Friday, November 25, 2011

On the plane to LA, bored and tired


My check-in was a little stressful. The check-in staff has to verify that the US will allow me to enter the country before they will give me the tickets. So they ask for my passport and where I will be staying. However the addresses I gave them weren't being accepted by the US computer systems. Turns out I was suppose to mention that I had actually already been given a visa, whereas they just assumed I would be on a tourist visa. Anyway they entered the visa details and everything went through okay.

The baggage checks and the customs were long, the lines were moving but they were long. Even though the actual rooms used are relatively small because one has to zig-zag through them you end up walking a long distance. Then after that you are forced to walk through a long line of duty-free shops and there is no shortcut even though they could have built one. Then the gate I was going to was one of the furthest away from the end of the line of shops. So much so that they put moving walk ways in. All this walking was compounded by the fact that I had quite a heavy bag on my back with most of the weight coming from the laptop I am currently typing on.

Getting onto the plane wasn't too much of a hassle because on this flight I am flying premium economy and so the line was nice and short. Yay! However the plane ended up being delayed by too obnoxious customers who must of gotten lost or something because we ended up setting off 30+ minutes from the scheduled departure time. Alas I suspect this type of thing isn't as uncommon as it should be.

We had turbulence for a large portion of the beginning of the flight. We weren't allowed to take our seatbelts off during the first half hour due to it being particularly bad. I am not talking about the few little shakes at the start of the flight due to going through the main cloud layer, I am talking about major jerks at cruising height. We were served lunch with the turbulence still going. Towards the end of lunch it did get to the point were you couldn't have a full cup of liquid without it spilling. Though that eventually died down. They did put seatbelt sign back on shortly after all the lunch had been packed up but that ended up only being a pre-cautionary measure.

During the turbulence and lunch I was watching Captain America. Not a bad film really. I would recommend watching it if you haven't. It was only at the end of the film did the turbulence eventually die down. After that I started watching the social network. Not the greatest film in the world but it was decent. I actually watched it in two parts. Half way through they closed all the windows. This might have been because were were moving into darkness though I don't actually know. At any rate the cabin was dark, my eyes were sore and I so I decided to try and get some sleep. Key word here was try as I didn't actually manage but I started getting a head-ache so it was probably no bad thing that I had my eyes closed. As I write this, around 8 hours into the flight, the head-ache is coming back so I guess I am going to try and get some sleep again.

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