And So It Begins... Much Less Dramatically Than The Title Would Seem To Suggest

This twenty four hour plane trip was actually one of the best i have had up until now. I think it was my first time by myself but it was rather uneventful and not very stressful. The first leg of the trip to chicago was just trying to busy myself so that i didn't get bored without draining the batteries on my various electric devices or having too much fun. "Why would having too much fun be bad?", you might ask. I try and keep myself busy but not have fun so that i don't set the bar too high for the next leg of the trip. This may seem stupid but it's only an hour and a half there and i would rather deal with slight boredom than think about how much more boring it is on the next 13 hour flight. I know that i would compare it to the previous flight and not be happy with the thirteen hour flight because you just can't sustain that amount of fun for that long in such a confined space. They had some fairly good movies on that trip like how to train your dragon and clash of the titans. I actually liked the dragon one best, it was very good. On that flight however there was one man who got on my nerves a little bit. He was sitting in the exact middle of the row and got up to go who knows where every 30 minutes. I watched him and he didn't even go to the bathroom. He just walked up to the front of the plane and back. Being in the exact middle he of course got out on my side EVERY time. It was quite bothersome to put it politely. At the airports there was a subtle underlying competition going on. I had a three hour layover at each airport and it was the same at both places. As you may know there are outlets periodically on the baseboards around the airports. You had to fight to get to them. You need to be polite and yet viciously nab the oppurtunity when it arises. The trick was determining who you thought would leave first and then casually hanging out near them and trying to blend in. Then when they left you needed to swoop in at walking pace and plug in before anybody else did. It was tricky and took a little bit of practice. I did not however have to recharge my nook. I read it for the last two hours of the longest flight after i ran out of movies. because it was in airplane mode it did not need to connect to the cell network and saved lots of battery power. After those two hours it was still at ninety percent charge so i didn't need to charge it the whole time. Great christmas gift Mom and Dad. The last flight was the best by far. I was not tired at that point and i had absolutely no idea whether it should be night or day. On the last one however i fell asleep immediately for some reason. I slept through takeoff without my seatbelt on and didn't even turn on the tv the whole time. I only remeber maybe ten total minutes of clarity but the memories i had were vivid. One was supreme annoyance at my immediate neighbour. i had a window seat so i only had the one guy next to me. Problem is, he was a big guy. At one point i woke up and sat up straight looking to use the armrests for added comfort but to my surprise he had taken the armrest and a good portion of the space next to it in my seat. It's bad enough when one person takes the whole of the one armrest given to two people but then he oozes over it too. His arm was on the armrest("arm" being the space directly around the bone and muscle) but then the excess oozed over. i was annoyed and slightly disgusted but decided to fall back into blissful sleep. Then next time i woke up i was in that in-between place somwhere not quite awake or asleep. That place where thoughts slow to a crawl and blinking takes several seconds to open your eyes again. During this I could hear at least five people coughing within three rows around me. It was at this point that i recieved a bit of a realization and actually thought about airplanes. This thinking took quite awhile to process but i got there. i thought about all those people sneezing and the various germs floating about through the air. I realized that a plane is basically a closed system of reproccessed air that continually circulates. Those germs where probably circulating around with little breeze to refresh the air. That's when i decided i didn't care and fell back to sleep. I slept so soundly i missed the attendants handing out the customs forms and almost forgot about it until i was leaving the plane. I rushed back in and asked them about it. Feeling proud of myself for remembering. I was not so proud about the form later. To stay in the country you had to wait in a very long slow-moving line to hand someone your passport and that form i just remembered. I fill out the form and saw that there was an arrival half and departure half. I though to myself, "i'm only arriving now so i only need that half." Being me, i ripped it in half and only took the arrival half. It only occured to me halfway through the line that i should have kept the other half just in case, but i decided not to go back and get it because i didn't want to rewait for in line again. So i wait and when i finally get up to him he says i need the other half. I ended up having to wait longer and go back and start over again. Yeah, not my smartest moment.