Arrival in Germany

Well, it's been a bit longer than I hoped before my first post here. Plenty has happened, and I've really had little time to get onto the internet, but now I've finally got a second to myself and a computer I can use.
I guess I'd best start where it begins - the flight over.
11 O'clock in the morning, Tullamarine airport. I check into my flight, hand in my baggage and am given my boarding passes. My flight over to Germany is to be in two stages - from Melbourne to Shanghai and Shanghai to Frankfurt, both with a certain East China Air. Hadn't heard of them before, but for under $2000 in peak holiday season, I got a pretty good deal. After I was to arrive in Germany I was to tranfer to Hamburg with Lufthansa. Now, as I'm checking in at Tullamarine with East China and not Lufthansa, they tell me my luggage will not be transferred to the Lufthansa flight and I'll need to pick it up myself and check into the next flight in Frankfurt. Fine, I think. I can manage that. They give me the two boarding passes for the first two legs of the flight and I go on my way. Everything runs as normal for now.
Now I'm to find out why my flights were so cheap. Though, to be fair, it didn't bother me - I'm hoping this won't qualify for a white whine. But the plane was basic. And I mean basic. Now, for at least the last 10 years just about every international flight I've been on - and keep in mind I don't fly business or first - has had individual screens for every seat with a little controller that allows you to choose which music, movies and even games you want to play. This plane, however, had nothing of the sort. There were even still ashtrays in the seats, even though I'm pretty sure you haven't been able to smoke in planes since the Battle of Hastings. There was no movie or anything played for the whole flight. However, all that didn't bother me squat, because the plane was more than half empty. I had nobody next to me or in front of me, so I could spread out as much as I wanted. Now, for a tall bugger like me on a 10 hour flight all the entertainment in the world will never beat good legroom. The first leg of the trip, then, was pretty good. I even got a window seat.
So, after the first stage I arrived in Shanghai at about 7:30 at night, local time. After coming from the depressing cold winter of Victoria, the muggy heat of China was a bit of a shock to say the least. Together with being generally out-of-sorts from being on a plane for 10 hours I was a bit bewildered by the whole chinese system of security checks and little slips of paper I had to fill out. But in the end I managed to stagger through the labyrinthine bowels of the airport and find my boarding gate. Number 23 it was. Clearly printed on my boarding pass. My plane was to leave at 23:50 local time.
For the next few hours I'm sitting at this gate waiting for my plane to start boarding. A sickeningly cute animation of a pig singing about how to protect yourself from Swine Flu is playing on repeat on a nearby screen. He's annoying. I try to read a bit of my book. No indication yet as to when my plane can start boarding. Oh well. Still a couple of hours.
Now it's half-past 11. 20 minutes til the plane is supposed to fly out. It's not even indicated on the screen yet. There had been a delay with the plane before it, but this just doesn't seem right. I decide to get up an go hunting. Sure enough, as I'm strolling past gate 21, there's my flight number up on the screen. Final call.
Dammit! I look at my ticket. It says gate 23. Obviously somewhere between Melbourne and Shanghai they decided to change the gate number. I rush to board and try to explain to the unsympathetic lady why I was so late. Oh well, at least I got onto the plane alright. I was mighty pissed off, but it was less and less about my nearly missing my flight to Germany. Something was nagging at me. It was my transfer to Hamburg. I would arrive in Frankfurt at 6:05 local time, and the connecting flight was at 7:00. I had previously noticed how little time that left me, but at the time I think I had just assumed that my luggage would be transferred and I would just be able to go straight to my plane. And so I had forgotten about it until now. But what the lady who had checked me in at Tullamarine had told me began to gain significance. Instead of heading directly to my plane, I would have to first collect my luggage, check out, check back in, pass through security and find my gate. All in less than an hour! Damn girl at the travel agency screwed me over!
I sat in the plane to Germany worrying. This one was booked out, and the guy crammed into the seat next to me slept the whole damn way, before we even took off, with his elbow intrusively too far on the armrest toward my side. I was fuming and worrying uncomfortably the whole trip, but at least they had a couple of movies.

The plane arrived a couple of minutes early. Encouraging. Maybe, if my luggage comes out early, I might just make it!
No such luck.
I didn't need to wait too long for my luggage, but as it turned out even had it been shot at me from a cannon the moment I stepped from the plane I didn't have a chance in hell of making it. After rushing around the airport for a few minutes trying to find the Lufthansa terminal I discovered it wasn't actually in this building, but somewhere ages away. After climbing three sets of stairs and boarding a connecting train, I was wondering if I could have reached it sooner from Shanghai.
Finally reaching the check-in counter at 15 minutes to 7, hoping against all odds that I would make it, I discover boarding closed several minutes ago. Well, that figures.
So I had to pay another 100 Euros for the next flight to Hamburg, plus a couple of phone calls to let the people who were picking me up know the change of plans.
Well, after that it finally began to run smoothly. The Lufthansa plane was nice and modern, and as we landed there was a film crew on the runway filming my plane - as it turns out, it was the first commercial place to be powered by bio-fuel and they were shooting some documentary about it. Well isn't that nice. I'm afraid they didn't get a shot of me, so I'm not famous yet.
So, I was picked up from the airport without a hitch and I've pretty much overcome my jetlag already. I still have 4 months, 2 and a half of which are non-stop travelling, ahead of me in Europe. I just hope that my little adventures are going to prove the worst hiccups of the whole trip.