Winter Vacation Part I-Transport

School was out for two weeks for winter vacation, and although the Board of Education Office wasn't closed that whole time, I used a few vacation days to fill in the gaps. I was so excited to get out of here but I didn't take the time to get any Christmas gifts! Fortunately the airport was pretty empty (actually, at 6pm it felt like 2am, it was so quiet), so I got through check-in and security in time to start my vacation with a little airport Christmas shopping. I'll admit, most of the gifts weren't great, but they were from Japan...

Everything was going well until I found my seat on the plane. It was a middle seat in the middle section of the 60th row of a 747. We pulled away from the gate basically on time, but then there was some kind of problem on the flight deck and the pilot was on the phone with a technician in London! Why London, you ask? I have no idea! It was a Boeing plane with United Airlines and we were sitting at Kansai International Airport, you'd think someone in Japan or the US could help, but he was on the phone with London. Pretty soon we were back at the gate and some local technicians were coming on board to fix a circuit breaker and I was finding out that there were two Marines to my right. One young and one older, they didn't know each other, but they seemed to enjoy talking about guns and crazy nights at bars and various Marine stuff that I prefer not to know about. I'm sure they were just as thrilled to find out that they were sitting next to a vegan when we were in the air and my special meal arrived. It's a good thing I can read some Japanese, because my special meal didn't turn out to be so special. The entree and salad (without the creamy dressing) were OK, but the packaged bread (which was served with butter) clearly listed milk products, eggs AND lard in the ingredients. The dessert didn't have a list of ingredients, but since it was clearly gelatinous, I didn't want to risk it. By this time I had spoken with the older lady on my left and found out that she was on her first trip to Japan, tagging along with her husband who was on business, and was sitting in business class. It seemed that she didn't really enjoy Japan, she claimed that she didn't see any other foreigners (although when I asked her where she had gone, they were all the tourist spots) and she thought it was terrible that the Japanese people...in Japan...couldn't speak to her in English.

To top things off, there were no personal TV screens on this flight, so when the movie started I noticed that I was too short to see the screen and the jack for my headphones didn't work. It was really a lovely nine-hour flight, and once we arrived in San Francisco, I had missed my connection to Colorado Springs! I was rerouted through Denver with stand-by tickets, the woman helping me said that my bags would be going on those flights even if there wasn't room for me. I was really happy to make it on the plane to Denver, and I was even sitting next to good company! When we landed, I thought I had already missed my connection again, but checked the board just in case. That flight was running late, but it was just about to leave, so a I ran from gate 40-something to gate 80-something and just made it! When I got to Colorado Springs, miraculously only about 4 hours late, they said my bag was still in San Francisco.