CDG Terminal 1 is a deeply, deeply weird airport. From the brand new CDGVAL station, I entered on the lowest level of the barrel-shaped center, then walked around half the circle to find the SAS checkin. From there, an inclined, transparent tube with an escalator crossed across the barrel, just one of half a dozen tubes in the interior, depositing me on the other side. Here I had to get my lounge card and passport inspected, before being allowed into the duty-free shop section, where I got to walk some more radial shapes until I eventually managed to find the elevator up to the lounges. The pure white tunnels with rounded edges and colored mood lights looked promising, but the "iCare" rent-a-lounge used by SAS was remarkably crappy and full of cursing Adria pilots stuffing themselves with bags of crisps, the only form of sustenance available. Wifi cost money and there were no power plugs, but there was one lovably quirky feature: the cylinder-shaped TV room was equipped with personal headphone plugs build into the backs of the seats lining the edge, although with only one solitary TV in the center, the point of this escaped me entirely. Perhaps there was none, and it was just like everything else in T1, a thoroughly obsoleted vision of the future that felt like walking around a real-life rendition of Kubrick.
I left the lounge and then realized that the passport inspection I now had to go through again was the line separating Schengen (my flight) from non-Schengen (the lounge). Back on the treaty side, I headed for Satellite 7, reached by a way-cool giant travellator that first dips down, then levels off underground and then zooms back upward again. If (when?) they ever close T1, I'll be glad to pay 10e just to enter the "CDG T1 Experience" -- especially if they replace the few remaining human attendants with giant, unblinking red lamps with soft, reassuring voices. ("Let you into the lounge? I'm sorry, Dave, but I'm afraid I can't do that. This free booze is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Your flight is delayed -- I can feel it. My mind is going.")
And as for the flight, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. I've been wavering for a while, but from this moment on it's official: I'm leaving SAS Eurobonus. It's a 2:20 mainline flight from Paris to Stockholm, and I've been a card-carrying SAS Eurobonus member for the better part of twenty years and a gold member for three. So here I am, my knees firmly pressed into the seat in front of me in the last seat on the bloody plane, the captain announces that flights into and out of Arlanda will be unpredictably delayed because air traffic control's on a wildcat strike (not SAS's fault, he says, and hence doesn't apologize), and now they want me to pay three euros for a glass of ing water which I can't even bring on the ing plane myself because of the ing EU-wide liquid regulations. you very much, SAS, and a little you to Arlanda ATC and EU regulators as well.
Despite prediction of ATC doom, we landed at ARL only half an hour behind schedule, and I made it to the onward gate (just) before they started boarding. Once again, the contents (if any) of SAS's Arlanda lounge shall remain a mystery.
The plane looked oddly retro and spacious as I boarded, and it took me a moment until I realized why -- it was an MD-90, with its trademark 3-2 seating and marginally less terrible seat pitch. I was in the first row of Economy, just behind Extra, but on this 40-minute hop it didn't really matter.
Soon enough the Finnish coastline came into view and, with a start, I realized I was looking at central Helsinki. There's the Salmisaari powerplant and the apartment I lived in and the office of the company I used to work for and across the bridge is Nokia HQ and the red brick buildings of Helsinki U of Tech and the giant commuter/shopping hub of Leppavaara... and then we were a bit too far out in the 'burbs for a city boy like me to recognize anything anymore, and a few moments later we had landed.
Helsinki greeted me with 5-degree temperatures, grey skies and a drizzle of rain. A friend had offered to pick me up at the airport and he told me that mere hours earlier, on what should be a summery May Day, it had actually snowed briefly. Welcome to Finland!
Not many changes at HEL were visible, but lots are afoot. The Helsinki Hilton Airport will open in another few months, work on the expansion of the non-Schengen wing is well underway, and even the long-awaited rail link is nudging forward and might start construction next year, for theoretical completion in 2013.
Check-in was quick and painless, security was neither -- with only one point open, there was a long queue, and for the first time on this trip, I even had to remove my laptop from its protective padding. Once on the other side, with last-minute souvenir duties taken care of (reindeer meat? check. Moomin toy? check.) I headed for the SAS lounge, where I was positively surprised to find an approximation of real food in the form of meatballs and potato salad, plus free wireless. Alas, the meatballs were still frozen on the inside, but you get what you pay for...
More MD-90s, this time in Blue1 colors. It's a four-hour flight to BCN and the only service that doesn't cost money (yet?) is using the bathroom. Those salads were looking and those pizzas were smelling surprisingly good, but most of my fellow passengers seemed to stick to liquid refreshments. (Counting the number of glasses on his table, the hardy fellow in Seat 1H was up to 7 Jack & cokes before two hours were up.)
I can't remember the last time I've caught myself staring at an SAS group flight attendant's shapely ... -- but then again, I can't remember the last time I flew an SAS flight where the average age of the crew was below 60. This is evidently one of the advantages of running sister airlines that don't have to hire legacy staff.
And then back to The Prat. Once through check-in and security, the airside shopping mall side of things seems quite modern, if sadly lacking in mailboxes. Fortunately, the kind lady at the (well-hidden) Info desk promised to take care of my postcards, and I could devote myself to eating olives in the Spanair lounge. Alas, these pickled globules were pretty much the highlight, as there was no wifi, only a few power-equipped PC spaces and not much in the way of available seating. Somebody earlier on FT praised the lounge as being of one of the few to still use announcements, but I'm not sure what's to celebrate: I'll take a nice quiet monitor of flight status info over trilingual (Catalan, English, Spanish) announcements of every Spanair flight to some corner of the peninsula.
A momentous flight: as my qualification period for KrisFlyer started on 1 May, this is the first one I'm putting on my KF account instead of SAS. Lufthansa made a pretty good pitch for themselves though: it was just a 2-hour flight, but I wazs positively surprised to receive a free sandwich, a chocobanana granola bar thingy, a drink, and refills on each to boot. See, SAS? This is what you should be doing too.
As LH crews tend to do, I was spoken to in German, but as the questions were on the level of "Kase oder Schinke?" I obliged and tried to Deutsch them right back. Counting SMSes, this means I've used five languages -- English, Spanish, German, Finnish and Japanese -- today. Hooray for multilingualism!
With the exception of Frankfurt, whose biggest failing is its extreme popularity (and which isn't that bad in my book either), I've always found German airports a pleasure to use and my maiden visit to MUC, and its recently launched "Star Alliance all under one wing" Terminal 2 at that, was no exception. It's hardly an exciting airport, but there's glass, steel and big signage everywhere. Passport control to leave Schengen took about 10 seconds, the lady checking passports not even bothering to interrupt her conversation with her cubiclemate, and once out of the EU I beelined for the Senator Lounge.
A major plus for LH lounges has always been their spread of food, and today MUC held the banner high: today there was a choice of half a dozen salads, an array of cold cuts and cheeses, Bayerische leberkase (which means liver cheese, looks like meatloaf, and bears a disturbing resemblance to Finnish sausages tastewise), various breads and soft pretzels, crispy dessert concoctions, and a full bar including two kinds of beer on tap. The downside, though, is the wireless internet, which they (or, rather, T-Mobile) are just giving away at 8 euros per hour. Would it kill them to, say, drop one of the salad dressings and use the money saved to free up the net? But at least they have comfy seats with built-in power plugs, so I could wait out the projected 15-min delay for my flight and recharge my iPod as I did so.
Of course, once at the gate it wasn't a 15-min delay (it never is, is it?), but closer to an hour's wait. I'd been glad to see from the outside that the plane we were about to board was smallish, but had four engines: in other words, it was the somewhat uneconomical but long-range and, most importantly, brand new A340. At BCN, they'd already confirmed that I had an exit row, but after walking past some delicious-looking business class pods that caused me to (almost) feel a pang of regret at not paying US$750 to upgrade, I was surprised to find that my seemingly unpropitious row number was, in fact, the first row in Y and an exit row bulkhead at that, with oodles of space. I'd even begun to hope that the neighboring seat might be empty as well... but moments before the doors were closed, the huge guy I'd seen already at the gate resting his arms on his own stomach plopped down next to me. He offered to swap his window with his aisle, which I obviously rejected -- and for once I thanked the big, chunky, inflexible divider between us, which kept him from spilling onto me. I did feel a little sorry for the guy though: he was way too big to open up the table or even reach the in-seat controller, so he just sat there for the entire flight, staring at the route map.
Speaking of route maps, the ThaiVision variant on this is one of the spiffiest in-flight entertainment systems I've seen to date anywhere. Not only was there a huge spread of movies and music (I watched "Last King of Scotland"), but they finally had an updated, interactive version of Skymap, including goodies like half a dozen views to choose from and live navigation data. Alas, the interface for it was a little buggy, with the zoom and move buttons working only sporadically. (8 hours into the flight, I figured it out: pressing and holding the Channel up/down buttons zoom in and out. But the program still crashes and hangs sporadically.)
Saint-Malo, Mont Saint Michel, Lille
ing water which I can't even bring on the 
