After hassling with the ticketing agent, finally got my tickets at the airport.

Flight from Luxembourg to Munich was kinda uneventful. Could get my morning coffee and sandwich.

In Munich, almost eight hours stopover (!). Never had it this long before. But it was the only way to get tickets with a reasonable price this time, so well…

What do I do? Hang out in the lounges this long? Bah, but Munich is supposed to be nice and I hadn’t been there before. So I thought why not go and take a bus tour, which I did. The tour was not so good, as the weather was kinda gloomy (not raining, but about to start any second) and the bus had its roof on (the two-floor tourist type bus that’s supposed to not have roof on most of time), so didn’t really see much — except that it is indeed city with great potential and worth a longer visit. And don’t take tour buses with live comments in several languages, those have always sucked for me. Take the taped version when you can. Live comments are only good on walking tours.

So anyway… made it back to airport few hours before flight. Found out that my Priority Pass lounge access only works in another terminal where I couldn’t go back any more after coming in through security (or rather, I could have, but would then have had to go through zillion securitys again many times so no point.)

Spilled half a bottle of Fanta on my carryon bag. At least the bag was closed so nothing made it inside…

Managed to find a sitting place with plugs so could charge my laptop battery for the flight (for only a few hours anyway). Place started crowding up.

Finally, off to the aircraft. And airborne we are.

There was a kid in the row in front of me. Big thumbs up to him, he was really quiet and shut up most of time.

Lufthansa Airbus A340 economy legroom is much better than in 747. Almost good. And there are apparently several A340 versions. The one that I used with Air France in February had toilets on the same floor. But on this Lufthansa one, the toilets were actually downstairs from the passenger floor — this is the first time I’ve ever gone up- and downstairs while airborne in an aircraft I guess the toilets were same level as the luggage. And makes sense — you can fit more toilets down there and fit more people upstairs.

And when Connexion went down, Lufthansa announced that they will keep the aircraft wifi operating, but apparently this isn’t the case, as there was no wifi signal onboard this flight so had to live without it.

Then about an hour into the flight, my in-seat controls stopped working. So I couldn’t control the audio channels, volumes, nothing. INCLUDING THE READING LIGHT. I had some books for reading but now this was no good as I couldn’t read in the dark. Crap. What did I do during the whole flight? No idea… but somehow I got by.

From the airport, took BART to where I wanted to go… had to change trains two times.

Then made it to the hotel. And the hotel reception girl tells me she has heard nothing about my booking that I made on Expedia a few days before. Mind you that I had been on the road for about 24 hours straight by that point, and so I found this discovery really unfunny. But now comes a big up for Best Western whose hotel I was staying in. They could very well have told me to shove it and not come back until they have some confirmation from Expedia. But the manager told me they’d let me in anyway and just need me to call Expedia to fax or send them some confirmation after it. And so I did — another big up to Expedia who didn’t have their phone service outsourced to India or anything, but I got this perfectly normal sounding American girl on the line who helped me sort the whole affair out so the hotel knew I was not a crook.

Even though the hotel initially didn’t have the confirmation, this manager really helped me end the day on a positive note, cutting a few small corners (they’d get their confirmation anyway, just a bit later) and not charging me extra or anything, honoring the price that I had got on Expedia. Sometimes people follow the book and service manuals strictly and treat customers like shit. Here I felt that we all worked together for a good solution. And more generally, the Best Western franchise keeps having consistently good, predictable quality, wherever I go. (Except last summer in Berlin where I myself made a bad choice and managed to pick a hotel without air conditioning in the rooms during the hottest part of the year. But this was my own bad.)

And this was a regular Saturday.