Airport Lounges Are Great, and Other Controversial Opinions

My First Newsletter

Hello friends, family and fans, you have been selected for your good humor, tolerance and forbearance to be my beta group for my new newsletter. Before I unleash it on the masses, I’m unleashing it on y’all.

So what am I going to write about in this very first newsletter?

I’ve been contemplating starting such a publication for at least a decade, and the creation of the Substack platform (thank you Substack) makes it even easier to do. And my family and I recently moved to Prague for a while, and that is an auspicious moment as any to begin. So begin I do, with this first newsletter describing my bumpy journey, which included a meeting with hurricane Ida and a famous pop singer.

Wednesday, September 1, 9 pm.

Well at the moment, I’m sitting in the Lufthansa lounge at Newark Airport waiting for my flight to Zurich and then onto Prague. The flight to Zurich has been delayed because of weather. It’s now scheduled (so they say) to leave at midnight, instead of 9:55 pm as scheduled. And the plane that was supposed to go to Zurich is sitting in Boston, waiting for word it’s safe to come here and land.

So it goes. I am thrown at the mercy of this airport, which all things considered, is not a path I’d choose. I’ve been in Lisbon, Prague and Frankfurt airports over the last month, and of course the American airport is clearly the worst. Here in my section at Gate B65 in Newark, the dining options are only two, and both are crowded.

But I have it marginally better, in that I’m sitting in the Lufthansa lounge that is available for Business and First Class customers, and those like me, who have finagled a way in. More about that later.

Speaking of lounges, I fairly recently looked down on them in a kind of reverse snobbery, as well as just not my idea of travel. I had no desire to be a part of some exclusive club that held itself apart from the regular folk in the terminal. And isn’t the whole idea of travel to mingle more with new people, not hold yourself apart from them?

But Miss K, my very significant other, immediately loved the idea of going to a more comfortable, private place when we had to spend time at an airport. And, as is her way, she searched out ways to gain access without actually having to buy a first-class ticket, or otherwise pay a bunch of money. ​​And she found out we're eligible for Priority Pass access through a credit card.

And you know what? Now I like them. It simply is nice to have a quieter, more comfortable setting, with free food and drink, better wifi and bathrooms. The hell with mingling. In Lisbon, I think it was, the lounges actually had showers and sleeping booths. I could get used to this. I am getting used to it.

Miss K, by the way, is the reason we get to move to Prague. With my encouragement, she has taken a job teaching “maths” at an international school here, meaning all the classes are in English. It’s an opportunity for us to live in Europe for a while, or at least for nine months.

We will see. I’m being impulsive here, but I’m just going to let this first column - no newsletter - fly out of here. I’ll finish with this little photo of myself, taken with my Apple Macbook Air camera, here in the lounge.

10 pm, Wednesday, September 1

No, I’m not going to “let it fly out of here.” Because right after I wrote that, things got interesting.

First, a woman’s voice said pleasantly that “Level one is being evacuated.” Then my flight was canceled. Then I discovered there was no way home because the airport had come to resemble a castle surrounded by a moat of water. And the water actually entering the castle! An airport employee showed me a video on her phone of the water coming up the escalator stairs. There is no way in or out, no way to lower the drawbridge.

9 am, Thursday, September 2

I’m still at the airport. It’s been a long night — I only got an hour of sleep, and that was on the stone-hard, cold floor — but there have been some recompenses. Mostly in the people I’ve met.

There was Britney, from around Knoxville, TN. She had a sweet accent, which among other things, prompted me to start talking to her as she sat next to me. Her travel plans had been upended even before it started raining, because she left her passport in a restaurant in the Atlanta airport. Now she was trying to figure out how to fly back there, so she could take her planned vacation to Portugal. 

Then at about 5 a.m., I met Mika. He was a tall, handsome gentleman dressed with some flair - all in white. He was wearing a mask, as almost everyone is here. He came over and wordlessly, gave me a blue blanket and a pillow, still in their plastic wraps. The Port Authority, which runs the airport, had been giving them out. I thanked him, and a bit later we got to talking. I immediately noticed what sounded to me like an English accent, which made him seem even more dapper and urbane. And he had an interesting story. Turns out he was a professional songwriter. This came out because he had noticed my guitar, and he asked me about it. He said he was a songwriter. This percolated with me for a bit. A songwriter. Very, very few people are professional songwriters. So I eventually asked him his name, and he said Mika and that I could look him up. 

And once he walked away for a bit, I did look him up. Wow, he’s really famous! And he’s not just a songwriter, he’s a song performer. And has sold millions of songs. And he was English, via Lebanon. The most popular song that he performs, Grace Kelly, has been listened to 223 million times on Spotify! That’s Beatle-popular! Here’s his Wikipedia entry. 

I got out my guitar, walked over to his corner, and attempted to lure him into singing harmony on “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” by the Beatles. But he wouldn’t take the bait. Which of course disappointed me. In the San Francisco airport about 15 years ago, I sang harmony with Dan Zanes for several hours in the middle of the night as we waited to fly to Sydney, Australia on the same plane. Zanes is a pretty famous singer of children’s songs, and before that leader of a successful rock group, the Del Fuegos.

At about 8 am I met the lady near me now, whose name I hadn’t asked for yet, who is originally from Michigan but now lives on the Upper West Side and runs in Central Park. She is a nurse. I interrupted her while she was working on her computer, because I was bored, and she responded with real animation as if she had been waiting for someone to give her an excuse to stop. We watched each other’s stuff as we used the bathroom.

It occurs to me that we have been here long enough that we are starting to coalesce into a group, where we kind of know each other, even if we don’t talk. There’s the Japanese gentleman and his wife who keep drawing my eye. He has admirable style. He looks to be about 50, but pulls off wearing his hair in a short ponytail. He has jeans on and a very light sports coat. And seems to have an amused expression on his face most of the time. 

I’m probably a type myself now. Out of the corner of their eye, probably many people have noticed the tall man in a vivid red-silk sports coat pushing a huge cart piled with a perilously high level of duffel bags and suitcases, with a guitar balancing on top. (When you’re moving somewhere, you take a lot of stuff.)

The red silk sports coat has its own backstory. I bought it 27 years ago, in New York City on my way to Europe to spend six weeks on the 1994 German Marshall European Community Journalism Fellowship, which I had won. I would spend six weeks living and traveling around Europe, studying its cities and suburbs. I had decided I needed a better sports coat. So in a one-night stopover in Manhattan, where I slept on the floor of my friend Hugo’s apartment, I went to Rochester’s Big and Tall near Rockefeller Center on Sixth Avenue. I ended up choosing, correctly I think as it turned out, this bright red silk sports coat with swooping lapels. It was very bold, and it risked making me look like a clown. But I wore it all over Europe for six weeks quite happily. It fit me and wasn’t too heavy. And I continue to wear it, when appropriate.

In all this time, I have only slept for one hour, when I lay down on a cold tile floor near Mika from 4 am to 5 am. I used my computer bag as a pillow. I slept very fitfully, and then got up. It wasn’t until 4 am that I stopped trying to get home to our apartment in Brooklyn, and accepted my fate of spending a night at the Newark airport, on my way to Prague.

11 am, Thursday, September 2

Only seven more hours to go! They rebooked me on a 6 pm flight to Frankfurt, which will carry me onto Prague, where I am scheduled to arrive at 9:30 am, (which will be 3:30 am New York time.) I hope I’m okay. I will basically be going through jet lag twice. I got virtually no sleep last night, and tonight on the plane, I won’t get much sleep either.

3 pm, Sunday, September 5

I arrived in our apartment about 11 or noon on Friday, all by myself. Miss K was at work, our daughter EC at her new preschool. I unpacked all my bags, and then went out for some lunch. I did not succumb to the temptation to sleep. 

Awakening Saturday after my first stretch of sleep after three days and two nights, we went to a farmer’s market down by the river, here in what the Czechs call “new town” or Nové Město. (New, as in established in the 15th century.) It was just a 15-minute walk from our apartment. Such a beautiful day. Sun shining, just warm enough. Crowds of people strolling along the river, and buying fresh vegetables, grilled sausages, and local cheeses. We found two new playgrounds for EC. We ate ice cream, and took a bus we found right back to our apartment. It was a great morning and afternoon. The buildings around us, so ornate and lush, reminded me of why we had taken the leap to move to Prague.

So nice to be here. Thank you life.

And thank you, readers, even those who didn’t make it this far.

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Best wishes to everyone.