I flew Alaska
for the craft beer and biscoff
best breakfast on air.
Tag: travel
One over the otherĀ
When I think of layers, I think cold afternoons, coffee, and cookies. Layers always revolve around comfort and food. And no one combines them better than the Americans.
With bated breath
Waiting, for me, signifies expectation, anticipation, and the hope that something big is about to come my way. It’s the thrill of breathlessness and the unsettling uncertainty that makes waiting so much painful and yet pristine at the same time. There’s tension in the air and friction in the molecules all around us, and a mystery waiting to unfurl. That’s what I felt while walking down these Pleasanton suburbs. It was at around 7 am and not a cricket was astir. The entire place awaited the buzz of human existence.
In the distance, behind the shadows of these beautiful buildings stood a woman on her porch ready to scare away unwelcome trespassers. Perhaps I appeared too touristy to her, but she ignored my presence and glanced right through meāas if I wasn’t there. Oh, but I was, and I have this picture as a reminder.
Organisation
Perfect structures and organised systems are beautiful. They look nice, and the emit an aura of perfection that anyone would aspire to achieve. As a person, however, I’m not too structured. I never could live in an organised manner. Having said that, though, I can appreciate the beauty of structure elsewhere. Like in this picture of Polish vodka bottle. I came across this in a Duty Free shop at the Dubai airport, and I couldn’t leave without being the obnoxious tourist who sneaks in a photo everywhere they turn to.
Jet lagging
I love waking up early. I love challenging the sun and facing it upright just as it shows its face from behind the clouds. But not even I enjoyed being wide awake at 2:45 am.
Well, my preferences didnāt matter, because the day after we landed in a timezone about 11:30 hours away from home, my system was so messed up that at two am in the morning, I felt as awake as Iād have felt at 1 pm at home.
Ah, the miracles of jet lag.
The weird thing about being jet lagged, though, is that for the most part of the flight, my symptoms were different from the rest of my colleagues. Sure, we were all up by 3 am, but while they were all hungry at odd hours and remained jet lagged for over three days, I was in and out of jet lag in less than 24 hours. Apart from being jealous, to everyone else, I was the elephant in the roomāthe only one comfortable with the drastic change in time.
When some of my colleagues heard that Iād be traveling over the seas, they all said the same thing: regardless of how drowsy I felt, I shouldnāt ever sleep before 11 pm on the day I land. That shouldnāt be too hard, I thought as I boarded my first plane to Dubai. It was an overnight flight starting at 4 am and no sooner had I gotten on that I yawned far and wide. A few minutes into the flight, however, I was still up. I couldnāt sleep even though my eyes drooped and my brain bored. By the time the sunrise became visible over the clouds, they had served breakfast and I felt active again.
It didnāt take long for me to to doze on an off, but I didnāt ever once fall into proper sleep. It hit me hard only when I landed in Dubai. It was a brief transit, and we spent no time looking around at the massive airportāsomething I regret to this moment. Our next flight was even longer: 15.50 hours.
The enormity of that flight dawned on me when I felt as if Iād spent 2 days on the plane when we had in fact flown only for an hour. But we made it through, and landed not as excited as Iād hoped Iād be, but thankful beyond expectation. In hindsight, though, the flight wasnāt too bad. But at that particular moment, I was glad my feet found land. I still wasnāt sleepy, though. It was only while in the cab with end-of-summer breeze whizzing past my ear that I realised how sleepy and tired I felt.
To ensure we didnāt sleep, our colleagues sponsored dinner and we spent a long night wolfing down fancy burgers and kickass milkshakes. When we called it a night, it was early in the morning back home. Tired as a log, I had a peaceful napāuntil I woke up at 2:45 as fresh as a flower, cursing the colleague who predicted it. That afternoon, the weight of the sleepless nights came crashing down on me. And it didnāt help that I was in a boring meeting with sleep in my mind.
That night, things started falling into place. I fell asleep on time and awoke on time. From that day on, Iāve been one of the few to tolerate the time zone variation without a pill or pain.
And I couldnāt help but feel proud.
