Narita is the airport city just outside Tokyo. This is also where we stay, on our Tokyo flight layovers. The picture perfect city center in Narita is surrounded by a lush green landscape, and there is also a shrine and lots of small vintage stores.

I am back from Chicago and my first long-haul flight for almost 4 years. I started my layover with a visit to Le Pain Quotidien, where I got their oatmeal to go. Then I went down to the beach at Lake Michigan and found a sunny spot to sit down and have my oatmeal breakfast. Oatmeal tastes better with a view like this, don’t you think?

It is already May 8th and we wonder what happened to April? Well, time flies and so do we. Here are some of the things that we are looking forward to on this month’s roster:

I’m back in Sweden after a wonderful vacation in Hawaii. We stayed at Aston Hotel which is located on a quiet stretch of Waikiki Beach. We had booked a room with partial sea view but got an upgrade to full seaview, so we had the most amazing view of the beach and the palm trees. You pay $39 in service fee per day, but the fee includes sunbed, beach towels and sun lotion as well as the opportunity to borrow a GoPro camera free of charge.

Being a cabin crew is all about being service minded, being able to talk to people and wanting to help them. A small gesture is often all it takes to make a memorable flight for our passengers.  

On a long flight, food is often the highlight of the day. If you’ve run out of other things to talk about, you can always discuss the crew meal. Here is a sample of this month’s culinary delights:

After 3.5 years on the ground, keeping busy with a full-time job as a mother of three, it takes a while before the body gets used to working up in the air again. I had a rough start and did not take proper notice of the warning signs. Early check-ins, long flights and short layovers at airport hotels. Constant sleep deprivation and then back home, where three kids and a husband struggled with adjusting to the fact that the person who usually took care of everything from cleaning and laundry to grocery shopping, suddenly wasn’t there all the time.

The job as a cabin crew isn’t just a job, but also a lifestyle. It’s a great way to see the world (and get paid for it!) and when you’ve first hit the skies, it is difficult to imagine doing anything else for a living. Here’s how we ended up in the airline industry along with some of the best things and the worst things about working as a cabin crew.

So you think that most cabin crew are women? Think again! Magnus (@captainmagnus) and I had a flight together to New York, and out of 10 crew members, I was the only girl on board! It isn’t often that it happens, but we had such a fun time. Male or female, – all my colleagues are great!

When I got my first airline job and was undergoing line-training, I remember flying with an old and very experienced training captain. For the life of me I can’t remember where I went or what training topics were discussed on the flight, but what really stood out to me on that day was after the flight had concluded and the de-briefing was done, the captain said to me: “Poul, the best advice I can give anyone brand new in aviation, is to always be polite and respectful towards everyone you encounter, all the way from the baggage-handler to the airline CEO, because everybody remembers an a**hole, and in this industry you always meet people at least twice”.