in zurich :)

"hey Pat, I'd like to buy a vowel because O My God!"

yeah, that about sums up the last 24hours (or more? I have *no* idea!) of my life.

Urbana -> Iowa City (Saturday)
Left at 630pm. Arrived at 1030pm. ugh!
Met up with landlord of room that Kosh is renting for the month. OMG. She wouldn't stop talking. And in a very thick Indian accent. And she kept on and on and on. Arthritic hands ("they are not as good as they look"!); Wanting two separate cheques for rent vs deposit even tho she's gonna bank them both in, and issue her own cheque to refund the deposit at the end of the month. Writing long notes to Kosh, and to herself to tell Kosh, and reading them out to us, and so not makimg sense. Zoinks!! Anyways, the place itself is, well, very very basic. But can do lah for a month.

The next day : walked to the medical center area from the house : took almost 30mins! Jinkies! That's a LOT of walking every day. And it certainly seems more than the advertised "5 blocks from campus".

Breakfasted. Showered. final packing. then off to the airport, which is 30mins away. Checked in at the counter. No luggage to check in. travelling light, whoohoo!

Person at counter gave Kosh a "fake" boarding pass so he could get into the departing area with me, instead of us having to aprt before the security checkpoint. That was cool :)

Starting the journey

... started with goodbyes lah.

Get onto plane : even tho we are all ready to leavee, we are *too early* and would probably end up circling ORD, burning precious fuel, waiting for our alloted landing time, so the pilots had instructions to NOT leave until 5 mins before scheduled departure, at the earliest.

Fine. Got to ORD on time. Of course, this was the thing I had concerns about, cos I had a 30min connection... arrive ORD 5:55pm, leave ORD 6:30pm. Did a fast hike from Concourse G to Concourse K - good thing they were all in the same terminal!

I'd like to buy a "d"?

Got there... got to my seat... only to find that seat "D" was NOT an aisle seat??!! I've never had that before... I thot it was standard among the airlines to label their seats the same way so that evryone would know window from aisle to sucky seats! Cos if I'd known I was getting a sucky seat I'd have tried to change it at Cedar Rapids already!!! Grrrrrrr!!

Playing the helpless (short) maiden
So I get to my seat. I can't even reach up for the handle to the overhead compartment to get my bag up there. I flash a brilliant smile to the nearby steward asking if he could help me. There was no room at the compartment immediately above my seat, so he had to go searching the nearby compartments. He made a remark about me being able to help look for space too. Hello, I can't even reach up to open the bloody things! *sigh* ... it got me thinking.. I can appreciate even more the set-up of the Malaysia Airlines planes... I guess they are made with shorter people in mind? Oh and the little touches too... the silly hot/cold towel at the start of the journey / after sleep time ... free drinks with the meals... free headsets to listen to the entertainment channels... having a large electronic games selection... wow, I'm actually looking fwd to flying any MH flight... in January, I suppose...

Yellow or brown?
Had an entertaining air steward in charge of my area... instead of asking if we wanted beef or chicken, he'd ask if we wanted yellow stuff or brown stuff. And breakfast was supposedly left-over yellow/brown stuff. there was one couple seated closeby who didn't 'get' or just didn't appreciate the humour... I on the other hand was quite amused.

do you have any green?
Another thing from my booking that didn't happen the way it should have : in order to avoid the risk of running into pork products served during meals, I have my meal preference put down as vegetarian (not vegan). Ansd guess who didn't get to have greens instead of yellow or brown? (I chose yellow, btw). One more thing to complain to the airline....


Sleepless, but not in Seattle
Couldn't sleep at all. Ended up doing puzzle after puzzle of sudoku. And that's another rip-off: the new book of puzzles I got seems to be filled with real easy puzzles! I'm not having to do any 'pencil markings' to complete them in no time. Quantity is *so* much less satisfying than quality and challenge, lemmie tell ya. I ran through about 25 of those puzzles before getting to LHR.

Ah, LHR ....

We were in a holding pattern for about 45mins before being cleared to land.

At one point, I thought we must be in the clouds plus experiencing a bit of turbulence : nope, turns out that was us landing. In major fog. hence the delay in landing.

Ready to go but no info available
And guess what? That of course translated to delays to the outgoing/connecting flights too.... But OMG, LHR's system really sucks! They want you to look for boarding information on the departure boards... but when there was still nothing for my flight at 1130am, when it was supposed to be leaving at 11:55am... you know something's wrong... then a "delayed to 1220hrs" popped up on the screen. I went up to the Customer Service desk anyway, to confirm what was going on with my flight: according to the clerk, it was delayed to 1330hrs. Different from the info on the board. Go figure. One good thing from the delay was getting a GBP 5.00 food voucher, so I got myself a chicken-advocado sandwich and 2 bottles of water compliments of British Airways.

Everyone needs a shoulder to lean doze on...
Finally get on board the plane. I doze off. When I wake up we still haven't taken off. I guess I dozed off in fits and starts, and ended up semi-leaning against the shoulder of the lady next to me. Couldn't help myself... hadn't slept in so so long! Didn't do much for me tho, it is always so uncomfortable on the planes...

Finally make it to ZRH at 5pm. Since I had no luggage to claim, I went out of the first exit I saw. Which of course was not the one my brother was waiting for me at. So had more sms exchanges before we met up.

Now am at his place. He's off at an evening language class. I took a long-desired and much-needed shower. Skin totally dry but can't find lotion anywhere :( Once am done with this will probably just hang out in front of tv and pass out. Am kinda running on empty right now :p

who am i why am i here?
next, will need to figure out what exactly I'll be doing over the next week or so. Have a headache just thinking about it. So I won't. think about it. till later.

bye!