I am back home and going back to work tomorrow. Although not everything happened as planned, I am happy with my trip. I boarded a plane eleven times during these two weeks, my personal record. Out of these eleven times, four times it was business class.
It turned out that business class might be very different even within one airline, from “barely any difference” to something very sophisticated:
The bug plus was that I was able to use lounges on every connection because of the Finnair Gold. If not for the lounges, I won’t survive the travel of that intensity. I stayed at nine different lounges (two different ones in Helsinki and three different ones in Heathrow); Vaanta and Heathrow are on the top, although one of the lounges in Heathrow was so crowded and loud that it was not much different from waiting in the gate (of cause, there was a delicious food which makes a difference :))
Another thing I learned on this trip is that you can survive without some beauty products for several days. I always take my “thirteen bottles of liquids” everywhere I go, and I mastered the art of fitting them into a one-liter bag.
This time, I knew I would need more than that because it was a two-week journey without touching base in Helsinki, so I had some extras in my checked luggage. However, when I was heading to Paris from Stockholm, I was already more than a half through, and I decided to consolidate all of the remaining liquids in one bag. And I left this bag in my carry-on, just because I always think: what if the luggage is delayed and I will need something?
And you know what happened?! In Stockho;m, they told me that my one-liter bag was”too big” and I needed to repack my liquids into a smaller bag which they gave me. And they told me “it’s EU regulations” as if I was not on the second week of my trip! They would not give in, and I was nervously choosing what I could leave behind (my checked-in luggage was already checked!) I decided that the hotel would have shampoo, conditioner, and a body lotion and parted with those, only to find out that this hotel in Paris had only the body wash! It was a completely ridiculous situation because some of the tubes had very little of the cream left. At the same time, I had two bottles of the eye wetting drops in two bags inside my backpack, and nobody paid attention!
But I learned that I could wash my hair with a body wash and survived without the hair conditioner. And moreover, when I forgot my eye cream in the hotel, I found out I can survive a day without it as well 🙂
Hettie's Reflections 