Sometimes in Business Class

SOMETIMES IN BUSINESS CLASS

Jay Maclean

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PRONOUN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

SNOWLESS IN SCANDINAVIA

PIAZZAS ARE FOR BUSES

ARTISTIC AMSTERDAM

BENISSIMO IN BELLAGIO

AUTUMN LUNCH, ROME

AU PARADIS DES CHIENS

ON THE HERITAGE OF ITALY

A BLIND WINE PANEL AND A TIGHTLY PRUNED COW

AMALFI AMORE

FROM A BATHTUB IN THE HAGUE

LIKE GULLIVERS IN LILLIPUT

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE CONSTRUCTION SECTOR

FLIGHT FROM EGYPT

HIMSELF HAS COME HOME

More by Jay Maclean

Sometimes in Business Class

© Jay Maclean 2017

Jaymaclean2007@gmail.com

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The author welcomes enquiries.

INTRODUCTION

MANY PEOPLE, THESE DAYS AND nights, traipse around the world from meeting to meeting, soaking up the attention of airline stewards and stewardesses, clocking up free mileage and working out tax breaks or how to sock away their travel per diems. You can pick them at the airports: usually alone with a brief or attache case as hand luggage, their trusty laptop computer and shopping list - plus toothbrush and underwear in case their checked-in luggage is lost en route - within. My, they look bored. The thrill of travel itself has long gone and any deviation from the expected timetable or route produces a face longer than the runway. They know where they want to sit in every model of aircraft fielded by the airlines and can use the seat console buttons blindfolded, which they frequently are - stretching back to doze as soon as the seat belt sign is turned off.

And when they have landed, their schedules are laid out: meetings here, meetings there and afterward cocktails or dinner with other participants and perhaps a jolly field trip together one day and back to the hotel and the airport and typing a report of the trip on the return flight because there will only be time to prepare for the next trip when they return home.

I was in that circuit for a while before I realized that business trips were becoming black holes in my life. I began to take more notice and put impressions to paper for my wife Margie and make them into letters to friend Steve who, bless his soul, encouraged me by not asking me to stop.

The journeys and resulting stories in these pages were made between the late 1980s and mid-1990s.They are esssentially impressions, with no pretensions as to facts. I certainly do not wish to malign the airlines that have carried me safely on many journeys. The culture shocks and my outbursts should be seen by inhabitants of the countries concerned as the ramblings of a savage brought up on another planet, i.e., Australia. For good measure, I added lists of the airlines, drinks and places visited at the end of the book.

From the perpective of 2017, as this compilation of letters from Europe nearly three decades ago goes to press, readers will find fascinating snippets of history herein, for example, Brussels was being bombed by terrorists in 1990, while Germany was reeling under a massive inflow of refugees even then; the UK and Italy had quotas of refugees as well. Only the climate has changed.

SNOWLESS IN SCANDINAVIA

FINALLY, I AM AMONG THE unfortunates, the business class passengers, who have to watch the video screen cheerfully showing how far it is to fall into the shark-infested South China Sea below (9,541 meters); the temperature outside in case a window breaks (- 32 C); and the time and distance from our point of departure, so that I can watch every second and kilometer passing. Previously I only glimpsed the screen through the curtains from economy class. Now, I gaze at it unwillingly from time to time, half hypnotically as if I were visiting friends who keep their TV running while we try to converse.

The steward is trying to push wine onto two Filipinas in the seat ahead of me.

You vill like dis chablis; here, have some chablis. Then, turning to another steward behind him:

See, I only gif zem ‘alf each. Not so much, eh? Unseeing, I imagined the state of the Filipinas, who almost never drink wine, after half a bottle of chablis each.

He then gave me Veuve Cliquot champagne instead of the white wine I ordered. His attention was on the girls. Still one mustn’t complain, I say. The champagne accompanied well the smoked salmon, cured ham, caviar-topped quail eggs, fresh asparagus and artichoke hearts, and side salad. That was only the appetizer, of course.

And this was only the first leg of my trip to Europe this March 1990. I was in Swissair where, as I see it, old steward and stewardesses don’t die; they just move to economy class. An interesting career path, no? An Asian Development Bank colleague had similar thoughts that he once shared with me as we sped coastward in his BMW:

We should be allowed to peak out in our careers during our forties and follow a wind-down career track to let the next generation take up the stress and sweat, he said. Ironically, he did not follow his own advice and not long after spent nearly a year in an asylum. He was literally taken there in a strait jacket. Here, in Swissair, perhaps ve haf such a structure. I only hope that aircraft maintenance is not the bottom rung on the ladder.

Another amusing quirk of Swissair was that they were time-sharing a tiny executive lounge with Qantas at the Manila International Airport. By night, Qantas VIP passengers scratched their way through Airways, Qantas’ inflight magazine, over liberal gin-tonics and stagger onto the red-eye flight for Melbourne. By day, the name of the lounge was changed and Swissair passengers puzzled their way through Airways downing schnapps and furtively glancing at each other, wondering if they were in the right place.

KONIGSTEIN

My first stop was Konigstein outside Frankfurt. Driving between the two was like watching a black and white movie. Bare black trees, grey fields, colorless sky, and it wasn’t even snowing. Smoke from factories sat unmoving, like pieces of cotton wool on a collage. Konigstein was higher, among the magnificent pine forests of the Taunus. But even the pines were dark and oppressive; traces of dirty snow lay beneath them. Later, we drove to the highest peak around, where a US communications tower was listening to the Berlin Wall coming down. Outside it were cars with East German plates, yes tourists. Imagine that less than a year before. Aerobatic kites were soaring overhead in a wind that would have blown the fur off a brown dog; falconry was off the menu that day. The wind laughed at my warmest jacket and I retreated freezing to the car.

Next day was sunny and serene. Konigstein was radiant. Tiny houses straight from Grimm’s Fairy Tales leaned out into narrow streets, so narrow that there were no footpaths and one leapt into doorways as cars approached. Sparkling white houses, smaller than life size it seemed, crisscrossed with brown beams at random angles.

Nearby Kronberg was even more Grimmish - more higgledy-piggledy in its narrower lanes weaving up and down steep hills; dark beams of houses bearing scant regard for gravitational innuendos; houses with doors so tiny that not only Snow White but all her diminutive friends would have had to stoop to pass through.

Our venue was an old castle there, previously owned by the Rothchilds, which overlooked, through the French windows of our cozy suite, long sloping hills and woods reaching toward distant Frankfurt.

There is a rather famous Italian restaurant in Konigstein where our host arranged a truly magnificent meal of seafood delicacies, raw (for example, raw monkfish wrapped in smoked salmon), broiled, fried and baked, washed down with just the right white wines from Algeria, Sicily and Germany. Afterward, grappa. And, mama mia, more grappa. The manager filled the table with odd, individually-shaped bottles and fresh glasses for each kind. He explained some as he stroked the bottles, delicately pouring a little of their precious contents into our glasses. This one, three months it took me to get hold of this one - Grappa dela Donna Selvati ca di Raffaele. Another excellent yellow one from northeastern Italy (Ciliego) For this, I gave only one of my eye teeth. There was La Grappa di Sanlio Bottega; we sampled bottiglia no. 348/A. And Grappa de Monoviligno Picolit. There was an aquavit, acquavite da uve di traminer. There were eight altogether and they were offered, meaning on the house!

I suspect that I lurched, rather than walked from there to the castle and was still lurching as I boarded the plane next morning for Brussels.

BRUSSELS

Brussels was armed to the teeth. Armored personnel carriers followed planes out onto the tarmac; machine-gun toting guards roamed around inside the airport. I visited the European Commission headquarters, a massive bureaucracy of several thousand persons, guarded electronically with alarms that scream and doors that slam around you if you don’t have the right card.

Bilingual Belgium was rocking to the gales that were sweeping across Europe, taking many lives. My three days were windy, rainy and utterly miserably cold. I felt cheated not to have snow. The Belgians have different miseries. A recent opinion poll showed that their greatest fear is of being run down by a car on the roads. I mentioned this to a Brit who nodded sadly. A friend of hers was run down and squashed by a tram in Brussels.

Divorce is another source of misery. I was taken along to an apartment-warming for a couple who had been married recently. The husband was a physical and financial mess because he was still getting over his recent divorce, a harrowing experience in Belgium. Practically the only grounds for divorce there are flagrante delicto so to speak. Also one must hire two lawyers. Seems to me to be adding insult to injury. To be fair, the Australian Embassy in Manila advises that to register a child in the Philippines as an Australian, you need not only evidence that the baby is yours and that the woman is really the mother, but also evidence that you were together at the time of conception. I ask you....

Fear of flying may be another Belgian woe. As I entered the airport for my flight to Finland, a small crowd had gathered around an old lady who appeared to be having an apoplexy. Loudspeakers were calling for a doctor as I heaved my luggage onto the weighing platform. The ticketing lady was looking around for the source of the problem. I told her. It happens all the time here, said the ticketing lady. I sink it is the stress about flying, you know? I was about to say that I had not seen it anywhere else but bit my lip in case the ticketing lady might get palpitations too.

Speaking of trams, Brussels bears an uncanny resemblance to Melbourne, Oz. Wide streets with trams careering down central islands; low-rise grey and beige buildings, mostly Victorian looking in Brussels as in inner Melbourne, and several seasons per day, one of which including rain.

One thing you won’t find in Melbourne is a pissoire on the side of a church. As we strolled by St. Catherine’s in downtown Brussels one evening, a cabbie stopped and half ran, half hobbled across the footpath ahead of us unzipping his fly, and darted behind a green screen against the church facade. On another church, one side was covered by a row of shops. A step up from a pissoire, but...well.

Despite their fear of flying, or perhaps because of it, the Belgians maintain a wonderful aeronautical museum in Brussels. Needless to say I spent a little time there. It was on one side of a military museum, which has an army under glass. There were rows upon rows of life-size model soldiers in all the uniforms that have ever fought. They stood in glass cases that stretched along curving arcades. Included were more varieties of your basic suit of armor than I would have thought anatomically possible. This surprised me at first but why not? Ye knights’ gazette probably had lift-out catalogues of armor. New for the nineties- 1390s that is.

The planes, the planes. In Smithsonian museum style, there was a Caravelle flying overhead, dwarfed by the immensity of the hangar that constitutes the museum. A mezzanine floor around the perimeter had beautifully restored craft from the teen years - a Sopwith Camel, a 1917 Bristol, a Fokker triplane and a variety of other exotic European constructions of wood and canvas, some more resembling boats with wings. Downstairs was a fantastic assortment of planes from the 1930s to the 1980s. A DC-3 was hardly discernible among a motley squadron of its European equivalents.

The highlight for me was finding two craft that for several years were the only winged items in my Dinky Toy collection - a Gloster Meteor and a De Havilland Vampire. The 2-inch cast-iron models I had (I was no more than six years old) made awful landings when hurled with appropriate whooshing noises onto the bed at the end of strenuous flight around my parents’ apartment. I repainted them several times after heavy dogfights which usually ended in crash landings into flowerpots or the great sandy plains that stretched for meters beside the footpath.

As I wandered among the smaller jets, Hawkers, the first MiG, etc., the sight of the real Meteor made me really grasp with joy. For the Vampire I gave an involuntarywhoop out loud. My eyes had focused immediately on the triangular areas between fuselage and wing. I could see that they were air intakes. The old memory cells were a few milliseconds behind, reminding me that about 40 years ago I used to have trouble deciding what color to paint those triangles. Should they be silvafross like the body or black to represent holes? The answer sure took a long time coming, but what stupid neurons to keep the question alive after all these years!

Gosh, do satiated neurons die? What happens to them after all the synaptic questions of youth have been answered? Is that brain death? Strangely enough, as I draft this page on Thai’s 620 flight - nearly home again - a sentence in an article in the inflight magazine bubbles back from the subliminal sea that I believe makes up most of the inside of my head. The author of the article is traveling around feeling old at 38 and trying to sort out the dividing line between youth and middle age. He equates death of youth with death of wonderment. The second part of his equation is that wonderment means innocence and ignorance. Well, hell. I wonder nearly all the damn time. The longer I hang around the more things I find to wonder about, as Margie is exasperatingly aware. The more I learn about life the further away I become from any state of grace with respect to knowledge, and the more questions I foist on this overburdened brain. Lordy, there must be countless thousands of still unanswered questions dangling from the edges of neurons, waving around like a dark kelp forest in a surge in my subliminal sea.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, violence has moved sensibly to the campus where there is less security. The third bombing in six months occurred just before my arrival. Students were advised to form vigilante groups and screen their peers as they enter lecture rooms. I can see where that will lead! Flashback to my university days when the greatest danger during lectures was of being hit by a paper aero plane. Some budding engineers could create paper gliders that simply defied gravity, cruising over our heads for endless seconds, landing to wild cheers and clapping, completely destroying the lecturer’s concentration. Hmm, could the lecturer’s staff association be behind the Brussels bombings...?

HELSINKI

Finnair’s delightful MD 87 lifted us smoothly and quickly out of wet Brussels into a sunny sky on 28 Feb. I was feeling somewhat euphoric and opted for Laurent Perrier champagne to accompany the huge meal being offered - shrimp salad, stuffed salad, stuffed chicken, a massive cheese plate, fresh fruit - and was about to sample an old cognac when the pilot announced that the temperature in Helsinki is zero degrees and it is snowing. I suddenly felt like a condemned man who has just eaten his last meal.

Helsinki ought to have been knee deep in snow and 20 below. Instead, the city and indeed all of Finland were experiencing a third successive mild winter. PLUS two degrees emphasized an announcer later on the evening of my arrival. What little snow had fallen had melted away. Some old snow was piled on the edges of paths and in parks; the lake across the park from the Helsinki Intercontinental Hotel was frozen. However, notable winter sport events had to be cancelled, again.

My contact, an entomologist by training, feared for the forests that form the bulk of Finland’s rural production. The warmer weather could stimulate insect populations to plague proportions, eating leaves and burrowing into trunks. It was bad enough that there was already significant tree loss from fallout from factories and mining activities in northern Russia. But you should see the desolation there, he said.

It was not far from the Helsinki Intercontinental Hotel to the foreign aid office, where I was drumming up finds for the international NGO I am presently heading. Reprieved from an icy death, I wore my new suit and whatever would fit comfortably beneath it, which wasn’t much. In any case, the cold here was exhilarating compared to the cold misery of Brussels. In fact, there were some gentle flurries of tiny snowflakes which played with my suit and face as I walked by the park to the office. Nice to christen a suit like this, I mused, watching the flakes melt into it and blinking as some tickled my eyes. Grinning, I thought Well, here I am in a snow country when it is actually snowing. Took me 45 years and in a country that was once only a name on stamps when they held the Olympic Games here. Feels great. Wish my wife was here. To my guide I said, mustering bored sophistication, Awfully cold isn’t it? That’s when I learned about mild winters.

Bloody expensive town, Helsinki, although I can’t think why. Fairly young by European standards, it lacks soul and is totally oriented to commerce. My US$200/night room at the Intercontinental was nothing special and I resented the bar fridge, which was a metal cage from which one could not even get a glass of cold water. Instead a message read selection automatically recorded. You could extract a Pepsi for $4.50, a beer for $7, but water, no. In the major downtown department store, Stockman, I sought out a skivvy to augment my meagre winter wardrobe. The sales lady found one; it was US$85. I expressed thinly veiled horror at the price. She replied Yes, everything is expensive here. I come from Sweden and it’s much cheaper there. But if you are going to Denmark, do your shopping there. I was told it is much better than Sweden. So I hung onto my Finnish Marks and later bought a similar item in Bergen, Norway, for about $14.

Helsinki is smaller than I imagined. The water authority caters for only 750,000 people, drawing water from a lake over 100 kilometers away through a rock tunnel to a highly automated treatment plant on the outskirts of the city. The lake has several paper pulp mills at one end so the water needs to be checked carefully. Part of the monitoring is carried out by a dozen trout. True! I am not making this up. I went there to see the operation. The serene salmonids swim around in tanks in the plant. Electrodes measure their heart rate and gill movements, A computer analyses samples from each tank and compares them for statistically significant deviations from normal behavior. If the fish begin to act abnormally, the water supply from the lake is shut down and an alternate source opened up. The latter is a large reservoir. TV monitors operated from the main console, where I was standing. They scan the perimeter and intake area of the reservoir for illegal human presence. The operator did the rounds by fingering a few buttons on the console while we watched on a screen.

Yes, but fishermen come here at night anyway, whispered my guide impishly. So far, fish, water and the Helsinki population remain healthy.

Dining out in Helsinki can be a little different to tropical Asia, I discovered. Where in Manila, for instance, can you find: "slightly smoked fillet of elk, sauteed reindeer; noisettes of reindeer, poached snow grouse, or grilled bearsteak? I can tell you that the elk at the Piekka Restaurant is dark and delicious, with or without some Finnish vodka schnapps. I noticed that Finns are very fond of these schnapps and soon found out why.

BERGEN

To reach Bergen by air you have to bounce through Oslo, Norway’s capital, so that they can look at you. That is my conclusion, because there is no pretense at a customs check. As in most parts of Europe these days, officials are only interested in you if you pass through the red Something to declare lane. I was tempted to declare that I thought they were a bunch of bureaucratic bastards, but forewent the pleasure and chose continuing freedom.

The airport near Oslo is on an island; the approach is over the city. Looking down there are rows upon rows of apartment blocks that are so regular I thought I was seeing a container terminal. The rows extend all along the mountainside as if someone had marked the contours with monopoly houses side by side. The plane descended past them low over a bay and we were rocked by severe turbulence that shook our jet like a toy boat right up to the point of landing. I was pretty frightened but after experiencing it twice assume that this is common. Still, one wheel landings are bad for the complexion of one’s knuckles.

Bergen was only 40 minutes west of Oslo by air, barely time for the Scandinavian stewardess to pass around prepacked goodies. Outside, the view was so spectacular that I had no idea what I was eating. We flew over the backbone of Norway, rising over snow covered mountains, the sun sinking golden ahead of us. Craggy peaks seemed to soften in the sunset and magically became smooth pink undulations. The scene grew incredibly sensuous as pinks, mauves and purples swirled through space below. The undulations became softer and softer until there was nothing more than a pastel plain, pulsing with changing colors like a cornered cuttlefish. It was only as we descended that I realized that somewhere during the flight the