She'd Already Been to Italy and Poland Before Lunch

A Day in the Sky, a Night Across the Bridge

Read time: 2 mins 42 secs

Friday evening, Copenhagen Airport. The train platform was packed the way European Friday evenings always are — rolling bags, work bags, a low collective hum of people ready to be somewhere else.

We squeezed on. Tori and I, our daughter strapped to one of us, bags wedged at our feet. No seats. We stood, held the overhead rail, let the doors close.

The bridge appeared almost immediately. Flat grey water. Sweden on the other side.

She was standing nearby — dark hair, maybe 25, Ryanair uniform, one hand on the rail like the rest of us. The specific exhaustion of someone whose morning had started before the city was awake. We got to talking the way you do when you're six inches from a stranger on a moving train.

She'd flown to Pisa that morning. Then Krakow. Then back to Copenhagen. Used to be based in Gothenburg. Preferred it there. The move to Copenhagen was practical, not preferred — better routes, more hours. You go where the work is.

A few stops before Lund, she got off. I don't know where she was going. I made assumptions about the math — Malmo rents run 30 to 40 percent cheaper than Copenhagen, and the train is 35 minutes — but I don't actually know. She just disappeared into a Friday evening platform and that was it.

She was roughly the age I was when I first started traveling seriously. Except her version of travel was four flight sectors before noon, 189 passengers per flight, a packed commuter train across an international border just to get home.

Ryanair flight attendants earn roughly $2,000 a month in base pay. Most are independent contractors — no sick days, no pension, no cushion. You fly or you don't get paid. The salary gets supplemented by per diems and onboard commission — scratch cards, mostly. Ryanair sells lottery scratch cards mid-flight for around $5 each. Crew earn 10 to 15 percent per sale. On a packed Ibiza flight with passengers already in a holiday state of mind, a good crew member can add $90 to her day. It is one of the stranger economics of modern aviation — that a meaningful slice of a flight attendant's income depends on her ability to sell gambling products at altitude.

She didn't love the Italian routes. Too loud. Too much cabin baggage. Gothenburg she talked about differently.

There is a version of travel writing that is only about the traveler. The hotel, the meal, the feeling of arrival. I've written that version.

But the more time I spend moving through the world, the more I find myself drawn to the people on the other side of the transaction. The ones who rarely appear in anyone's travel essay except as background.

She wasn't background. She was standing in the same packed car, going home after a day that had taken her across more of Europe than most people see in a year. Tired, opinions about Italian passengers, soft spot for Gothenburg. Tomorrow the roster continues.

I have had travel days that felt hard. Long-haul with a baby. Middle seat. Missed connection. But I was always going somewhere I had chosen to be.

That is the difference. That has always been the difference.

She was just working.

The bridge passed underneath us and our daughter was asleep on Tori's chest. Through the window the water was dark and flat and going on forever.

We continued to Lund. Quiet platform. Slower weekend beginning.

The world is full of people keeping things moving. We just rarely stand next to them on the train.

Until next Thursday,
Jeff