Round The World and other travels

A frequent flyer's collection of trip diaries

This is: The Portuguese Connection (2012)

Homewards in style

Almost unbelievably, it was already time to start the process of heading for home! It was mildly annoying to find that, after all the hazy, murky conditions that we'd had to put up with, today dawned with that kind of clarity that promised a gloriously sunny winter's day ahead. C'est la vie, as they say! We returned to the little French bakery for breakfast, checked the times on the bus stop across the street and attended to final packing and formalities at the hotel. The journey to the airport was much more comfortable than on arrival: it was daylight, the service wasn't too busy and the air quality inside the coach was reasonable.


ABOVE: Asiana First Class Lounge at ICN		   Passage through the airport was easy: the check-in agent saw us through Security and, with our agreement, let us make our own way to the lounge. I remembered it well from just six months previously. I wondered whether the baby grand piano was ever actually played. In due course, it was time to wander down to the gate area. With our flight again being on a 747-400 Combi, there weren't that many passengers waiting.

(Link to flight log in side panel)

Having arrived back in Frankfurt, we made our way through long and overheated corridors, including the A-B tunnel. Our Seoul-issued boarding passes already showed gate A56, so we headed towards the lounge in the new A Pier.

The entrance to the new pier was well done, with various aircraft models suspended under a dome, and the new lounge was also very nice indeed and a huge improvement on the older Lufthansa lounges at Frankfurt. We settled in for a long stay. When the hunger pangs started to appear, I had a barley-based soup that seemed remarkably similar to Scotch Broth, followed by a typically German boiled sausage with potato salad and mustard. When the time came, we strolled round to Gate A56 - the original allocation given in Seoul had remained intact!  
LH Senator Lounge

(Link to flight log in side panel)

Delivery of checked luggage at Copenhagen was disappointingly slow, except of course for crew bags.   We eventually proceeded through the late-evening calm of Terminal 3 and across the road to the Hilton, where we were allocated a top-floor Executive room. After a very long day indeed, I sank into bed and was fast asleep within a couple of minutes.