The Finite

I was serenaded to sleep by Les Miz through my complimentary headphones for the second leg of our journey. I had to keep my eyes closed because the person in front of me tilted his seat back so the monitor was in my face and the human mind can only tolerate so much Hugh Jackman, you know?

Anyway, landed on time and in the right continent. The one with all the delicious fruits and animals.

Stayed in a hotel for a night and hurriedly shipped out at 5 in the morning double-fisting croissants (a poor decision since they were all crushed and hard when I ate them). One last time, we had to be accosted by security and declare that we had nothing to declare. I swear, those customs officials could smell the fear coming off me. Or maybe it was the 25 hours of traveling. In either case, they didn’t care.

Lemme tell, you Embrauer 170s are sketchy as shit! This plane had freaking ashtrays and shakes like a patient in benzo withdrawal. But whatever, they gave me two bags of macadamia nuts.

…Alright, five stars. Slow clap.

And then, we were welcomed into… The Compound.

The Compound is safety. The Compound is vital. Mostly because the Compound has Wifi. The Compound provides us our meals and bunk beds to sleep in. Our room of two has a single desk and shelving and space of hanging clothes. The Compound has provided us a mosquito net for which we are thankful and bottled water for our health. There’s also some tall, quirky medical students. And some dogs.

The Compound is our home now.

…in O’Hare of allergic rhinitis. Damn you 10mg loratadine, you are but a feeble peon in this harrowing struggle!

So, I’m either owning clothes way heavier than they used to be, I’m getting stronger or someone has altered Earth’s magnetic field, because it is now way easier to overpack suitcases. On the plus side, I can apparently deadlift 56 lbs, shortly before dropping it and falling down the steps of my apartment. Now to convince them to make that an Olympic event.

So then after all that hullabaloo, yadda yadda yadda, I’m in a metal tube traversing space… and time. But at the same rate as usual. And if you have any questions about what a Ugandan man’s elbow is like, shoot me an email, because after 8 hours, I can describe it on a disturbingly intimate level.

747-400s are nice though. Individual seatback LCDs and a remote/controller thingie. Well, I had an exit row since I’m special so I had an articulate metal arm holding my screen. They had movies -recent ones: Les Miz, Skyfall, Wreck-it Ralph- and select TV shows.

And a flight tracker.

And a preview of menu items.

And games you could play if you turned your remote sideways.

And an program for learning foreign languages.

And the headphones were free.

Yeah, KLM is pretty nice. The food was “eh.” Pasta was nothing to write home about. (Why I even wrote that sentence kind of confounds me.) But holy hell the cherry tomato, the cherry tomato, the freakin’ tomato. It was ripe. It tasted good. That’s all.

Also, highballs in the sky, suckas!

About that, I tried a coffee and cognac (the original Four Loko) and have concluded that I’m a lightweight because I never could have made it to lunch if that was part of a balanced breakfast. Luckily I was restrained in a seat for 8 hours so I made it to the end of The Hobbit without doing anything too unbecoming. (By the way, did anybody else find that the climax to that film took kind of a Wes Anderson-y turn?)

Some seat it was. Even though I was in the exit row, I was right next to the wall yet I had no window and I had the hatch impinging on my legroom as well as putting up with all the people congregating outside the lavatories. (I’ve decide the new rule is that all lavatory floors are made of lava.) I heard the same flight attendant tell people not to stand in front of the emergency exit for a good five hours. Which… why? Lady, we are 35000 ft up. If there was some need to use the emergency exit, don’t you think we’d have some advance notice? Because there’s such a thing as exiting a plane too soon, don’t you think?

Anyway, now I’m waiting at the airport for the next flight. There are a buttload of pictures of tulips here.