von Lena & Rico

Posts in category Allgemein

New York we are coming

Monday 24th August 2015 3 AM: our alarm clock rang. It was time to get to Hamburg Airport. Thanks to the Morning-Shuttle-Service from my mom, we reached our Terminal at 4:15. Thank you once again for the ride! Unfortunately there was no ground staff yet at Terminal 1. Even the machine for the luggage drop-off did not work and greeted us with the following message „This machine will be available for you again shortly.“ Small tip for everyone: Do not stress yourself! Lufthasa starts their business at 4:30 AM.

The baggage handling was otherwise smooth. Only my backpack was waved out at the security check. The suspects were our ICE candies 😀 We went for a small shopping tour through the Heinemann Duty Free and bought thanks to my membercard and a voucher 2x chocolate and 1x gummy bears for only 1.30 €. And as a thank you we received vouchers for two hot drinks in the Marché.

Our Boarding of flight LH001 to Frankfurt started at 5:30 AM and our A321 took off at 6:00 AM. The culinary higlights of our flight was a granola chocolate bar. The flight time to Frankfurt should only be 45 minutes according to our flight captain and this was actually the case. So we ended upt 30 minutes before the scheduled Arrival in Frankfurt. Accordingly, our gate was still occupied.

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The boarding for our flight SQ26 to New York should start at 7:40. We had no stress and were able to enjoy the long way to our boarding gate. And while we were coming across some gates, one of the latest planes from Airbus suddenly appeared – the A350XWB.

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But now to our A380. There she stood: graceful and large but not easy to photograph.

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We wanted to sit down, but suddenly there was a loudspeaker announcement and some names were called out. That you all know for sure from airports and well one barely listens. So the voice called out: „Mr. Schwarzbach […] Mrs. Stendel […]“. We look at each other: What? We? Have we done something wrong? Are our seats overbooked? So again we took all our belongings and went to the Counter.

All clear! Since we had checked in with Lufthansa, our travel dates were missing in the Singapore Airlines database. Despite the so-called code-sharing, the data exchange between the airlines does seemingly not always run smoothly. Our data has been supplemented and while we wanted to sit again the real boarding began. To our astonishment, it went really, really fast. Before 8:40 o’clock, the staff had locked the doors. I had it particularly „great“ – I got Mr. stinkyas the hottest seat neighbour you could possibly want on a long-haul flight. Luckily the aircon was able to distribute the fragrance of the friendly-looking gentlemen in the remaining space of the cabin. 😀

Short after the A380 took off. You could describe it as simply huge and super quite! Rico had fun observing the wings and the aerodynamic effects. The A380 is just awesome! During the flight we were well treated by the cabin crew. It was literally an eating event. Singapore Airlines has spoiled us with two tasty menus (brunch and dinner), snacks, ice cream and drinks.

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On this flight too, we broke through the space and time continuum. Instead of the planned 11:10 AM, we landed at 10:30 AM in New York! Good performance, but what followed was not so nice…

Let’s rock it!

Hello everybody,

Maybe some of you know how it feels like, when your vacation is approaching and you have loads of things to do in advance and then time for the actual packing is short.

Same happened to us: Our bags were filled by the last minute and here and there you try to finish the remaining work, which needs to be done. Well either way, what you cannot do today will be done after many weeks 😀

This morning we had the opportunity to do something extra sprecial: reserving our seats in the airplanes. Oh, yes, you do not know when we will take off tomorrow. We will fly at 6 AM with Lufthansa from Hamburg to Frankfurt International Airport! And there he or she (I prefer she :-) ) awaits us: Our beloved A380 from Singapore Airlines. That will be an awesome flight!

Back to the seat reservation: Nowadays you book your flights online. The good part: the tickets are often cheaper and it is an extremly comfortable and easygoing way of booking! The disadvantage: the moment something does not work you must use your creativity to find a way out. This morning (24 hours before departure) the seat reservation was unlocked for the customers of the crane company for flight LH001. We pulled out our smartphones and started the reservation process. That worked fairly well for the domestic flight. Now the thrilling part occured: the flight to New York… Here the system told us that the huge A380 is almost fully booked and we would have had to sit three rows apart from each other :-O For us it was completely unacceptable! So I tried to call the colleagues from Lufthansa to ask for a solution. After some time of ringing someone took my call. He stated that he could not do a thing for us and kindly forwarded us to Singapore Airlines. He was nice enough to give us the phone number of Singapore Airlines.

Next up: we tried to call Singapore Airlines. A nice electronical voice informed us that we would be calling out of office hours and highlighted that a following number should only be dialed in case of emergency. Sure this was an emergency – ‚cause we wanna do Selfies in the A380 together and not over 5 seat rows! 😀 So I decided to chance it. With success! Now, we will sit abreast at the window and can enjoy the flight fully relaxed, do Selfies, kiss, sleep, eat, bore, watch films, chill, bore again, look outside, slander about the folks, bore again and with some luck reach our destination.  But about this, we will report tomorrow.

In that way: welcome to our small blog. Stay tuned – it pays!