12 December 2009
Here I sit on my sister’s sofa, one of my nieces beside me and a nephew playing with a giant yellow dump truck on the floor at my feet. I’ve got a belly full of beef fajitas and I’m about to fall asleep, even though it is only 6PM. Awww, Mexican food. Awww, jet lag.
I’ve been on three airplanes in the last three days. On Wednesday I boarded a Hainan flight from Beijing to Seattle. Hainan is the first Chinese airline that I have flown internationally. Other than the man seated next to me, who snored for 9 out of 10 hours, it was a completely uneventful flight, so I guess I’d say Hainan is a great airline to fly.
I spent way too many hours in the Seattle airport. As airports go it is not too bad. They offer free wireless Internet, sponsored by Google. When I attempted to plug in my laptop power cord I realized that I left my adapter back in China. At that point I knew I needed some caffeine, so I went to Starbucks for a grande latte. The poor barista didn’t know what to say when I handed over $28. “It’s $3.47,” she said. Doy! A grande latte at a Chinese Starbucks is 28RMB, and so I just automatically thought “28.” Yeah, it didn’t even occur to me that a $28 latte was excessive. I feel like a tourist in my own country.
From Seattle to Denver I flew on Alaska Airlines. Alaska’s airplanes (livery) feature a man on the tail with the biggest afro I have ever seen. I don’t quite understand why. The flight also featured the perkiest flight attendant I have ever seen. She told us “Welcome Aboard!” at least 20 times. I had a little nerbulence on approach to Denver, but as you can see, it ended well.
My flight from Denver to Houston was on Frontier, an airline I had never even heard of before. It’s a low cost carrier that features different animals native to the northwest and Alaska painted on their tails. My flight featured Fritz, the mountain goat. A mountain goat? We couldn’t have something majestic like an eagle? It seems to be a trend to paint interesting things on the tails of airplanes.
Last night after my sister picked me up from the airport we went to watch my brother-in-law play volleyball in a charity tournament. His team won and although I was nodding off due to the jet lag, the final games were exciting. This morning I went to watch my niece play volleyball at the local YMCA. I’ve learned more about volleyball in the last two days than I ever knew before.
I’ve got to go now, my niece and I are going to watch a program on Discovery about giant rats, “Ratzilla.” The thought of it is both disgusting and thrilling.
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