Sunday, March 6, 2011

Journey to GERMANY part one. for lack of a better title. (THE PLANE)

Sooooo I am in Germany for Spring Break.  I'm here for Lutherans, and it's incredible, but we're not starting at the incredible part; we're starting at the beginning.

So Spring Break started for me on Thursday afternoon.  I packed my bags at breakneck speed, and hoped against hope that I was prepared to be in a foreign country for a week.  We took what was essentially a school bus with an unusually interesting driver (he basically spent his time talking to us advertising for Cat’s Cradle, which is a fascinating example of media overlap [is bus driving a media? Doubtful.]) on the torturous 3 hour road to Charlotte.  This was nothing, however, when considering the plane ride that we were about to undertake.

9 hours is a long time.

It is SUCH a long time.

So nothing extremely eventful happened between arriving in Charlotte and getting on the flight, except that I ate pizza. It was delicious.  Here is an example of just how subjective the definition of “eventful” is on this blog. ( MY WHIM IS LAW)

Then we boarded our plane to Frankfurt.  I am in a group of 50 Lutherans, which you can imagine would be quite rowdy all together on a plane.  Sadly for us, the plane decided to split us up a bit in hopes of keeping our volume down.  

It worked.  Rather than yelling and screaming to everyone else the entire flight through, me and my lcm neighbor flew much like we would if we were separated from a huge group of people.  (It was her first flight, so of course I knew turbulence and landing were going to be much scarier and stressful than I remembered them being before.)

I had my laptop charged and I planned on getting homework out of the way on the road, but you know what they say about “the best laid plans”….   Actually I have no idea what they say but I assume that it ends negatively.  Inform me if it is otherwise.  

So there I am, contemplating what to spend my 9 hour trip observing.  They seemed to have a good selection of movies, and I hadn’t figured out the trick to those stupid headphone jacks, so I spent 5$ on a crappy pair of airplane headphones.  They had both Social Network and The King’s Speech available, and this marvel of Oscar-winning content excited me to end.  

Unfortunately, I didn’t remember that movie watching on airplanes is the most inconsistent and low quality experience there is available in terms of sub-par observance of media. (Besides listening to your ipod while you wrestle down pigs covered in filth.) [I hope that isn’t hard to follow.]

So after 15 minutes of The King’s Speech, I gave up and decided to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks 2, but in Spanish.  I enjoyed myself immensely. (surprisingly, Alvin and Simon are actually pretty easy to understand; it’s Theodore whose squealing Hispanic speech is hilariously incomprehensible.)

TO BE CONTINUED

2 comments:

  1. Germany sounds like a pretty awesome spring break! I can't wait to read your next blog about it. I hope it’s awesome! I have been to Europe but have only visited France and Switzerland. Germany has always depressed me, mainly because of that World War II situation. I don't know what else they are known for! For example France is known for its sophistication and fashion, England for its monarchy, and Spain for the hott Spaniards. When I think of Germany I think of Jewish people! They need to get it together and change their image. But yes the movies that they air on airplanes are of terrible quality! I remember watching “21” on the plane to France, and it was a surprisingly good movie, but my headphones were terrible and the woman beside me had an awful snore. Not a very fun experience. I hope you’ve been keeping up with Carolina basketball, despite your distance from the United States! Every game in this ACC tournament has been so intense. Have a safe trip back to Chapel Hill!

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  2. Oh boy do I hate plane rides! They take FOR-E-VER and then the worst part is that you have to suffer through another one on the way back. Sounds like every plane ride I've had to go through! But longer... I just cannot stand their stupid headphones. I wish planes would put more money into things like that, then “first class” would have to be twice as nice as it is now to compensate for the nicer “average” class flying I suppose. Unfortunately they’re already short on money as it is. My parents went to Germany in September and they said it was the most fabulous place to visit! I wish I could go to Europe for a visit sometime. I've only been to Canada and Costa Rica, so I feel slightly un-cultured. I wish I could have done something that fun for spring break! I went to the beach, which was still quite the fun, but the beach just isn't a foreign country!

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