Crossing the Atlantic

So first, about my trip: Not bad at all.

Of course it was a mad rush to Logan, and at the end I was seriously just stuffing things into my bags, rather than placing them in carefully--but oh well. The craziness of the situation took my mind off the fact that I was leaving home for a year.

Once I checked in, we had some time to kill. There weren't many people around the airport so I got the chance to walk/run with Will along the moving escalator-like sidewalks (What is the techical name for them again? It's probably not so technical!) backwards, like I've always wanted to try. It made me a little dizzy! Here are some action shots:

Goodbye Boston!

Not exactly the most attractive shot...

Thankfully on the plane to Paris I was sitting next to a youngish guy who kindly helped me lift my carry-on bag (it was heavy and chockful of stuff!) up to the overhead compartment, and then back down again when we arrived. He slept snore-free most of the way. I tried to sleep too, but not so successfully.

On my flight to Geneva, however, I sat next to an older Swiss businessman who spent the entire flight telling me how awful Americans are, which I considered to be rude, given hello?! I myself am an American, and there he was, making accusatory, too-wide blanket generalizations about a group of people I am a part of, not by choice but by technicality. He seemed to think that all Americans owned semi-automatic weaponry, and that hunting was a widespread national pastime. Luckily the flight was only one-and-a-half hours, and at least it was good practice to be listening and speaking French (albeit fragmentedly).

My connection at the Charles de Gaulle airport was smooth, except for the extraordinarily long lines through the security checkpoints, which ate up the entire hour-and-half time that I had to get from one gate to another. I didn't see much of Paris except for the airplane strips from out the window. So much for seeing the Eiffel Tower! It was nice being surrounded by such internationalism, though. I kept hearing snippets of different languages everywhere.

When I finally stepped out into the Geneva airport, I felt rather dehydrated and I had baggish pillows under my eyes, but aside from that, not too bad. When I was trying to lift one of my bags from the merry-go-round (I forget the name for the thing-y where you collect your luggage. Clearly I need to brush up on my airport vocabulary!) I nearly whacked an older woman with one of my suitcases and she gave me a very nasty look.

The real issue at that point was the transportation of my three enormous bags across the airport. It would have been helpful to have a carriage cart, but it required a 1-euro coin, which of course I didn't have. So I managed to devise a sort of luggage train that I pulled, or rather lugged, along. I must have looked slightly ridiculous, and very lost, because I wasn't quite sure where exactly Sophie (my host mom) was going to meet me. There were a lot of people and I was starting to get nervous that I wouldn't recognize her, wondering how different a person could look in actuality than on webcam.

Finally--at last! I heard an uncertain, "Ali...?" come from among the masses of people, turned around, and found S, Au, and I behind me.

And so it was all good from that point. I had made it!