Well, Europe is a bloody long way away. You know in Star Wars where they say "In a Galaxy far, far away"? Well George Lucas is referring to the distance between Australia and Europe.
The first leg of the trip was from Brisbane to Dubai, and this was almost 15 hours in a Boeing 777. That's a long time to be cooped up in a small airplane chair. Thank god for lots of movies and a good plane entertainment system. Unfortunately the games sucked the big one but there was a good selection of movies to watch and apparently it changes every month so we'll have new ones on the way home. I ended up watching In Time, Warrior and The Green Lantern and surprisingly they were all quite good.
After landing in Dubai they got us off the plane and onto the tarmac and then put us in buses for transit to the actual airport, that was a bit weird. It's the first time I've exited a large plane onto the tarmac and the first time I've ever had to be transported by bus from my plane to the airport and that took almost 15 minutes! As you can imagine, Dubai Airport was huge!
We spent about 4 hours at Dubai before jumping on the next plane headed to Munich in Germany, an Airbus A380. OMG, this plane is huge! it has 2 levels and they board through 3 different entry ramps across the 2 levels. The wings would have been atleast 10 meters long and probably 40 meters wide each side, this plane is enourmous! This is one of the things I was really looking forward on the trip over. Everyone knows that I generally have space issues in a place seat due to my shoulder width and on the previous Boeing 777 I was a bit cramped as per usual. Not on the A380! I had room to spare in my seat and we were only in cattle (er I mean Economy) class. I give 2 big Nathan Thumbs Up for the travelling experience on the A380. So, the flight from Dubai to Munich was about 6 hours long at 38,000 feet flying at about 600 miles per hour. I watched the Tin Tin movie (what an epic disappointment, don't bother! or maybe I was just too tired...), napped a little and played some of the disappointing games. Even with the crappy movie and boring video games my A380 experience wasn't tarnished in the slightest.
So, in about 30 hours of travel, we've flown about 16,000km. Wow, that's almost a world away.
Touching down in Munich was painless and while customs did take a little while, our Customers Officer (a German Police Officer!) was very friendly and didn't even threaten to arrest me.
We picked up our bags and then headed to the Munich Airport Train Station. All my research suggested that it would be very easy to simply catch a train from Munich Airport to our Ski Resort in St Anton (Austria) but to say I was a little nervous about it would probably be a slight understatement.
We bought our ticket from a gruff German Lady, direct from Munich Aiport to St Anton. We jumped on the train and after a couple of easy transfers we arrived in St Anton 4 hours later. Europe has such a simple and efficient transport system, Australia has a lot to learn.
Jumping in a taxi we were at our Apartment in 5 minutes and we were both completely wrecked after almost 40 hours in transit.
After ducking out for a quick pizza (which cost about $15, I was told St Anton was very expensive ... apparently not if you go to the right places!) we both hit the hay and slept like logs for about 11 hours.
Thus endeth our transit. A few lessons were learned and we'll be better prepared for our next trip here next year! =p
1 comment:
lol gruff german lady. i can hear you saying this in my head, it's kind of freaky that you write like you speak!
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