Leone and is on her way to Prague for a four year medical course. She’s very nervous and apprehensive about being in a strange city, and having no friends there, so I lie that the Czechs are a warm and fun loving people, and that she’ll soon make friends in Prague. It’s just as well that she brought along a few members of her family in the bag that I’m now struggling to carry.

It’s slightly more than one-hour delay to the Prague flight, but the passengers are stoical as ever and nobody complains. It amazes me how docile and failure tolerant we have become about air travel. The airlines, in their greed, cram more and more services into overcrowded airports and skies. The service gets poorer day by day, the queues get longer, delays are seemingly written into the system, and yet we accept it all as part of the stresses and strains of modern life, and we forget about the inconvenience. (And don’t get me started about lost baggage!)

The BA service to Prague is excellent, food is good and I allow myself a gin and tonic. I find it impossible to sleep on most flights and this one is no exception, so I bury myself in The Economist and wish that I could absorb all the wisdom in that publication without the chore of having to read it.

At Prague airport I help my new Sierre Leonean friend to get the airport mini-bus and then, feeling like I’ve been a very Good Samaritan, I head off through security to the gate for my next flight to Vienna.

To Vienna in a Dash 8 and then briefly through the airport and onto a svelte Canadair jet from Adria Airways for the trip to Ljubljana. The Tyrolean flight to Vienna was good and the business class service excellent. I wonder however about cabin crew on Germanic airlines such as Tyrolean. They are the least happy cabin crew that you can expect to meet; maybe their wages are docked for smiling.

As ordered, my car awaits to take me to the hotel. It’s €30.00 for about 20 kilometres which isn’t bad, although the driver is a bit of a fiend, and hurtles me into Ljubljana at well over 100 mph. It’s dark so I have little impression of the city, but in the distance I can see the outlines of mountains in the moonlight.

The hotel is a bit of a hoot. In it’s promotional literature it calls itself “the most technologically advanced hotel in the world”, so I anticipate being unable to get into my room, a completely mystifying lighting system, and no doubt an unfathomable shower to contend with in the morning.

Actually it’s not too bad although I was unable to get into my room at the first attempt and no amount of keying my PIN number into the LCD screen outside my door seemed to help. Eventually I realised that I was trying to get into the wrong room and that solved that particular problem.

The hotel is big on screens, they’re everywhere around the hotel, and in the restaurant there are two very large ones, each showing a promotional video about Slovenia. Mercifully the sound is turned off, but there are English language subtitles which at one point helpfully inform me that “human knowledge is perforated” as I watch a bearded man trying to look interesting as he walks along a beach. God knows what it’s all about. Pretty soon I’m perforated too and it’s time to go to bed.

My meetings next day are out of town and I have a beautiful view of the mountains that surround Ljubljana as I am driven out of the city. I can see aircraft taking off and landing at the airport, and both look decidedly challenging with the mountains in such close proximity. Best not to think too much about that I suppose.

I’m back at the airport for my flight to Vienna and in the Adria Airlines lounge. OK, I know it’s a small country, a small airline and a small airport, but the business lounge is very poor, with virtually no food, and in the hour that I’ve been here, no one has bothered to clear the empty glasses, empty bottles and half eaten bowls of biscuits that litter most of the tables. To put the tin lid on it, I can’t get a service on my GPRS card so I’m stuck here for two hours without food, Internet or a decent newspaper.

On the flights to Prague and Vienna I meet up with a young Hungarian girl who is in PR for a computer hardware manufacturer, and bores me rigid with tales of the latest laser mouse. I retaliate with Multi-surface polish and the new Oxygen Bleach, till finally she admits defeat and pretends to sleep.

The Ametyst Hotel in Prague is located in a handsome part of the city. The Prague traffic is a nightmare but eventually the airport minibus arrives outside and I’m quickly into a comfortable and modern room. My evening meeting takes only a short time, and for dinner I have a Czech goulash with what looks like the hotels’ entire stock of dumplings as an accompaniment. Later at the bar, I strike up conversation with a very genial Irishman from Fermanagh who just got married to a widow four months ago, and was rather shocked to discover that his new wife has a serious problem that he didn’t know about before he got married. As we are discussing this and I’m telling him about my own experiences living with an alcoholic, his wife appears, and instantly I am reminded of my mother. The poor man has a serious problem to contend with.

Next morning after a fine buffet breakfast, my mini-bus arrives to pick me up to go to the airport for my flight to Belgrade, and I find myself sitting with a doctor of theoretical physics who owns an international software company with headquarters in the US, and offices around Europe. I briefly consider telling him that I’m working on theoretical sales, but I reckon he wouldn’t get the joke. His wife, who is a rather dour looking woman with what Joni Mitchell called credit card eyes, isn’t talking at all, so I get a lecture on the venality of the drugs companies (his main customers) which lasts all the way to the airport.

None out of 10 to JAT Airways for the dreadful check-in at Prague Airport. Over an hour in the queue, before they open an additional desk 20 minutes before the flight. The aircraft is packed with doctors returning from a medical convention in Prague and I’m sitting beside a huge man who spills over into my space and makes the flight quite uncomfortable. JAT economy class is basic but adequate and the blue striped apron worn by the rather squat stewardess makes her look like a fishwife, fresh from a mornings gutting.

Belgrade is not by any stretch of the imagination pretty. It was virtually destroyed during the Second World War and then it was rebuilt by the communists using a Lego brick for inspiration. A few old buildings remain, but they are lost amid the hundreds of virtually identical rectangular blocks that are so typical of the former communist states.

Serbia’s recent turbulent past is still very much on the minds of the people in this city and like on my previous visit, they make sure that I am driven past the damage caused by the NATO bombing. One of the bombed out buildings I see, is (was) the Chinese Embassy, apparently hit in error. Now, I always imagined that the building was in a built up area, where you could understand, it was hit by mistake. In fact, it sits in splendid isolation near a major road, and it is very hard to believe that it was a “mistake”. Also, like on my last visit, I feel like apologising to my young hosts for what happened, and for the ludicrous situation in the late 20th century where we were bombing fellow Europeans whose country had been hijacked by a thug.

In the evening, we have a superb dinner in a magnificent restaurant. Like all Serbian meals, they serve enough food for all the diners plus another 10 people. It must be in the Serbian tradition of hospitality but the waste is enormous. Earlier we had sat outside on a floating pub on the Danube, enjoying the autumn sunshine and watching someone in a micro light flying boat practice take offs and landings on the river, while we supped Slovenian beer and tried to tell each other jokes, (never a good idea when there’s a language barrier).

I remember during the NATO campaign, reading that we were bombing “Milsoevic”, or that we were bombing “Belgrade”. No we bloody well were not, we were bombing these charming, intelligent and friendly young people sitting with me, destroying chunks of their city and their economy, and scaring them shitless. For them it was terrifying and humiliating in equal measure and there is a peculiar mixture of anger and bewilderment that the NATO countries “punished” the Serbian people for the actions of an unpopular and criminal government. We’ve got a lot to explain here.

We have another meeting in the morning and then it’s off to the airport for BA to Gatwick and then on to Glasgow. I fear the worst given that it’s Friday, peak time and a London airport. Ah well, at least I’m heading west.


It’s two months on from my last entry and I’m about to go off on another trip. This time I have what is really a fairly easy jaunt around the Middle East, if there could be such a thing. Ten days, three meetings (so far), and all six flights in business class. I’ll be in Dubai, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Just a couple of days each in Saudi and Iran, but quite a few days in Dubai with not too much to do.

Bit of a breeze really.