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Airports I’ve Known and Loathed, Part II – AMS

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Adventures Abroad, Fun with Security

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Tulips at the Amsterdam flower market

Oh the tulips at the Amsterdam flower market

Last year, E and I visited the city of Amsterdam primarily because I had never stepped outside the airport after 10+ years of flying through it. And it was great. Amsterdam is a fabulous city and a real European treat. I only wish I could say the same for its airport.

There have been many memorable visits to Schiphol…I don’t think I’ve ever felt traveling anxiety the way I’ve felt it at AMS. It’s hard to distill, but here are the top three recollections.

  1. Amsterdam architecture

    Amsterdam architecture – the hooks are used to move large pieces of furniture.

    The time I ran the entire length of the airport. I really need to write a post about my trip home from studying abroad (yes, the same trip where #3 on this list happened), but for the sake of this discussion, I’ll just recap the very quick portion spent at Schiphol. Traveling home with my dad from Paris, our first connection was at Amsterdam. Naturally, we were late getting in and, knowing that we still had to connect at JFK (this trip is the singular reason I never connect if I can help it. Triggers the PTSD.), I was worried we’d be stuck overnight in Amsterdam or New York even if we didn’t get on the plane to NYC.

    AMS is a “one terminal” airport which can be helpful because you don’t have to take a tram between terminals but unhelpful if you get in at one end and have to get to the other. Which was exactly the case here. Because we had flown on a commuter-type flight from Paris, we weren’t near the international departures. As my father had recently had angioplasty, I took it upon myself to run ahead. Literally. Like a crazy person. I got to the podium and begged the gate agent to let us on, breathlessly telling her my father was coming and throwing around “heart condition” to gain some sympathy points. I looked (and felt) like a maniac, but we did make the flight.

  2. The time we spent an hour in the basement of Schiphol. En route home from Hungary a couple of years ago, we connected through Amsterdam. I’ll have to do some sleuthing as to whether there’s tension between the two countries, but it sure seemed like we were put through the ringer. First, we had to deplane on the Tarmac. Second, we were herded onto a bus and driven to the terminal. Finally, we were left in a teeny room, barely big enough to hold the 200 or so people from the flight. It became apparent that we’d be going through security again before being allowed into the main terminal (even though we had clearly gone through in Budapest). Sigh. There were two security staff working one conveyor so it took about an hour to get through. Thankfully, our flight had arrived slightly early so we had time to waste on these shenanigans.
  3. Anne Frank Museum, Amsterdam

    The Anne Frank Museum. Incredibly powerful.

    The time I thought we were going to have to call the State Department. Ok, this is a bit of a cop out since I already wrote an entire post on the time our passports were mis-scanned and we were pulled aside while our national identity was clarified but I think we can all agree this is about as bad as it gets. There’s nothing like being detained (ok, ok, that’s overstating it) like thinking you will be detained in a foreign country to make you want to never leave your house again. If I thought I looked like a crazy person in story one, I was even worse in this predicament as on top of the near-meltdown, I was rocking a horrible (and attractive) case of sun poisoning. Don’t be jealous.

I’m really grateful we spent time in the actual city of Amsterdam. Aside from fearing I would be run over by a bicyclist, it was an amazing time. And it makes me loathe AMS just a little bit less.

Amstel River, Amsterdam

A view from the Amstel River.

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Airports I’ve Known and Loathed, Part I – CDG

26 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in Adventures Abroad, With love from the Tarmac

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I mentioned in my last post that I’d write a future installment with commentary on specific airports that have caused me headaches (and blisters!). What was mostly meant as an off-handed comment actually brought some very specific requests for these posts to take place. So, much like the deconstructed baggie post, away we go!

L’Arc de Triomphe, safely taken from the center of traffic by my father.

I bet you thought I’d start with ATL but honestly, some of the most poignantly awful experiences I’ve had in an airport reside at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. I know that this has the propensity to sound like a White Whine submission, but it’s the truth. Here are the top three memories I have from disasters at CDG:

  1. The time that kid threw up. E spent a year at LSE getting a Master’s so after I graduated undergrad, we thought a European jaunt would be the perfect celebration. Since he was in London, we decided to meet in Paris. Très romantique, n’est-ce pas? After landing at CDG, I was surprised/not surprised to find that we couldn’t pull up to a gate. I was surprised because we were on a HUGE plane filled with hundreds of passengers (I had connected through Detroit) and not surprised because CDG is always a hot mess of construction. On the Tarmac, we were loaded into a tram/bus thing to get to the main terminal. I wasn’t wild about this, but what are you going to do? Unfortunately, one of my fellow travelers, a little girl who was probably about six years-old, was even less excited. No sooner had she uttered “Je me sens mal” to her mother and she was throwing up all over the back of the tram. It was not awesome. Everyone just kind of looked at each other with grimaces and edged away from the mess. Exactly the kick-off to vacation I was hoping for!

  2. Notre Dame by night.

    The time the baggage carousels were closed. As repeatedly mentioned, I usually carry on luggage. However, when I was traveling to Paris in 2004 to study abroad, I needed a few more pairs of shoes than I usually bring on vacation so I had checked luggage. Upon arrival we were, of course, routed to Customs. I was 20 years-old, completely alone, and not really at a point of mastering my French skills so you can guess how terrifying this was. After clearing Customs, I went to baggage and looked around frantically for a monitor that would tell me which carousel held my bag. As CDG is perpetually under construction, all the carousels were closed. I kid you not. Every single bag was coming out of ONE hole. The chaos was palpable. I still do not understand what travel gods were looking out for me, but the second I deduced what was going on and edged my way to the hole of baggage, my bag came through. I know, it’s a mystery to me, too. Let’s all pause to say a prayer of merci.

  3. The time that new KLM agent lost my luggage. At the end of my study abroad session, my dad came over to visit and we flew home together. When we got to CDG, we queued for check-in at KLM and had an agent who was clearly new on the job. Although a supervisor was theoretically helping her, she still managed to get everything wrong. We were connecting home through Amsterdam and NYC and she booked our bags all the way to Minneapolis. Imagine our surprise at JFK when our bags never showed up and we had to explain to Customs that we weren’t doing anything untoward. Considering the amount of precious cargo I was bringing back stateside, I thought I was going to lose my mind. Not to mention that when we got to Minneapolis, one of the bags was missing altogether (naturally the one with all the expensive wine), and wouldn’t be located and delivered until the following day. Don’t worry, the wine survived.

I should probably note at this point that Paris is my all time favorite city. I could/would/probably should live there.

Still my favorite tourist attraction.

I should also probably note that I flew to CDG about a year ago and everything was running much more smoothly than when I encountered the above situations. Regardless, a million disasters at CDG could never diminish my love of Paris.

If they run out of wine, we may have to reassess.

It’s in the Bag(gie)

18 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Fun with Security

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Believe it or not, a couple people have actually asked me what’s in my plastic baggie. So here’s an exciting post about it!

BaggieHere’s a typical Business Trip Baggie (see Tip #4 below). As you can see, it’s pretty much packed to the brim. In case you haven’t yet gleaned from this blog, I am a little bit what they call “high maintenance.”

What’s in the baggie:

Deconstructed baggie.

Liquid necessities:

  • Fekkai Color Care shampoo and conditioner. I spend way too much on hair coloring (right, E??) to use hotel shampoo. Plus, some hotels don’t give you conditioner (and if they do, it’s never adequate) so I plan ahead.
  • Mousse. As you can tell, haircare is very important to me. I also have a pomade sort of deal which is technically a gel but it’s too big for the baggie, so…
  • Toothpaste (I usually stow one away as well (rule breaker!)).
  • Makeup (in the top pic I had the mascara in the bag but by the time I took picture #2, I had removed it. Technically TSA says it’s a liquid but I’m usually playing with fire on how much the Ziploc will hold before coming apart at the seams, so I tend to put this in my makeup bag instead. Hasn’t been an issue yet.)
  • Body wash. See first bullet on hotel inadequacies.
  • Face and body moisturizer. All that crap you read about flying being hard on the skin is unfortunately true. And hotels often have really hard water.
  • Two kinds of face wash (one is a backup. I’m petrified of running out of face wash and having to use soap.).
  • Lip gloss (this is what I call a decoy. Like most women, I have lipstick/gloss/chapstick everywhere in every bag, so I put the decoy here to account for all of them.).
  • Perfume. I also carry a solid perfume, but this is a great way to use up department store samples and they hardly take up any space.

Top tips for baggie packing:

  1. Lay items sideways. Standing little bottles upright wastes space.
  2. Pack from largest to smallest. These new-fangled Ziploc baggies are bigger at the bottom.
  3. Alternate the direction of your items. Most of my liquids are in a triangle shape; by alternating their caps and seams, I can get more in.
  4. Every trip is different; plan accordingly. For example, when I fly with E, I make him take extra liquids for me. When I’m going for work to Atlanta, I always stay at a Hyatt which means that they stock the room with toothpaste so I don’t have to give up precious baggie space for it (although I always pack one toothpaste in case I get stuck at the airport in some kind of never-ending delay situation. Scuzzy teeth are the worst.).
  5. Medical liquids can go in a separate baggie (yes, two baggies!).
  6. Do your best. I have never had to rip my bag apart for an elusive liquid. I’m not saying to not follow the rules (believe me, I’m nothing if not a rule-follower), but TSA should be looking out for guns and nun-chucks and whatnot, not my mis-packed mascara. And I think they mostly are. So pack a baggie as best you can and if you need an extra toothpaste and put it in some other bag, the worst case scenario is that they’ll confiscate it. Put your expensive liquids in the baggie and roll the dice on the rest. Since you’re now at the airport, you can probably replace whatever you need. Unless you’re in Tehran. But then you probably have more problems than this blog can solve.

If this seems overly complicated, it is. Over-thinking to this extent is surely causing some sort of mental malfunction in a brain synapse somewhere. I would just always prefer to carry-on than check. I haven’t checked a bag in years. In fact, E and I have taken several two-week European vacations with four carry-ons between us. Insane? Mayhaps. But worth it in my book.

Happy flying!