Our Way Home

I can't say that what I've just experienced was one of the more pleasant journeys of my life, quite apart from having to leave Whitney and come back to lectures.

Things started off in a taxi to JFK airport. I was slightly surprised that when I phoned for a taxi to pick up one passenger for a 40-minute drive, Westchester Express sent a huge minibus (which isn't so much a contradiction in terms as you might think) for which I was the only passenger for the whole time. During the journey, the driver kept commenting to me about the names and histories of the various hip hop bands he was playing on the stereo. I felt it more appropriate to smile and feign interest rather than say that I was a fan of rock and therefore probably his mortal enemy, at least music-wise. Nevertheless, he was nice enough.

However, the company's latest pickup time was 7pm and my flight was near midnight, giving me several hours at the airport to waste time. I wandered up and down the row of shops trying to decide which place looked least hideous to get a meal at, and eventually decided to give them all a miss. Instead, I sat on a crowded bench and read a Darwin Awards book, making sure to spend a great deal of time on the Theory of Evolution pages so to people reading over my shoulder it looked as if I had some degree of intelligence.

I got fed up of that ploy fairly quickly, though, and went through the gate to wait out my last two hours before the plane took off. The A-gates have between them a couple of TVs and two Ms. Pac-Man machines - full marks for retro appeal, but no marks for anything else. I did spend a dollar to go on the Internet for a while, but was unable to accomplish anything of value within the meagre four minutes that it gave me. Even at Aberdeen it's £1 for quarter of an hour, and Hotmail is free at Edinburgh. Who says the Scots are mean?

With that possibility exhausted, I went over to the Namco cabinets and proceeded to guide Ms. Pac-Man, leading the four coloured ghosts in their futile dance of eternity. Not to boast or anything, but I stayed on it for about half an hour without putting any more money in. But no matter how good you are at the game, you eventually die. There's some sort of hidden philosophy of life there. Anyway, the record high score was over eight times my own, so whoever set that must have had an incredibly delayed flight.

When I finally got to sit down on the plane, I found it strange that no one was taking the seats beside mine. It's always nice when you have two people to three seats, as there's a lot more legroom, but this seemed too good to be true - I was sure that every time someone walked down the aisle, their searching eyes were going to alight on Row 33 and stare down at me, silently politely asking me to shift. But that never happened - I had an entire row of three seats on the plane to myself! Once we'd taken off and the lights had gone down to let people sleep, I sprawled across them, smiling in the knowledge that I was using roughly £400 worth of seats that I hadn't had to pay for.

Ironically I slept really badly, because the seats are just not wide enough to perch comfortably on without the straps digging in to your back. After four hours of restlessness I gave up on it and started reading Tony Hawks' "Round Ireland with a Fridge" (gifted to me by e_to_the_ipi, which I'm very grateful for as it's even funnier than reading both sleigh82's and humphrey_clarke's journals in their entirety, and that's quite an accolade).

Once again I failed to find anything approaching entertainment among Amsterdam Airport's endless cheese, clogs and windmill shops, and decided to trek around the airport, reaching the end of each terminal and back, on my way to the next flight. Perhaps it was because I hadn't slept, but it was on my way around that I decided that one of the things that I most hate is the way that some people stand two abreast or in groups on the belts, rather than "rechts stehen, links gehen" as it says on the signs above every one of them. (Actually, they would only say that if they were in Germany, but I imagine the Dutch equivalent is very similar - just with a few extra Js thrown in.) Having people stand in clusters means that to get past them you have to either shout above the background noise and hope they realise they're being spoken to, or just batter them with your hand luggage to get past. After six hours on a 747, the second option certainly seemed the more appealing.

Back in Aberdeen, my parents looked kindly upon my sleepless plight by grilling me viciously about my engagement and plans for next year throughout the drive to St Andrews. They're thinking of buying a flat for a holiday home nearby, though, which would help us a lot if they let us live in it for a year...

Suddenly I have lectures to go to again. This time, there are Operating Systems, the return of the dreaded Logic, and a course on Databases taught by someone with an awfully long Asian name that I would never be able to spell. At least this week is the week of no practicals, meaning plenty of time to waste in the afternoons.

gh, you're a hardware sort of person, how about getting together some sort of teleportation device so I don't have to go through all that again? I can't help out much, but I do have a fairly large student loan if funding is what you're looking for.