The Flight

No pictures in this post...when you're flying halfway across the world, how haggard you look during the process is the last thing you want to record. But anyway: here is precisely what happened. We left Omak at 2AM and drove to Wenatchee. Mom fell asleep quite quickly (as she does on just about every journey) leaving Dad and I to talk about life, the universe, and everything. When we got there at 4...it was closed....

No duh! You say? Bit of back-story: One or two years back, Daniel was flying out to Japan and he had the same early-morning flight to Seattle as I did. They got there with plenty of time to spare, but had already closed the ticket counter, instead sending the people there to load up the plane (despite my parents being there early). They refused to let my brother go any further, despite the fact that it was still half and hour to take-off...so my parents had to drive all the way to Seatac and luckily got him there on time. Wanting to avoid this, we went extra early...and so had to wait outside.

Standing in the airport, I said my goodbyes and sped through Homeland Security (which has a full operation in Wenatchee even though there are only 4 outbound flights a day...waste of tax money in my opinion). Luckily, I was able to check my baggage all the way to Poland and avoid the stupid baggage charge in the process. Hoorah for sanity! The plane was a nice Bombardier jet, but someone on board had a crazy, intense allergic reaction to any sort of nut. Intense to the point where the smell of it would cause her throat to tighter...so we didn't get a snack. Lame. Un-eventful trip and landed in Seattle.

My friend Matt Kraske met me at SeaTac with his tricked out Volvo and we drove up to the U-District (making a quick detour for some Krispy-Kremes) where I had to pick up my ballot and rain-jacket from my friend's house. I went down to the Cafe Solstice on the Ave and enjoyed a last-minute hangout session with some of my best friends in Seattle. My ballot didn't arrive and my friend Quinn forgot my rainjacket, so I had to run up to his house to get it. I arrive there and find out that the house is all locked up so I receive instruction to crawl through a window. Kind of dodgy but lots of fun. Take the bus down to the airport and go through airport security again. I take the tram thingy to the C-Terminal and grab breakfast from Burger King. While enjoying my delicious mushroom-swiss burger, I run into Dr. Justice who was on his way to some conference in Chicago (Dr. Justice is from Omak and incidentally on hand when my brother was born years and years ago). After enjoying my burger, I watch some How I Met Your Mother on my computer and hop onto my plane.

My flight was on Lufthansa direct to Frankfurt and was quite nice. The flight wasn't full so I had my row completely to myself. My usual plan to avoid jet lag is to completely avoid sleeping the day before I travel so by the time I got on the plane to Europe I was at about 40 hours without sleep. Needless to say that is what I did the most during my 10 hour flight. I was also able to slip a movie in (The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, not too bad). I had researched the flight before on Seatguru.com and made sure that I had the best possible arrangement. The Airbus plane that I was on was equipped with Personal Video on Demand in every seat. This meant that i could start the film whenever I felt like it, and not have to try and stay awake at the beginning of the flight.

I landed without any issues at Frankfurt. Evidently as soon as I got into the customs line they decided to take a lunch break or something, as I was standing in the same spot for the better part of an hour...annoying but I had a 6 hour wait so it wasn't a big deal. I grabbed a sandwich and cola and went to my departure lounge where I was delighted to discover that Lufthansa had free espresso machines. Unfortunately there wasn't any free Wifi...but I wasn't worried as I brought my Nintendo controller with me and played some Mario while I was waiting.

My flight to Poland began with a 15 minute apron level bus ride to the opposite side of the airport where we had to climb the stairs to board the plane. Sweet. After a quick hour in the air, we landed in Krakow, Poland. Baggage came on the carousel just as planned and I walked right out into the lobby.........where no one was waiting for me. I waited 30 minutes and then figured I would try and contact the school. Luckily they had an internet kiosk that accepted eurocoins so I was able to look up the school's contact numbers before finding a pay phone. Pay phone ended up being a bad idea as they're now trying to charge me $30 for the in-country call. Gar. Luckily the person to pick me up was just late and showed up 10 minutes later. After stopping by for some pizza, we drove all the way to Bielsko-Biala, where I met my Australian roommate Mike.

And that be enough for today. So yeah. Long post but that's ok. More to come soon