Back in December, I did a short trip to New York City. I flew with Swiss International Air Lines, which, coincidentally, was also the airline I flew with when I first crossed the Atlantic Ocean. This was back in 2006, when I was living in Buffalo and visiting Prague for the summer. I went back to my archives and found my article about that trip. Man, I was so naive back then!
I must say that even though I don't fly Swiss as often as I fly other airlines, I was nevertheless still impressed with their service. I like the consistency: I was satisfied with them back in 2006 and I still have reason to be satisfied this time. The flight attendants were very professional and handled cabin issues really well.
As I took LX 14 to fly from Zurich to New York, I looked back and realized how many other places I have been to during the ten years that passed. And while a lot of things have changed, there are things that also remained the same. I may have more experience traveling now, but frankly, I still get excited because of simple things like flying in a plane. I wasn't too eager to go to New York City mostly because it's a place I have been to several times already, but nevertheless I find myself excited simply because of the flight experience. So when I arrived from Berlin to Zurich, I somehow already was looking forward to transiting the béton brut terminal, where my long-haul flight to New York City was departing from.
Flying back to Europe, it was funny that my departing gate from New York City was the same, Gate B29 from Terminal 4. This time, I was flying to Geneva, which was a new airport for me. While I am not verbose anymore when it comes to writing about my trip anymore (unlike in my entry from 10 years ago), I still am nerdy enough to acknowledge that I was excited to increase my airport count.
Anyway, I guess the biggest realization is that a lot of things happened with my travel style between then and now. I used to be amazed at these little things, and yet now everything is more or less automatized. Sometimes I read the travel subreddit and read questions of people who clearly do not have much travel experience. And while I have plenty of travel smarts nowadays, I also used to be naive like that. And since travel is a great experience, I do my best sometimes to answer these questions and help people experience travel more smoothly.
