Travel from Athens to Birmingham

As I wrote about the flight to Athens, I now write about travel from Athens to Birmingham.

The flight from Athens to Zurich was very early, departing before 7 o'clock (I woke up at 4!). This is the breakfast.

The same sultana bun as the one I had in the plane from B'ham to Zurich, but this time with a pot of yogurt. We were given a small tablet of Swiss chocolate, too.

The girl sitting next to me was reading a book written by Russell Brand. It is totally irrelevant, but I remembered it now. I like Russell Brand.

Swiss airplanes look like Red Cross planes.

This is the waiting lounge of Zurich airport. Cool, isn't it?



Lunch hour approaching, I felt hungry. Everything was pretty expensive. A coffee is about 5 Swiss francs, or a cup of soup at self-service cafeteria is 6.50 or so.

I settled at a cafeteria called Corbeille and ordered a coffee/tea + a slice of cake deal for SFr. 9.90. These are milk coffee and a cake with berries and custard cream cake.

The cake looked delicious but was pretty ghastly. No interest what-so-ever. The coffee was really good, however.

While I was eating, an American guy sat down behind me (there were lots of Americans in Zurich airport). To order, he asked the waitress's suggestion. It was not a specific question. Something like "I think I'd like to have lunch. What do you recommend?". I felt it was quite alien to my culture, or the cultures I have lived in. In my culture, if you want to order, you read the menu and choose what you would like to eat. If you want to know some details about the items in the menu, you ask the waiter/waitress, but never such a general question. In America, the waiters/waitresses are not just the people who ask your order and bring your food, but the people who coordinate your meal and your eating experience at the restaurant.

I finished eating thinking about these things, and then headed for the boarding gate.

This is the lunch in the flight from Zurich to Birmingham: brown bread sandwich with turkey ham and artificially formed egg.

We had also drink and a tablet of Swiss chocolate again. Food with no joy.

When I arrived at Birmingham, the temperature was 14 degrees and it was raining, while the temperature of the room where I was sleeping in Piraeus was 35 degrees during the night. Shock to the system, it was.