Good food, bad entertainment

Around midnight we were served with Dinner, I was hungry since I didn’t really have a dinner. The food was quiet good; they offered a couple of choices. I asked for some red-wine and they gave me an airline size bottle of a French red wine. They gave us real silverware which was a nice touch. Jim had chicken, it was a little, may be a lot, spicy for his taste buds, after a couple of bites he turned red and yelled “fire, my mouth is on fire”. He asked for some water and quickly received several glasses of water to put out his fire. He said he was not used to the hot food.

As soon as we were airborne the guy in front of me reclined his seat and it almost hit me; apparently his seat reclined a lot more than usual but he was oblivious to this fact or he didn’t care. When we were served with food, I had to ask him to take the seat out of its Maharaja position so I can open my tray table. He didn’t like it very much but every time we were served food he did that on his own. I didn’t have to ask him again.

Since I could not sleep, I decided to see what “entertainment” they had provided. Earlier they had made an announcement that they had a couple of Hollywood and a couple of Bollywood movies. If you’ve seen one Bollywood movie you’ve seen most so I wanted to see if they had anything I’d like. There were 21 channels available on the in-flight entertainment system. Each channel having A and B part so there would be 42 channels. Not all were available, in fact only 4 or 5 channels had something on them. The bad part was that the available channels were not all together, You’d have to go through the entire list to find the channels with “entertainment” on them. I quickly realized that all the movies had issues with tracking. The screen kept on flickering and the audio went in and out. It seemed that they had been showing these tapes over and over for months and the quality was really poor. I tried to watch an English movie and quickly realized that the audio on my right ear was in English and in my left ear it was in German, I think. So I had to watch this movie holding my earphone to one ear and with lots of tracking and flickering issues on the screen. After a few minutes I gave up.

Near the end of the flight I decided to use the lavatories. Right behind us was the entertainment computer and VCPs where they inserted the tapes. I saw this airline guy fumbling with the tapes, they were similar to 8mm camcorder tapes with hand written titles on them. I told the guy about the English/German Audio problem, he went to the computer and said it was fixed and thanked me for telling him. I was surprised that no one had complained about this and wondered how many flights went through with this setup. Apparently on one audits the entertainment system before each flight.

After a long 8 hour long boring flight I wanted to stretch my legs at the Frankfurt airport and walk a little bit; I was hoping they would let us off the aircraft. Sometimes on delayed flights, they just park the airplane, clean around you and off you go for 8 more hours.