30 Hours in Transit

Observations during transit, a sort of diary entry.

At the airport I buy the most expensive bag of skittles in the world and wait by the windows that look out to Sydney’s skyline, for the flight attendants to call economy boarding. The girl sitting next to me looks after my bag while I go to the bathroom, and I stand behind her in the line to board. Behind me the Australian National Ice-Skating team are flying to Frankfurt too and chat excitedly around me.

During take-off I cry, only a little bit, thinking about everything good that happens in summer and everything exciting to come. Everyone everywhere telling me they wish they were 21 again and trying something new. I try to watch a movie, but my headphones are crackling faintly, and I can see myself reflected in the screen. Becoming part of the set, a player in the game, actor in the storyline.

The girl beside me eats pork dumplings out of a yellow hungry panda plastic bag. The smell reminds me of daily mart pork buns and first year. When Canberra still felt big, and I didn’t think I’d bother with exchange.

I drink a glass of red wine and eat a bag of tiny peanuts. The red wine I realise is possibly a mistake - I’m trying not to sleep on this flight to prepare my body clock for CET. I eat more skittles and only pour out 2 colours at a time: green and red, orange, and purple, diagonals across the colour wheel.

I watch I Saw the TV Glow. It’s strange because I’ve listened to the soundtrack and in doing so thought I knew what the movie was about. I realise that I’d accidentally made it about me. It surprises me to see Phoebe Bridgers on stage on the screen. I argue with myself about whether it’s worth considering the esoteric implications of a movie like this, thinking about metaphors and symbolism and inference. I tell myself now is not the time, another voice tells me I have 24 hours left in transit, if not now then when?

Instead, I think about the Instagram reel I watched the other day about how apparently roller coasters were invented to stop people, men, from visiting brothels. I wonder if it’s true and then it makes me wonder about whether roller coasters are better than sex. It tastes sour to think about the times I would rather have been riding a rollercoaster.

The second dinner, the ‘refreshment’ comes around. Mincemeat noodles and sticky date pudding, that’s neither sticky nor does it taste like dates and has a powdery, bland icing in a neat square on top. ‘Darauf’ I think, the closer Germany looms the harder I attempt to think in its language. An English couple fret in the seats in front of me and bring their seats forward, leaning through the seats I try to tell them that I’ve finished my refreshment and to not worry about leaning back. Their politeness leaves them upright and uncomfortable for the last 2 hours of the flight.

The girl beside me scrolls through her photos again. I can’t help but side eye the album, my guess is a holiday to Sydney with her boyfriend. Selfies of them in Pitt Street and matcha cakes and the harbour. Then she crafts a long message in her note’s app, the Chinese characters interrupted only by strings of emojis: ❤️😢😘.

Across the aisle an older man who’d made a fuss about anything and everything the whole flight angrily drags his finger across the screen of an indie black and white film in which a woman interpretatively dances, clutching at her crotch. On the inflight entertainment interface I listen to Club Classics; the completely different version and the headphone digital crackle adds to the effect. I think old mate across the aisle would hate Charli. The interface tells me time to Hong Kong is one minute. The clock flips to zero and I’m still waiting for touch down.

In transit, I walk around Hong Kong airport dazed and get stuck between the ice-skating team and a British school group in the security queue. They are loud, with pink faced sunburn across every cheek and decorated in tourist goods: a bamboo hat, sarongs, and flower hair clips. They argue about who will sit next to who and I stand between them sweating in my jumper.

My flight is delayed by 15 minutes, and it feels 15 minutes too long to wait. At the gate I try to tell the German family sitting beside me that they can put their bags on the seat next to me, but the words jumble, and they give me polite nods and keep their bags at their feet. I write in my diary that from here on out Deutsch und nur Deutsch! I Play Block Blast, I’ve beat my high score twice now, fill up my water bottle, lie on the ground and feel like I’m floating in a pool of water. In line to board an old man watches the queue from his seat, he’s in a leather jacket drinks Asahi Super Dry out of a can, it is midnight and I wish I could be as stone cold cool as him.

On the second flight I exist in a groggy dream state. The couple beside me are kind, originally from Albania, living in Germany with their four children and returning from a two-week holiday in Thailand. I ask them how they find Germany in comparison to Albania, and they tell me that living in Germany is much better. They compliment me on my German, though it’s a polite concession I appreciate it all the same and later in the flight I fight the good fight for them, translating between them and the flight attendant because they won’t eat the pork sausage in the scrambled egg breakfast. He offers them a second bread roll and they concede but only with extra jam.

I sleep intermittently. Listening to a Blind Boy Boat club podcast on repeat, slowly piecing together between snatches of sleep on his ideas on quantum physics and Irish folklore. About parallel universes and alternate realities. In my dreams I discover a sea that is not just a sea but also an orchard, a bird that is not a bird but also a goddess. A word that exists in two languages at once but are different from each other.

As the animated plane on the flight tracker flies closer to Frankfurt and the pilot announces the beginning of our descent, I begin to feel the realness of what I’m about to embark on settle in. By now I am not sure if I am excited, terrified, or just tired. My heart pounds so loudly I can feel it pulsating against my chest.

Over the intercom the flight attendants tell us the German Federal Police are doing a random identity check, ‘so please have your passports ready’. It becomes obvious as I walk down the long hallway towards them that they are profiling Asian men. They wave me through without a second glance.

I lose the Albanian couple in the journey from gate to immigration, in which a Kafkaesque scene unfolds before me. Foreign passports, more than a thousand of us, wait in line for an hour to meet with the judges of our fates. There are four booths open but even as I stand there a young woman slides a metal grate down with a swift snap and now there are only three. I prepare my case, evidence in hand, a folder of acceptance letters and signed rent agreements and an email with advice from the university suggesting I apply for a residence permit after arrival. I watch anxiously as a family of three make calls and slide papers under the window of the booth. Finally, they are stamped through, the click and thud a sweet sound of success.

And now it is my turn, and I am sliding my passport under the window and my fingers are sweating and I wait for him to ask me the purpose of my visit and I begin to open the folder and… He hands me my passport back and waves me through without a second glance. It’s a potent, pointed, poignant, petrifying reminder of the privilege of my passport. By petrifying I mean that in moments like these the veil of inclusion and acceptance becomes thin and the reality that your national identity has a value that exists within a hierarchy is revealed. Simply that at the border some people are considered more people than others.

I collect my bag, catch a bus to Terminal 1, get confused buying train tickets, drink a coffee, ask one Deutsche Bahn info desk and then another, pay an additional 12 euros to amend my ticket, sit on platform 5 and freeze waiting for my delayed train. I spend the train ride thinking about a short story about a German hobby-horse rider and watching the mountains come closer. Snow glistening white on their caps.

Und jetzt bin ich hier. Sitting at my desk in my new room, in my WG (shared apartment) and a weak yellow sunlight is casting shadows on my wall. I can hear the housemates I haven’t met yet stir outside my door. I’ll post this, and build up the courage to say hello with my pre-prepared German introduction.

Bis später I guess.