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Published: January 27th 2008
North Pole
flying over the north pole!Well my trip around the world is finally here! As I write this, our plane is located directly on top of the north pole. Today got off to a rocky start, to say the least. Bad weather in Chicago would have caused me to miss my flight to Hong Kong from there, so at 8:00 this morning in the Columbia, SC airport, I was given a new flight on a different airline. I didn’t leave Columbia until 12:30pm, and headed for Newark, New Jersey. I thought the flight from Chicago to Hong Kong was going to be long, and then I found out I’d be on a non-stop flight from New Jersey to Hong Kong! And indeed, this flight is ridiculous! The total trip is 8,061 miles, and just like my original flight, I still managed to end up in a middle seat. So it’s basically impossible to sleep. Everyone has their lights on, the airline keeps feeding us a meal or a snack every hour or two, and did I mention I’m in a middle seat? I took a whole sleeping pill a few hours ago, and it’s had no effect. I’m very tired, just not in a position to sleep really. It’s hard to pass the time here too. I’ve been on the plane already for 7 hours, and there’s still almost 9 hours left in the flight.
Did I mention we’re over the north pole right now? The current temperature outside is negative 87 degrees F, which is pretty dang cold! Everywhere I look for the temp, I see it in Celsius, which means I’ll have to learn to read it that way. My flight is mostly Asians, either from Hong Kong itself, or using it as a layover to some other Asian country. So all of our movies onboard are shown with Chinese subtitles, and our food menu was in Chinese, and after the captain speaks in English, someone translates it into Chinese. None of that bothers me, I just don’t think I was expecting it until I arrived in Hong Kong. But it was like I was already in China while standing at the gate in the New Jersey airport.
Anyway, I might take another sleeping pill here soon and see what happens. These last 8 hours are going to kill me! I’ve only slept 3 hours the last 2 days, so I would very much enjoy the sleep if I could get it. I’m told I will have internet access where I’m staying in Hong Kong, so I’ll try to set up some type of blog when I get there.
More to come later!
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josh
non-member comment
First!
glad you finally got this going. those thailand pictures on facebook are amazing.