Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Space-age travel

456 words

After getting up, showering, calling a cab etc in record time and at a record time, I could enjoy the minor nuisance that there wasn't a direct train to the airport this early and I had to change at Frankfurt's main railway station. Not really bad, I guess.

The train I changed into was one of the latest generation of high speed trains. In addition to being very new (new upholstery &c), I must say, these are very nice trains. Not that the design is all that different to the old ones, but many details seemed improved. First of all, carpeting is really 'wall-to-wall' without any guides or so on the floor to destroy the clean look. Then they replaced as much of the walls as possible by glass, thus enabling you to look through several waggons right to the front of the train – even through the driver's window as far as I could tell. This leaves a very spacious impression and is quite cool when going around curves, just like seeing earh's curvature from space. Sort of. Well, not really – but you get the idea.

Arriving at Frankfurt airport's railway station, that was quite futuristic as well – a huge but slightly curved metal and steel construction. Only a few platforms and only streamlined shiny white high speed trains standing there. Very impressive. If you took a photo of this to the 1960s and told people it's what travel in the 21st century will look like, they'd for sure be impressed.

On entering the airport, things went downhill. Frankfurt ist one of my least favourite airports. And there were queues. Luckily I could get around those because they offer some new high-tech automatic check-in. You insert your ticket and place you bag on the scale. Then the computer will print out the baggage tag for you to stick on your bag, the bag is scanned to see whether the tag is affixed properly and its size is acceptable and then your ticket is returned to you with boarding card information printed onto it.

A good idea and quite neat. Not quite tried and tested, though, as they had an extra lady there whose job was to help people insert the right things in the right places or press the right buttons when the instructions weren't clear. She also had to unwedge luggage that got stuck during processing. We'll have to give it a few years, I suppose.

Add those things up and my experience feels a lot like 'travel of the future' as seen in old science fiction films.

Afterwards things went from bad to worse. This airport is simply unhospitable and we are boarding from some basement area which is quite ugly.

September 12, 2003, 18:42

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