After an excruciating flight back from Germany (I am never flying Lufthansa again - joke), sitting in the midst of German snorer and a Russian elbower, I am back in the US. And after sleeping for a few hours, I’ve been catching up on email and sipping espressos since about 4am, with Otto on  my lab. Life is good. So was my trip back to Europe. I am so thankful for all the friends and family I got to see, and all the other people who made this such a great trip. Most notably, thank you Jefferson Farfan, for scoring a goal against Frankfurt and letting me see a Schalke win after all. Whenever you return from a trip like this, there are always a ton of impressions on my mind. Here are a few, more coming later, complete with some pictures of our journey.

• Jen loves gelato. If we lived in Europe, we’d have a problem.
• I greatly missed Otto who is about half the size of my parents’ cat
• Thank you Adam for staying with Otto while I was gone. I hope you like the new roommate I brought you from Amsterdam.
• Schalke is awesome. When I am old, I am going to fully devote my life to watch them play.
• Germany is an interesting country. Actually I think it’s the greatest country in the world, but many people there are too negative to ever recognize it.
• Jen and I got along great while in Europe. We also get along great in the US, which is nice.
• My family rocks. I wish I could spend more time with everybody, such as my little sisters who are growing up to be beautiful young women. And by spending time, I mean making sure that pubertal German boys don’t.
• My parents both ran a marathon. I hope I am that cool when nearing 50.
• Both my cousins are married now, with Stefan breaking the golden rule of dating a woman for 10 years before getting engaged.
• Dominik and Sebastian win the “friends of the trip” award for getting me into all kinds of sporting events while in Germany. Christian gets the same award for driving all the way from Austria in his luxurious Dacia Logan to come and visit me.
• I love German food and beer, but look forward to once again eat something green now.
• Amsterdam is one my favorite places in the world. Jen and I must have walked around for 12 hours one day, all the while we were eating Dutch French Fries. I love Dutch French Fries.
• Otto just managed to get stuck under my couch. Got to go.

As I am typing this blog entry, I am arguably sitting on the best flight ever – flying from Portland direct to Frankfurt on Lufthansa. Since Lufthansa is a German company, there might be a slight bias in play here but that’s ok.  I am constantly flying for work, and other than flying on a private jet, this has been the best flight experience in a long time. It’s refreshing to see an airline do some things right, especially from the perspective of a guy who publishes a book on how to write complaint letters.
Here’s what Lufthansa did right today:

• When checking in at the gate, there counter was well staffed and we got checked in to our flight within a matter of 5 minutes. This is unusually fast for an international flight.
• At the counter, I asked if there was any chance that Jen and I could get a window/aisle seat rather than the “bathroom watch” row we were assigned in the back of the plane. The guy told me that he wasn’t able to make any changes right now, but to find him once we got to the counter.
• I, of course, forgot to find him at the counter. Instead, he found me. While walking on to the airplane, he pulled us aside (I was assuming they had opened my luggage and were wondering why I was bringing 37 brand new soccer jerseys) and asked whether we’d still like to change seats.  2 minutes later, we had graduated from the bathroom watch row and were sitting in a window/isle in an exit row. As you can see in the picture above, the leg room was incredible.
• Before walking onto the plane, we grabbed a half dozen magazines (GQ, Mens Health, Cosmopolitan, Nudists News) from their free magazine counter and boarded the plane.
• Once on the plane, we enjoyed excellent food, great service and lots of sleep induced by French wine and a couple of blue pills – the sleeping kind.

Lufthansa really didn’t do anything crazy here, but unlike most airlines, they upheld the promise of the kind of service that one should be able to expect. Nothing crazy, just basic stuff.
Now, some might say that international flights are always more pleasant than domestic ones. But I disagree. I paid $900 a piece for this tickets, which isn’t that much more than a number of domestic routes are going for these days.
Anyways, we are about to land in Frankfurt. Who knows what will go wrong there, but this is was an awesome flight. Thank you Lufthansa.

Ps. It should be noted that the on-board entertainment was broken for the duration of the flight, as the system’s hard drive somehow got corrupted. While this was certainly a bummer, I won’t remember it as a negative. Rather than keeping us in the airport for hours and hours, the captain made the right choice in departing Portland rather than trying to fix a problem that wouldn’t have been fixed anyways.

I continue to support the non-exclusive bar scene as you can see in the picture below.