Switzerland Versus Australia

Our first flight to get back to The Land Of Calc was with Qantas, which you will all no doubt recognise as an Australian airline, and the second was with Swiss. And so, to sum up finally whose country is better than whose ...

On our Qantas flight we had a spare seat between the two of us. You might uncharitably suggest that this is because no one is foolish enough to fly Qantas, hence the empty seats, or you might just recognise that gift horses' mouths are not made to be looked in.

On our Swiss flight, not only did we have far less leg room and noticeably narrower seats, but we somehow managed to be wedged into the middle two seats of a row of four, which is obviously the worst possible seating luck.

WINNER: Australia.

On our Qantas flight we didn't have individual screens! I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't have even thought such a lack of technology was still possible these days had my sister not recently told me that the same thing happened to her on a United flight to America a few months ago. Happily one of the movies they showed on this flight was Michael Clayton (which I had been meaning to see and really enjoyed watching), but the other one which I embarrassingly endured most of was some tosh with Nicole Kidman and space aliens. Happily for Our Nicole, she had to spend much of the movie pretending to be a soulless, emotionless zombie type, which suits her acting style down to the ground. I have never seen her so convincing.

On the Swiss flight we had sensible individual screens and shows on demand, as it should be. Funnily enough, I watched another Nicole Kidman flick, this time Margot At The Wedding, which was far better than the Qantas one, but still kind of awful. I also watched a fairly excellent and peculiar Canadian movie without Nicole Kidman in it, called Lars and The Real Girl, which was bizarro and comes highly recommended (by me).

WINNER: Switzerland

The Qantas blankets were all soft and fluffy, and the cushions had surprisingly endearing little ruffle things around the edge.

The Swiss blankets seemed as though they had previously been used on horses and made me itchy. The pillows were fine but had no endearing qualities.

WINNER: Australia

The food on the Qantas flight was okay. I scoffed every skerrick of my first meal (and some of Reto's. This possibly says more about my hunger than the fact that the food was great, but it was certainly edible. It was an asian-themed pork thing). The second meal was worse (pasta with an extremely mushy cheesy sauce, allegedly gruyere but I would be very surprised) but still not bad. In between meals they gave you fruit, semi-upmarket 2-minute noodles (of the Suimin variety, if that means anything to you), hot chocolate and peppermint or jasmine tea. Oh, and one of the cold drinks you could get was Ribena!

On Swiss, the first meal was okay but not super (Some sort of unidentifiable chicken and rice number. Possibly I ruined it for myself by having a fantastic bowl of ramen at the airport in Hong Kong), and the second meal was atrocious. Reto disagrees with me vehemently on this point - it was breakfast, a bread roll, a croissant, strawberry jam, butter and strawberry yoghurt. Oh, and a banana, orange juice and a piece of gruyere. In my opinion, this isn't a meal so much as a bunch of assorted undesirable food items placed in close proximity to each other. The cheese was nice, and the banana would have been had it not been pre-frozen, but that's about all I can say for it. Reto, on the other hand, thinks this is his ideal breakfast (or something like it) and always goes on about how he likes the breakfasts on Swiss.

All the wine I drank on both the flights was Australian, so we're all even there, but on the Swiss flight no one offered me anything at all to drink for a stretch of about 6 hours. Possibly this is because I was asleep a lot of the time (and I suppose it's polite not to force beverages on people who are in no fit state of consciousness to drink them. Or even hold them), but there was also a lot of time there that I was awake and so dehydrated that my mouth felt like it had been chewing on the horse-blanket for the last few hours.

WINNER: Australia. Although Reto would disagree.

The Qantas flight had a landing gear (or whatever it is that makes the wheels go up and down) that sounded so scarily loud and crunchy that I was sure we were all going to die. Coupled with the alleged flickering of the cabin lights just after take-off (coinciding with the up-crunching of the wheels), the fact that the down-crunching seemed to need 3 goes to work properly, and the fact that it was a mere 12 hours or so since we had seen footage of that flight that failed to land in Hamburg, I was convinced we were going to die. Then again, I usually am.

On the Swiss flight - no crunching, no more than the usual mild-to-moderate anticipation of death during take-off and landing.

WINNER: Switzerland



Actually, in general both the flights were okay, but it would have been better if they were the other way around. On the first flight, which was shorter (9 hours vs 12 or so) we were not tired (we left at 3pm) but we had plenty of space for comfy sleeping and no real chance to watch movies (which is my favourite thing about flying). On the longer flight we were trapped in tiny claustrophobia-inducing seats with entertainment galore and hardly even the ability to stay awake for dinner, let alone a movie. It sort of goes with my theory about life here being all backwards and topsy turvy. Sigh.