May 20th - And We’re off
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008Well today was the day where I would venture off to India. I woke up bright and early tuesday morning, around 630AM. I had to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything important for my trip. We loaded up the car, and headed to JFK. When I arrived at the airport, the line was very long for Etihad Airways. This is the national airline of the UAE. Apparently their boarding pass printers had broken so we just stood in line waiting for them to be fixed. After about a half of an hour I got my boarding pass and proceeded to take all my luggage to a separate security station. Apparently that was also broken, nice start to the trip. While I was at the security station I asked one of the TSA agents if he had the key to the special TSA locks. He looked at me like I was from planet mars and eventually said “yes I do.” I explained to him that I had one of those locks and for some reason it was not opening and I wanted it off my mini backpack so I could lock it up with another lock. After a few minutes he did so, and I was off to get some food. Even though I had several sandwiches and some goodies, it has almost become customary to eat some sort of fast food early in the morning on the brink of a flight. McDonalds it was, figured some western style food couldn’t hurt before I went to a country where the stands for food preparation were quite low.
I ordered some breakfast style food, thoroughly enjoyed it but then I remembered that I had forgotten the charged and USB cable for my iPhone. Doooohhh! I called my mom to ask her if it was in my room, she told me it was, and she even offered to bring it to me from home. I told her that shit happens, not a big deal and luckily enough I found a shop in the airport selling overpriced bootlegged chinese iphone chargers, good enough for me!
After getting the iphone charger, I decided to head through security. Again the line was quite long, and they built an amusement park style dividers, so I felt like I was being herded like cattle through the line. I went through with a breeze and was off to the gate.
At the gate, I had about 2 hours to kill before boarding, well maybe an hour and a half. I sat down, put my music on and chilled out for a bit. Eventually I got restless so I decided to walk around the area near the gate. I played some video games, pacman and another old school game, just one each and returned to my seat. I started to briefly chat with the girl sitting next me. The only reason why we started talking was because while sitting at the gate, I happen to check one of my grades for law school, was extremely happy at the result and exclaimed “yes!” with my headphones on, and it turned out to be quite loud. I noticed that the girl next to me looked at me and smiled, so I told her why I was so jubilant.
As it turned out she was in graduate school at a small school in Minnesota and was traveling to Nepal herself. She was on my flight to Abu dhabi and was connecting to kathmandu from there.
Once again I got stuck next to a really large person on the plane. Luckily I had an aisle seat as I was fortunate to be able to pick all of my seats when I initially booked my ticket through the Etihad website. The flight took off thirty minutes late as we were waiting for the final few passengers to arrive. The airline seemed fine. The plane was pretty new and I had a large personal video screen in front of me. Initially the on demand movie feature did not work, but luckily after a while it did.
After getting my really gross asian vegetarian food, I put on my first movie, national treasure two. I love this movie and loved the first one. I ended up watching several movies and about 6 episodes of King of Queens. I was only able to sleep to sleep maybe an hour total on a twelve hour and twenty one minute flight, usual, the seats were really comfortable, but I think I was just too anxious.