It's official - I am lazy. It has been almost three months since I last posted anything in here. I could mention a lot of reasons: my stay in Bulgaria was so filled with social events (meeting relatives, friends, colleagues, all kinds of loved ones), relationship maintenance and.. well.. could see that coming, could you... parties, that I have not had time to sit on the computer and chat, let alone concentrate my thoughts enough for a decent piece of blogging.
Then there was my trip back to Sweden - even more dreadful (yes, it is possible) than the one to Bulgaria. If you see the ending part of my last post, you will notice a promise to myself never to fly with LOT again. This flight.. or should I say flights... confirmed my determination. I departed from Sofia in a heavy rain with almost an hour late. Being only 60 minutes late is nothing compared to my previous experience with the Polish Airlines. The thing is, I had a window of 45 minutes to get off the airplane, navigate the twists and turns of Warsaw airport bureaucracy and get on my next flight, the one headed for Stockholm. Needless to say, I missed that one. Instead, I found myself flying towards Berlin, in the same heavy rain.
Here is the place to mention that I was not traveling alone. Ok, literally speaking, I was the only passenger on these flights I was inclined to care for. However, a person very close to my heart was constantly in my thoughts. She had taken an earlier flight, same destination, different carrier. We had an appointment that she would wait for me at Arlanda, the Stockholm airport, for the three hours it would take me to travel from Warsaw to Stockholm. You can imagine my frustration when I found out I had to fly to Berlin and there board another plane, which was supposed to arrive at Arlanda around... well, three hours later than planned. Thus, in the brief interval between flights in Warsaw I was frantically writing SMSes to her and a Swedish friend of mine, explaining the situation and arranging a meeting between them, so that he could pick her up from the airport. If you have waited for six hours at an airport with no place to go, you can understand what I am talking about.
And there I was, several thousand kilometers above Europe, flying not north, but west. Upon arrival in Berlin I start searching for my plane. Well, first, I had to explain to the security officer what a physiological solution is and why I carry a bottle of it in my backpack. Luckily he was familiar with contact lense problems and was not too grumpy about my bottle exceeding the allowed 100 ml of liquid allowed on board. Then I found out two things: a) my plane is propeller-driven, which means that a 40 minute jet flight turns into 90 minutes of casual strolling in the skies, and b) the extremely efficient clerks at Warsaw airport had forgotten to book a place for me on the next flight. Not only for me, but for a 13 year old Swedish boy going back home from a family visit... by himself. I suppose it was that boy that saved the day with his cute disappointed face that managed to melt the hearts of the German clerks. We received our boarding cards and were admitted on board as soon as possible. We took off in the same heavy rain. Where had all that water come from?
Turbulence. I have experienced a lot of those, the airplane getting shaky, the wings vibrating like those of a dragon fly, and the flight acquiring the overall sensation of driving along an old village road without any pavement. This one was worse. Remembering the scary stories passed around in waiting lounges, I tightened my safety belt so that a sudden drop would not send my head smashing against the luggage compartment, leaving me with the mild inconvenience of a broken neck. The strategy was working... at least until I felt the call of nature. Waiting for the plane to settle down somewhat, I managed to fight it for a while. Then I squeezed into the tiny coffin having the dubious honour of carrying the name "WC". As soon as I did that I noticed two dimensional problems. First, my head was 20 cm higher than the ceiling, and second, my shoulders could barely fit inside. Were those planes planned by dwarves or by gnomes, I will not stop wondering. Exhaling and lodging myself inside did the trick.
Long story short, I managed to land in Stockholm in one piece. The heavy rainfall that was chasing me through the whole continent had decided to camouflage as a heavy snowfall for this special occasion. After just missing the bus for Uppsala, with the next one due in half an hour, and a 40 minute trip north, there I was, at the Central railway station, nine hours after I had started my trip from Bulgaria, waiting for my friend to come and pick me up.
And here we come to my third excuse of being tardy: I have moved out. I am living on my own now, which is actually heaps of fun but not that much blogging. But I am happy as a bug in a rug, and with this I leave you until next time. Not in three months, definitely.
