Travlin' Fool

Traveling was uneventful, which is always nice. I didn’t encounter any problems and I was checked all the way through Cairo, so getting a boarding pass was at each stop was not necessary, which was awesome, because those lines got long! I have discovered that the best place in the entire world to people watch is the international flights area. There is such a jumble of cultures and languages all going on at once. Its so cool to be sitting next to someone and hear them talk interchangeably in three different languages, although it did make me feel slightly less accomplished. I love looking at advertising in other countries too. I had forgotten how funny things can be when words are directly translated and meaning is left by the way side. The funniest things that I have encountered in terms of products are boxes of cigarettes. I know, it seems odd, but they are hilarious. In Germany, half the box is blocked out in white and in bold black letters it states that SMOKING CAUSES AND EARLY DEATH. Here in Egypt, the boxes state that SMOKING KILLS YOU QUICKLY. This is not just some polite little reminder on the corner of the box, no, it is on the two largest sides of the box and it just screams at you! I don’t know that it makes much of a difference to the smokers, I’m pretty sure that they are going to smoke anyway, but it is funny to see them walking around with these huge warning labels that are just so direct it cracks me up.
I have also found a deep and undying love for in-flight movies. They were my saving grace on my flight from Chicago to Germany. I LOVE them! My first and second movie of choice was Prince Caspian. Why my second choice as well you ask? I was watching the movie the first go round and then we hit some turbulence and somehow the movie was restarted. I thought to myself, ‘self, you can’t possibly switch over to another movie now, you don’t know how this ends!’ As it turns out, I was only about a half an hour from the end of the movie when it restarted, so I watched Prince Caspian for about five hours and forty-five minutes (also known as almost 2/3 of my flight… woo!)
After my flight landed in Frankfurt, I had about 4 hours to kill. I wandered and looked around, but at 5:15 in the morning, not much is going on. I passed out on a bench in my terminal for a while, and then awoke when some of the other teachers from my school started to arrive. (How my body knew that this indeed was the time to wake up, I have no idea, but I am grateful that my future colleagues did not see me passed out on a bench like a homeless person, clutching her backpack!) I slept pretty much the whole four hours from Frankfurt to Cairo so that flight went wicked fast. And then, there I was sitting in Cairo airport waiting for my adventure to begin….