Epic Flight!

Well we have completed our epic 24+ hour journey half way around the world in order to arrive in this beautiful, muggy, rainy, hot country.

We started out by leaving Flagler College at 3am. About 15 minutes after we left, our professor received a phone call from another bus driver wondering where we were. Apparently our group had accidentally been double booked with bus companies. The hilarity continued as we realized that we not only had one coach size bus for 10 people, but two. Crazy things happen.

The craziness continued on our flight from Orlando to Los Angeles. We had a winning moment when a group of us realized we were sitting in the two emergency rows in the middle of the plain. Hello glorious leg room! About 10 minutes into the flight at the tail end of take off an older woman behind me threw up and then appeared to be having a stroke. They called for any doctors or nurses on the plain, and about half the plain seemed to be so including an ER nurse, anesthesiologist, and some other kind of doctor. Well the woman wasn’t having a stroke, but through out the flight continued to receive medical attention, and about 2/3rds of the way through they gave her an IV. That has never happened on a flight before!

Melissa E. and I on the Plane 

We landed at LAX, paramedics took the older woman off the plane and we proceeded to our next gate, we had 20 minutes before the plane began to board for Tokyo. This was our longest flight about 16 hours. I watched parts of 3 movies, Gangster Squad, Guilt Trip, and Quartet. I also attempted to sleep and took SleepWorks by Advocare, it definitely knocked me out, but because it was a plane I wasn’t able to sleep in a super long stretch of time.  I ended up missing a snack and a meal, but they give you a lot of food that is not particularly great so no harm done. I sat in front of my friend Melissa E. and had a window seat. We tried to sit together, but the women on the aisle seats of our row didn’t seem to keen on the idea, so we dropped it.

View from the plane in Tokyo going to Vietnam 

We arrived in Tokyo, went through security again, and connected to our next flight to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. From here we switched from flying American Airlines, to one of their affiliates, Japan Airlines. Flying international airlines is awesome, because the food is so much better. For our dinner we had the choice between Chicken and Fried Rice or Pickled Plum and Seaweed flavored rice with grilled Spanish Mackerel. I got the latter dish and it was surprisingly delicious. The dinner also came with two side type boxes of food. One contained a potato salad type concoction with salami, shrimp, and another fish piece that may have been squid. The second component was noodles, tofu, spinach, and perhaps crispy tofu. The dinner ended with Haagan Daz ice cream and coffee or tea. Yum. Also they were the first airline to provide us with actual metal utensils and even a hard plastic cup for tea as opposed to the paper or foam cups of other airlines.

Japanese Airlines Food 

While we left at 9am from Orlando on May 21^st, we arrived in Ho Chi Minh on May 22^nd at 10pm. With the time changes and the amount of time it took to travel, we have essentially lost an entire day, and my brain is very confused. Tomorrow our journey of Ho Chi Minh begins.