I finally left this morning for Iasi! By "this morning," I
mean yesterday morning. I have been traveling since yesterday morning at 11 (I
had to ride MoEx since Mom didn’t love me enough to drive me.) It was terrible.
I laughed at the old lady next to me who asked that we stop in the middle of
the drive for a bathroom before we even started driving. Then about 30 minutes
through I had to pee extremely badly. It was the worst experience of my life. I
arrived at the St. Louis airport about 3 hours before my flight. I found my
gate and sat and watched Flawless. It was about Michael Cain stealing diamonds
from the London Diamond Corps. It was pretty good. Then I arrive in Chicago.
The flight was delayed about an hour. I entertained myself
here by calling Mom and Dad for the last time, eating some fake Chinese food,
and guessing which country people were from before they spoke. Then I went on
the flight. It was about 8 hours long. Thankfully they had some movies on the
flight. I watched part of Mission Impossible 3 and something else that I don’t
remember. It obviously had a huge impact on me. I couldn’t sleep a wink the
whole time. I had earplugs and a face mask and a pillow, but I still couldn’t
sleep. I might take drugs next time. I
ended up in London about an hour and a half after I was supposed to. This was
actually a good thing. I thought that I was going to be the last of the girls
there, but I ran into most of them at the security checkpoint. This was very
exciting.
The gates were weird. Our gate didn’t even open until 10
minutes before we were supposed to board. It was baffling. And the Heathrow
airport is humongous! We had to ride a bus to the airplane and we were clearly
the loud American girls. I like to think that we were amusing everyone else
with our conversations. But we didn’t all sit together, so the flight was safe
from us jabbering the whole time. The people sitting next to me were Romanian.
I think the woman might have been talking about me. I pretended not to know
Romanian until the very end of the ride when she handed my tray to the
stewardess. Then I said multumesc (Romanian for ‘thank you.’) Her facial
expression was great.
The British steward was determined to give everyone their
meal. I dosed off for a bit and when I woke up the meal was sitting on my tray
table (halfway on the other ladies since I was sprawled across my table…) Apparently
one of the other girls was asleep almost the whole flight, including when he
brought the meal. He left it on her tray and then at the end of the flight,
when they were gathering the trash he hemmed until he woke her up. This never
would have happened on an American flight. I thought it was quite humorous. The
British also offered tea and coffee for free. Unusual. *Note to self* I did not
like the chocolate truffle, but I forced myself to eat it because I thought the
lady next to me would be bad if I didn’t.
We have been chilling in the Buch airport for a while. We
weren’t even allowed to go past security until about an hour before our flight.
Weird. And you don’t have to take your shoes off. We finally made it through
security. I talked to a nice lady behind me who was with a very, very
attractive guy who spoke perfect English, but was from Huntington Beach, CA. He
said he went on an internship here 13 years ago and never really went back. I
thought this was very strange since he did not look close to old enough to have
been applying for his Master’s degree 13 years ago. I hope for some odd reason
we see him again.
Now our flight has been delayed for two hours, so we’re just
chilling by our gate. We had internet for a split second from some guy named
Greg’s phone. I sent a one sentence e-mail to Mom and Dad, but then the
internet (Greg) left, or else had heard us saying “USE GREG!!!” and turned his
phone off. Megan just fell off her suitcase loudly. Everyone looked. It was
quite humorous.
