Episode 1

Like most good adventures, I was hoping that my story would start out with a slow beginning, allowing for the natural development of plot, characters, and the uncovering of some evil crime syndicate. Hour four of the flight to Frankfurt sucked: after a crowd-pleasing showing of Walk The Line followed by a half-hearted attempt at “acting” by Antonio Banderas in the Legend of Zorro, the cabin was subjected to torture at the hands of Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin. House Sitter has got to be the most God-awful movie I've seen. Second maybe to White Oleander.

First impressions of Frankfurt: Europeans definitely have looser definitions of a “smoking area”. In the airport, apparently, “smoking” areas are separated from “no smoking” areas by what appear to be gigantic Soviet-era air conditioners that attempt to suck in the offending smoke and recirculate "clean" air. The way these guys were wrapped around these things, it looked like a dude doing it with a Star Wars droid. And I don't mean any cute R2D2, I mean those weird boxy ones that the Jawas drag around.

In the event that the asian woman who was in line with me at the Frankfurt airport is reading this, I apologize now. My spidey sense was tingling five minutes after we spoke and I realized that we were, in fact, in line to exit the airport through customs, not to go to the B terminal as the misleading signs seemed to indicate. I’m hoping that you too figured this out and I apologize. My excuse in the event I found you on my flight was to say that I misunderstood your question of “B?” as “leave?”.

My impression of Geneva and Frankfurt airports were both the same: I can’t freaking believe how quiet, orderly, and uncluster-fucky everything and everyone is. Try going to BWI on a Saturday morning. It’s like you’ve entered the Astrodome and the ticket counters are handing out free TP. Geneva folk seem to tolerate a lot of crap - maybe its their Calvinist nature or maybe the fact that arguing with the French just got too tiring. I was witness to a child who incessantly kicked the chair in front of her for a majority of the flight – and the man sitting in it, at times. Did he turn around and glare at the mother with the oh-no-she-din't look? Did he let out audible gasps in hopes that someone within viewing distance would empathize? No. He simply read his copy of the Lufthansa magazine. Amazing. There was a quote about the Swiss in one of my guidebooks that this reminded me of: “The Swiss are polite, law-abiding people who usually see no good reason to break the rules… Good manners infuse the national psyche, and politeness is the cornerstone of all social intercourse.” Someone should have told that to the fighting French couple in my building – it’s like listening to an episode of Gilmore Girls in French through a wall. Thank God I can’t hear the makeup sex.