Flight to Dublin

Yay, my first post!  I hope you're as excited as I am.  This is the story of my flight:



I had a pretty good time spending Monday traveling.  I flew to Chicago in the morning.  I packed my carryon with my laptop, my ipod, and a few travel books about Ireland, hoping to have a lot of free time to read and write on the plane. Well, the flight to Chicago was so short that I didn’t have time to do any of those things.  I sat next to a high school senior who was going on a short trip to Ireland with his school, and at the end of our row was a pregnant woman who works for the military.  Both of these people got pretty freaked out when we took off.  The woman went into a legitimate panic attack.  I tried to say comforting things.  I felt bad: apparently, she has to fly for her job about every two months.  Once we were in the air, they were both fine.  We spent the time chatting and laughing at the SkyMall magazine.  A zombie-crawling-out-of-the-ground statue for your garden?  Really?  (It did make me think of Tasia in the zombie parade.)  And my favorite item: your very own voice-activated R2D2.

Once we got to Chicago, I hung out with other students from Notre Dame who were also coming to Ireland.  My friend Allison was there, and I met a number of other people in the program.  Our flight didn’t leave until 6:50, so over our eight hour layover, other people from our program began trickling into the airport.  Eventually we all congregated at the gate.  A girl named Nicki brought her guitar, and she and my friend Patrick had a little jam session right there in the terminal, which was very awesome.  Just as it was getting dark, we got on the plane.

All of the flight attendants were Irish.  It was quite exciting.  They served us tea after dinner and after breakfast, and they asked for our “rubbish” instead of our trash.  I've discovered that my reaction to interacting with people of different cultures is to be extremely polite, I think in an attempt to not offend them by accident.  I turned off my ipod and took my earbuds out whenever the attendants came by, and I said very distinct pleases and thank-yous.  We also had little TV’s on the back of every seat, which played 15 different movies, showed episodes from about 30 TV shows, played different albums of music, and contained simple videogames, including an inter-flight golf tournament.  It was pretty intense.  I quit the golf tournament after getting 7 points in the first three holes.  As you may imagine, not so much reading or writing got done.

Unfortunately, between dinner, breakfast, and the loss of six hours because of the time zone difference, we only got about four hours of quiet time on the plane.  I was exhausted, but sleeping on a plane isn’t very easy, even with those nifty neck-pillows and May It Be from Lord of the Rings playing on my ipod.  When we began approaching Ireland, I was hoping to look over the person next to me (I sat one seat away from the window, on the isle) and see the countryside as we passed over.  No such luck.  It was cloudy.  Big surprise, right?  So, as we slowly descended through the clouds, I kept my eyes on the window, waiting for my first sight of Ireland.  I had no more hope of seeing the countryside, but at least I could see the city for a little bit.

Finally, we broke under the clouds.  It was still twilight, and little yellow lights spotted the range of buildings below us.  Europe has been getting a lot of cold weather, and it had snowed only days before, a rare occurrence in Ireland.  The snow still clung to the corners of the patches of grass that lay among the buildings.  At first they looked like farms, or small pastures walled by trees, but as we got closer to the center of the city, they became smaller and decreased in number.  But even half-buried in snow, in the dim early morning light, in the middle of the Irish winter, they looked green.



I’ll post more about what recently happened later.  Over here it’s 12:45 (or 24:45, is that right?) and I should go to sleep!