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2:50 p.m. - July 17, 2002 I also think that living in Munich has given me this really sort of fashionable sense--after all, Munich is ultra trendy, and where I live, Abercrombie and Fitch seems to rule. I've grown accustomed to tight jeans, red shoes, tight clothes and very stylish hair, clothes, glasses, purses, etc. So I'm looking at all the people in the airport, thinking, "Man, these people look like slobs." Of course, I looked like one, too. I invariably look like one when I hop on a plane. And I look even worse when I get off the plane. Especially if I have not slept for about two days. Yes, I did not sleep during my last night in Munich. I stayed up to clean, and ended up just throwing practically everything away. I was just so stressed out and running on adrealine. Luckily, there was no sick feeling, like the one where I feel like I'm going to die (last time I stayed up for two hours straight, I made myself so sick.) I took three separate flights; one from Munich to Frankfurt, one from Frankfurt to Newark, and Newark to Cleveland. I ended up on a business class PLANE on the way to Frankfurt, which means I was pretty much the only person on the plane wearing jeans and a t-shirt, reading a book as the people around me wore suits and ties and dressy clothes, reading things like Capital and Deutschland Financial Times and spreadsheets and stuff about investments. That was one weird hour. Talk about being in a totally different world... From Frankfurt to Newark...I had to go through two security checkpoints (grr). It took me about an hour to get through passport control and security, and I was just so frustrated because I was so thirsty and couldn't find anyplace that was selling bottles of water. By the last security checkpoint, I found a pop machine and got myself an Apfelschorle, went through, and as soon as I got to the waiting area for my plane, I saw a water fountain. (In the whole year I've been here, this is the first time I've seen an actual water fountain!) Whoa. I love Continental Airlines, because the food is decent, and there were little TV screens in the seatbacks of the chairs, so you could pick what movies and stuff you wanted to watch, so that was super! I watched Ice Age. I wanted to watch a TV movie, but well, I fell asleep. I guess that's okay, though...Got to Newark, and chatted with the people who were sitting across the aisle from me, because she saw the Hugendubel bag I was carrying, and she struck up a conversation with me. She was nice. So was her husband, though he was not as talkative as she was. When I went through passport control, the guy asked me for a second ID because he thought the picture in my passport didn't look like me. Hmm. I thought that was weird because that's never happened to me before, and I am sure a lot of people don't look like their passports, either. Plane from Newark to Cleveland drove me nuts. I was sitting next to a little kid, maybe seven years old. I like kids so at first, I was like, no problem. But he was one of those really restless kids who can't keep his hands off anything, and I was falling asleep, them I'd get a jab in my side, courtesy of the kid. I tried (repeatedly) to fall asleep and stay asleep, but he'd wake me up one way or another. Eventually I got so frustrated and escaped to another seat, which was thankfully empty. I slept soundly till my ear started hurting (I guess the cabin pressure was a bit off or something). There was a little baby that was crying and pointing to his ear. I thought to myself, "That's exactly the way I feel..." And I always feel so badly for little babies on airplanes, with the air pressure and stuff, because they really don't understand what is going on and don't know how to cope with it. Now I'm home and not quite feeling like this experience is final, that everything is at an end. It will happen, this realization that it's over. In the meantime though, I've been keeping busy trying to figure out where to put everything (when I got home, I saw all my books and was amazed at how many I have, and looked at my clothes and hated them.) I got to play with the closed captioning on our TV, and was so pleased to finally have closed captioning after a year, and managed to get a DVD to play in my brother's Playstation (an Indian movie, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam). Our lawn, thankfully, doesn't look bad. There's no lake of dead grass. But a lot of it is consistently brown and dried out. But then again, so are our neighbors'. Apparently, we've been having a really hot summer so the grass fried. I'm getting my hair cut today. Finally.
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