Vacation Time!

Travel Journal: Day 1. July 29/July 30 (depending where you consider my first day being)

Ahhh. Travel. I have officially left “The City” on July 29th to go see Sweden/Paris.
Leaving the city for a while felt a bit weird. I will miss the honking and yelling and drilling and screaming and the 6,540 different smells around my neighborhood.

Off to see Europe. Sweden offers many things like Swedish meals like Swedish meatballs and it also offers large open spaces and green rolling hills. Much like New York, if you took away the buildings.

So now I am sitting in the gate at the Amsterdam airport. Was kind of cool to fly over NYC and see all the skyscrapers and then come in over Amsterdam and see…well, all the pot growing fields. If I only had an extra day here, I would be giving myself the Amy Winehouse treatment.

When I was trying to exit the plane here in Amsterdam I realized how odd it is that it takes 2 hours to get on the plane, but 2 minutes to get off. It’s very much like sex isn’t it?
2 hours of airport fore-play. Taking off your shoes. Taking off your belt, your jewelry. After a lot of checking your photo on your passport to make sure you are as “hot” as your photo is, you finally get “inside”. Oh yeah. Airport sexual healing. But yet, once you are on the plane, it takes 2 minutes to get off of the plane. All this build up and then it ends so quickly.

The exiting off the plane is the funniest. Everyone on the plane suddenly becomes a New York taxi driver. Gets up from their seats as fast as they can and cut off as many people as possible to get out as fast as you can. It’s as if a giant monster is in the back of the plane chained up and they let it loose and you are in a race to get the hell off the plane before you become the monsters bitch. Everyone is just so ready to go.

Today was kind of long. We landed. Everyone stood up and then stood and stood and stood. Line was not moving. It was as if the guy at the front couldn’t figure out how to open up the door. “Oh crap. I slept thru this section in steward school. Is it pull? Push? Lift? Break? Oh crap….was this red handle supposed to come off? Anybody here know how to open these doors? Hand me one of those emergency pamphlets!”

Perhapse the pilot for a split moment had one of those moments where he thought he landed in the wrong airport. I had one of those moments before. Where you are in the right place but you have a weird feeling like you may have showed up in the wrong place.
The pilot is probably thinking “Is this Amsterdam? I don’t remember all these trees. Shit. Is this the right place? Everyone is already standing up and ready to go. Shit. What do I tell them?”

Meanwhile, throughout the flight I had to keep my headphones on. A little kid was screaming the whole flight. Kids on a plane is worse then a snake on a plane. I would rather snakes on my mutha’ucking plane more the kids any day. There should be some kind of rule where kids have to take a shot of scotch when they get on a plane just so they can pass out.

Overall, flight was a lot of fun. 6 hours and now sitting in Amsterdam. Got another hour waiting and a 2 hour flight to Copenhagen and then a 3 hour train ride into Sweden. Three countries in 24 hours. I am like Barack Obama just without all the “giving a shit to stop and say hi to politicians” part.

Will write more later.