For most of the year 2015, I was in more flights than I was in car rides. Even so, in all of my experience with flying, I have never spent as much time on one plane as I did in my flight from JFK to Guangzhou, China.
While I grew a little restless towards the end of the 16-hour flight between the United States and China, most of my time on the plane was spent watching films and cracking up at Nicole’s stories of the man she sat next to for the first hour or so of the flight, and her plight in interacting with him. Sixteen hours gave me quite a few things to think about – for example, why don’t they give out complimentary candy on long flights? Haribo’s peach gummies were all I could think about during my entire flight to Guangzhou.
Long international flights are always strange in that time becomes surreal, and I begin measuring my productivity in the number of films I’ve watched. Considering that my television refused to work properly and I constantly had to turn it off and back on again, the fact that I managed to finish The Jungle Book despite having to reboot the television at least five times in order to is, to me, an accomplishment worthy of mentioning.
Anyway, as usual, the views from the plane window were indeed sights to behold. Although we had to keep our windows closed for the most of the flight’s duration, when we did finally get to open them in order to peek out at the sky shortly before landing in Guangzhou, I loved passing by the giant clouds, and imagining them to be titans, embalmed by frost and left to linger in the sky as stacked swirls of cotton.
All I can say now is that I’m super excited to see what the rest of this trip has in store for us! I have the feeling that it will surely be worth these long flights from home. 