With the exception of Frankfurt, whose biggest failing is its extreme popularity (and which isn’t that bad in my book either), I’ve always found German airports a pleasure to use and my maiden visit to MUC, and its recently launched “Star Alliance all under one wing” Terminal 2 at that, was no exception. It’s hardly an exciting airport, but there’s glass, steel and big signage everywhere. Passport control to leave Schengen took about 10 seconds, the lady checking passports not even bothering to interrupt her conversation with her cubiclemate, and once out of the EU I beelined for the Senator Lounge.

A major plus for LH lounges has always been their spread of food, and today MUC held the banner high: today there was a choice of half a dozen salads, an array of cold cuts and cheeses, Bayerische leberkase (which means liver cheese, looks like meatloaf, and bears a disturbing resemblance to Finnish sausages tastewise), various breads and soft pretzels, crispy dessert concoctions, and a full bar including two kinds of beer on tap. The downside, though, is the wireless internet, which they (or, rather, T-Mobile) are just giving away at 8 euros per hour. Would it kill them to, say, drop one of the salad dressings and use the money saved to free up the net? But at least they have comfy seats with built-in power plugs, so I could wait out the projected 15-min delay for my flight and recharge my iPod as I did so.

Of course, once at the gate it wasn’t a 15-min delay (it never is, is it?), but closer to an hour’s wait. I’d been glad to see from the outside that the plane we were about to board was smallish, but had four engines: in other words, it was the somewhat uneconomical but long-range and, most importantly, brand new A340. At BCN, they’d already confirmed that I had an exit row, but after walking past some delicious-looking business class pods that caused me to (almost) feel a pang of regret at not paying US$750 to upgrade, I was surprised to find that my seemingly unpropitious row number was, in fact, the first row in Y and an exit row bulkhead at that, with oodles of space. I’d even begun to hope that the neighboring seat might be empty as well… but moments before the doors were closed, the huge guy I’d seen already at the gate resting his arms on his own stomach plopped down next to me. He offered to swap his window with his aisle, which I obviously rejected — and for once I thanked the big, chunky, inflexible divider between us, which kept him from spilling onto me. I did feel a little sorry for the guy though: he was way too big to open up the table or even reach the in-seat controller, so he just sat there for the entire flight, staring at the route map.

Speaking of route maps, the ThaiVision variant on this is one of the spiffiest in-flight entertainment systems I’ve seen to date anywhere. Not only was there a huge spread of movies and music (I watched “Last King of Scotland”), but they finally had an updated, interactive version of Skymap, including goodies like half a dozen views to choose from and live navigation data. Alas, the interface for it was a little buggy, with the zoom and move buttons working only sporadically. (8 hours into the flight, I figured it out: pressing and holdingthe Channel up/down buttons zoom in and out. But the program still crashes and hangs sporadically.)