Plane Pain

(Wrote this above Hong Kong Monday Morning)

So during my thirty plus hours of journeying today, I have had a lot of time to think, and have come to the conclusion that international travel is really an earthly form of purgatory.  You literally sit in a box for 15 hours, and let nothing happen to you., then get on another plain, and do it again . It’s so frustrating. Hours of driving to the airport, waiting to get on the plane, waiting to get off the plane…  My conspiracy theory of the day is that the airlines invented  teleportation years ago, and  sit us in rocking, video screen window boxes and laugh at our futility while they take all our money. 

Granted, that thought was born entirely of 24 hours of sleep deprivation, combined with my unrequited fetish for Mr. Spock.

So I am doing all this traveling, sitting in this teleportation box so that I can somehow or another get to India, and spend a month admiring  the culture in the idealistically “gritty” manner of a white middle class college student. 

I Am Excited. About:

  History. India is such a historic, mystic place., home to religions three times as old a hundred times more unfamiliar to me than that particular brand of Baptist brainwashing that I have grown up with living in the south.

Native People.   I  think it will be a good experience for me to be a minority.  Even on this plane, I feel like a pale  awkward giant surrounded in a sea of  petite dark heads and velvety brown eyes.

Adventure:  Most of all, I am excited about doing something four continents outside of my comfort zones. 

I Am Nervous About:

 Flying: I hate air travel.  I have all these old testament inspired fears of God striking down the unworthy. I can think of several descriptive and colorful phrases that have left my mouth in the last week, and I hope that my climbing in a little metal tube and shoving myself under His nose doesn’t make Someone’s smiting finger a little twitchy. .  (Kidding about this kind of, but in all seriousness I don’t really  feel comfortable riding anything farther off the ground than  Michel Phelps;)

The food.  While delicious, I am growing ever more worried that  a prolonged diet of highly spiced and exotic food is  going to anger my already disgruntle digestive system into producing something  that will rival the Ganghes in consistency and force.

So here I sit, cards on the folding airline table, recording the ravings of a greasy  sleep deprived mad woman.  I really don’t knw what the hell I am doing for the next four weeks, and while I am excited to find out, there is definitely a little bitt of trepidation in with the excitement  We get our schedules tomorrow, and judging buy the fact we wont be back at our rooms until four  tonight, yet they  schedule our first meeting at ten in the morning, USAC is run by a bunch of meany-pants sadists.

But I will deal with their  wicked ways later.   Right now I am going to take my leopard print travel pillow, and see if I can “accidently”  curl up on the shoulder of  the man next to me, thereby making him uncomfortable enough to surrender  the armrest to my innocently dreaming self., for the last hour of my last flight.

Ready or not  India,  here I come.