My European adventure (Take 2) started off brilliantly with a 14-hour delay that the airline didn't feel was important enough to inform me of. Luckily my dad is a lot better at planning for things to go wrong than I am and he checked the flight online the night before, so, unlike a good number of the other passengers, I did not go to the airport at 6:15pm on Monday only to be told to come back the next morning. Thanks, Dad :)
HOWEVER. I was excited about going on the new 787 Dreamliner plane that Norwegian Airlines insisted was the best thing ever and totally worth being ridiculously inconvenienced for. And I have to say, it was pretty cool. Not only did it fly (standard, I think), but it also had windows from the future. No physical shade to pull down, just a button that allows you to tint your window to different levels of blueness. Kind of like manual sunglasses. Also, the map was interactive! The map is, hands down, my favorite part of the seat-back screen experience, and this one allowed you to move the world around, see the little cartoon plane from different angles (not really a necessary or even interesting feature, as far as I could tell), and zoom in on different parts of the world and read little blurbs about various cities. So that was cool. I slept a little bit on the plane (it might have been my imagination, but I think Dreamliner seats recline like half an inch farther), but by the end I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that flying alone will always be awful, no matter how many movies and out-of-context TV episodes are at my fingertips.
The truly unfortunate part about the whole thing, though, was not the delay in leaving, but the effect it had on my layover in Stockholm. What was supposed to be a five-hour layover turned into a fourteen-hour one, which I was less than excited about. The plane landed at 4:10am and my next flight was not until 6:30 pm. Luckily, about forty-five minutes into my dayover, I met another American traveler, Sam, who was starting out on a month-long trip to Algeria. Just because, apparently. He was staying in Stockholm for a few days, though, and didn't really want to leave the airport until he could check into his hostel. Or at least, you know, until the sun came up. So he hung out and talked with me for about seven hours, which was really nice of him. We got hamburgers, had a nice talk, and discovered our mutual love of absentmindedly tearing paper:
That was a team effort.
So anyway, Sam left and I began the second half of my layover. The Stockholm airport has free wifi, but only for three hours, after which you have to pay. I figured having a fourteen-hour layover thrust upon me was good enough justification to ask for maybe a wifi password or something, but they were pretty much just like, "Fourteen hours?! That's awful. But no, no free wifi for you."
The next several hours are sort of a blur. I checked my luggage for my second flight, trying to ignore the judgmental looks of the airport employee when I told her I was headed to Amsterdam and she stared down incredulously at my two suitcases, duffel bag and backpack, because apparently no one brings luggage like that to Amsterdam. In my exhausted and frustrated mind I was yelling, "You don't know my situation!" but I didn't actually say anything. Obviously. Then I mostly spent the rest of my layover trying not to fall asleep all over the place. I was out like a light the minute I sat in my seat on the plane and didn't wake up until the pilot announced our final descent into Amsterdam, where Tom was waiting (with a chicken curry sandwich! One of the things I'd missed most since leaving Belgium) to take me to Gent.
I had an awesome few days in Belgium with Tom. We went to this little city called Aalst to take a tour of a chocolate factory, but the factory turned out to just be a little cafe and chocolate shop where you could watch them make chocolate through a window. So we got a piece of some kind of brownie pie and moved on. My favorite thing in the city was undoubtedly this street:
We also went climbing with Tom's roommate, Hugo and his friend Charlotte, and while I was still not good at it, I found that I was significantly less bad than I'd ever been before.
That's Tom on a wall! First top rope, then lead climbing.
Anyway! After a lovely few days in Belgium, it was off to the little town of Montdidier to see the school and get settled in my new room.
And that's it for now! Intro to France will come in the next post.
