I Was Sitting, Tired but Breathing

The flight over wasn't actually as bad as I thought it was going to be. I mean, it WAS twice as long as any other flight I've ever been on. Fifteen hours in the air. That's approximately the same amount of time as it takes to play an entire game of Super Risk. I was expecting annoying passengers, bad food, boredom, and DVT. Surprisingly, only one of these ended up occurring.

Since the flight left at 10:00, it was sunny outside when we took off (fun fact: it was sunny the whole flight, because we were traveling the same direction as the sun). Because of this, everyone quickly shut their windows and the cabin crew switched off most of the overhead lights, resulting in perfect sleeping conditions. After my terrible lack of sleep earlier that day, and now that conditions in the plane were about as good as they were going to get, my body was screaming for sleep. This was exactly what I wanted, as at this point, it was 9 p.m. in Bangkok - a little earlier than I would normally go to sleep, but not that unreasonable.

I had planned on sleeping on the plane as much as possible to counteract any jet lag from the 11 hour time difference where I was going, as we would be getting into Hong Kong in the middle of the afternoon, while it would be 2 in the morning back home. At that point, I would still have about 5 hours of travel left before I got to my hotel room. And I couldn't very well fall asleep at 7 at night once I got there either. That wouldn't help me adjust at all.

I ended up sleeping for about 3 hours on and off, and then couldn't deal with the neck pain anymore. It was time to get down to business. I clicked on the tv on the seat, and flipped through the movies and shows they had for my viewing pleasure. Nothing jumped out at me, although they did have the first episode of The Wire, which was impressive. Only the first episode though, which seems like a pretty bad idea if you ask me. I shudder to think of how many people have watched that first episode aboard their flight and then gone insane before they landed because they didn't get to see any more. When I was watching the show last summer, it was nearly impossible to force myself to go make dinner or interact with the real world in any way other than clicking the play button.

Very pleased with myself for predicting this lack of decent supplied content, I struggled to extricate my bag from its spot under the seat in front of me, not wanting to disturb the sleeping asian lady beside me. Once I had it free, I got out my laptop and booted it up. Before coming home after exams I had the foresight to milk my university of a bunch of bandwidth, and downloaded two seasons of House, along with 12 hours worth of movies. All of this was now stored on the hard drive of my laptop.

I spent the next 9 hours watching The Big Lebowski and episodes of House and struggling my way through airline food (I never thought it was possible to screw up bread and butter, but apparently, it is).

When I couldn't take any more differential diagnoses I, for some reason I didn't quite understand at the time (and still don't upon further reflection), ended up watching the new Sherlock Holmes. It was cut off about 30 minutes from the end because we were landing. I feel no compulsion to finish it when I get the chance.

The best part of the flight, though, was the landing. As we made our descent, everything was white for a long time while we passed through the clouds. All of a sudden, water appeared below. It seemed a lot closer than it should have been. I didn't really have anything to reference how high we were against at first, so I wasn't quite sure, and just figured we were higher than we seemed.

A few moments later, though, a group of fishing boats appeared, and confirmed my suspicion that we really were as close to the water as I thought. We couldn't have been more than 20 or 30 stories up. A few moments later, we crossed what I assume was a shipping lane, as there were a bunch of massive ships carrying shipping containers all moving the same direction, as if it were a road for ships. Very cool.

We continued our descent until I could see the individual fish jumping out of the water, and I spotted a line of buoys that were there to guide us in. Just when I began to think that there was no way we were going to make it to any runway if we continued descending like this, it appeared beneath us, and we were on the ground.

All in all, I give the flight four out of five stars.

(+1 for lack of crying babies)

(+3 for perceived length)

(+2 for awesome landing)

(-2 for poor food)