Meeting Iasi

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.