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(Do you see what I did there in the title?)
(Do you see what I did there in the title?)
My flight itinerary looked something like this:
A total of 18 hours and 5 minutes of travel time (plus 3 hours and 30 minutes of lay-over). For someone who had never traveled on an international flight before, the whole flight journey was worse than sitting in the mid-school history class twenty times over (at least you get to wiggle around plus bonus points if the teacher is hot).
And this:
It was as if we were racing time (and thus, the Sun <straight
face>). It’s not even funny, when one pesky passenger opens the window pane
and everyone is blinded. Like literally.
My miseries didn’t just end there. As hard as I would try, I
would just not able to find a good position to sleep. My ass hurt all the time
and I would take frequent pee breaks to just calm myself down. I drank more
juice than water and somehow ate the odd-timed
seemingly-tasty-but-definitely-not-healthy flight food.
The in-flight system was exceedingly overrated. I was tired
of the unresponsive low-res screen in less than an hour and would only fire it
up to know how far we are into our path (it did have a pretty cool visual insight).
Plus the remote they provided was strangely difficult to handle, especially
with the old trackball and odd placement of arrow buttons. Movies looked
pathetic (if you could actually successfully load up the movie you wanted to see)
on the small screen and the subtitles usually covered half of it. I tried
listening to music, but it would frequently be interrupted by the pilot
giving us information we didn’t care about in an accent we didn’t understand at
a volume that was barely audible.
When we reached Chicago, I was heavily sleep deprived, had an upset tummy, was uneasily claustrophobic and had no clue where my specs, socks, laptop sleeve, shoes, earphones, flight ticket and phone charger lied. Getting out of the plane felt like:
We quickly switched on our phones to make that frantic skype call to our parents, check our mail and whatsapp, but the airport Wifi was such a fail. (even after it made us go through all the steps to log in)
What followed was a painful hour-long wait in the immigration line and a mess-up of sorts with the luggage – things too saddening to elaborate. We managed to stuff ourselves inside the university bus and then travelled for another 2 hours towards Urbana-Champaign. It was the first time I was sleeping in over 30 hours and thus, barely have anything to talk about.
