My flights were fairly uneventful and fairly long yesterday—though they don’t compare to the 16-hour non-stop from New York (and that’s a good thing).
Apparently, at 5 a.m., the gate from Lingnan facing Fu Tai is closed. Finding this out at about 5:25, I got to run with my luggage along the driveway to the front gate and run back to Fu Tai. I still got the 5:30 A33, which cost $25… a little more than the E33, but cheaper than the taxi I’d have needed to get to it quite that early. It took just about an hour to reach the airport.
Here Northwest impressed me (not favorably) by shoving me at the back of the Economy class check-in line for passport verification. “Save time by checking in at nwa.com” … or not. It was the first day of the liquids/gels regime at HKG, so there were lots of nice free plastic bags. I guess that’s good. I broke with tradition and skipped Popeye’s (their breakfast selection wasn’t looking very good) and had some fast food while I basked in the Wi-fi.
The flight to Tokyo was fine. We got a meal, which is the nice thing about flying anywhere outside of the United States. In Narita airport, I ended up buying some hideously overpriced dumplings (3) and iced tea for around ¥720.
I had snagged a bulkhead aisle seat, but a mother and baby had snagged one of the middle seats in that row. Instead of sleeping, I watched two-thirds of a season of Arrested Development.
SFO airport was disappointing. Immigration was incredibly painless—as a matter of fact, the whole place looked pretty deserted. Customs was more interested in whether I’d forgotten to pick up checked baggage than in my myriad visits to Thailand. The terminal where I waited for my flight to Detroit, though, was disappointing. This 20-gate range or so was cut off (by security) from the rest of the airport. It had one restaurant, one coffee/smoothie place, a few newsstands and souvenir shops, and… that was it. The restaurant had some clippings on the wall bragging about how SFO’s restaurants are 80% locally-owned. These are weasel words for “few in number” and “unconscionably pricey.” After my $6.95++ oatmeal (sob…), I sat down and started wondering about how I could imagine living in New York City.
I was paged before my flight to Detroit and told that due to an equipment change I had a new seat. “Don’t worry, it’s still an aisle.” Of course, it was in the last row and next to a mother with baby. After the door closed, a flight attendant took pity on me and moved me up to the other free seat, also an aisle, about halfway up the plane. Here the occupant of B (I was in C) told his squeeze in A that he was “really fuckin’ irritated” about that, as he sprawled halfway into my seat. I used my Hong Kong-trained zen powers (the combination of inadequate food and lack of sleep) to cram my fleece against him and go to sleep.
I guess I’d irritated him some more: he switched with his friend, who seemed perfectly normal and contained her sprawling.
The flight was delayed a bit en route for weather problems, so when I arrived in DTW fast-food places were shutting down. I gave in and booked a room in the Romulus, MI Super 8, which was decent. It had an airport shuttle, which was my top consideration. I escaped for under $50… I’m not happy about it, but it was good to have a room. Took a sleeping pill from WVU’s travel docs around midnight, and woke up at 6:45 to my alarm.
Maxine, a high school classmate (and saint, I’ll add today), picked me up around 7:30 and drove me into Ann Arbor. I walked around the Central Campus a bit and ate breakfast. This, too, seemed deserted at around 8:30. Maybe Michigan wakes up later, or maybe my metric of crowdedness has been severely warped by Asia. It started raining as I went back to the Campus Inn to check in to my mostly-subsidized hotel room. I’m in it now—it was ready really early. Registration for the events starts at 1:00 p.m. over at the Lawyer’s Club, the (predominantly 1L, I think?) residence in the Law Quad.
And that’s that. Boring, but exhaustive. I’m not really feeling the lag right now, but I’m sure I will this evening. I did get a few hours of accidental sleeping in flight, and I did knock myself out last night, so it shouldn’t be too bad.
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