I woke up at about 6:45am (local time) and decided to get on with life.
Interesting bits so far:
1. "Tak" is yes, "Nye" is no.
2. While there's snow on the ground and it's just above freezing, it's not nearly cold enough for all the cold weather gear I brought with me.
3. Traffic intersections in other countries take a while to parse -- especially when you're trying to reverse engineer them from a taxi driver's driving.
4. Polish graffiti looks just like American graffiti. Perhaps we could all learn graffiti and talk to each other through this beautiful common language?
5. Our Polish apartment is small, efficient, and to the point.
Travel was fairly uneventful. We (that is,
meerkat, her mom, dad, and me) got to the San Diego airport, got all her bags together (each of us was traveling with 1 laptop bag, 1 carry on, and 2 suitcases -- the maximum we could get the airline to let us on with. I was allotted 1 carry on bag for my stuff), and sent her through security.While we were walking away, her mom got a bit teary eyed, so I mentioned that my feelings wouldn't be hurt if she cried now and didn't cry after they sent me through security. Nothing handles a bit of sorrow like a lot of humor.
Security and the flight to Chicago were uneventful for me. I was seated next to a genetic mutant who was having trouble fitting into his space, but I was on the aisle and don't need much, so it wasn't a big deal.
When I got to Chicago, I found my way to the inter-airport railway thing (cool!) and got to the international terminal. I made a couple of calls and located
meerkat. We had roughly enough time to devour a Pizzeria Uno pizza (tastier than the ones out by us -- maybe there IS something to this Chicago pizza thing?) and get through security. That got us on the plane to Poland.Stepping onto that plane was an experience. We were, I think, the only people who didn't speak Polish. It wasn't a problem -- everyone knew English and communicated with us. One of them had a PERFECT English accent. Like the sort you hear in recordings. Very strange.
The flight, as expected, was long. We ended up having a row in the middle aisle to ourselves, so we stretched out at one point and had a nice long nap. I ended up seeing a bit of a movie "City of Ember" that looked interesting. I'll have to put it on my netflix queue a bit later.
Did I mention that flight was long? It was!
We killed some more time playing cribbage. And the flight was still long.
We had another nap and it was still long.
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STILL FLYING HERE PEOPLE
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WAIT?!?!?! WE'RE STILL ONLY OVER THE OCEAN!?!?!?!
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lalalalalalalala, wow. Cabin fever anyone?
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Hey! Gameboy! MUST PLAY!
At some point after that, it became light outside. Additionally, we were over Iceland. After that we were over Europe. There was far too much cloud cover for me to see anything. This made me sad.
My first sighting of Poland was shortly before the airplane touched down. There was snow everywhere.
meerkat was unhappy. I braced for the cold and...and I'm going to go get breakfast right now. You mugs can wait for the rest of the post. Besides, you should be asleep now!
