My First Flight, or "How I almost missed my first flight"

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So, my first travel blog post.

Yesterday, on the 23rd of April, was the date of my first ever time flying in an aeroplane. I set my alarm to 9 o'clock, but due to air travel-related stress I woke up around six. It wasn't like I had anything else to pack, I had done plenty of packing the night prior. Thus, after 3 hours of nervous waiting and thorough watching of instructional videos on planes, I departed to Schiphol Airport. I arrived at around 10, so I figured I'd have plenty of time to get through arrivals and board my plane that was leaving at 12:10. I figured wrong.



Getting through baggage, border control and passport checks took 2 hours. 2 hours of standing in line in sweaty hall full of people who didn't want to be there. 2 hours of old people elbowing their way through crowds because they had been "waiting for hours", implying we hadn't been. 2 hours of middle aged balding guys who smelled so rank people wanted them to be first in line. 2 hours of children screaming, babies bawling, the whole shabang. Man, airports suck. I got through passport control at 11:57. My gate was supposed to close at 11:55. Only by a stroke of luck (and the fact that multiple passengers were also running late) my gate closed 10 minutes late. I had never been so relieved, which was lost on me because I felt like my heart was gonna give out from running to gate D24 (one of the furthest gates from the departure hall).



My frustration with airport queues and fear of missing a plane made me completely forget to be nervous about flying. Luckily, I remembered just when we were about to take off. Taking off is the strangest feeling I've ever felt. Being pushed back into your seat while outside your window the other planes turn change from enormous structures to toy models to tiny blue blips is genuinely the oddest thing for a newbie like me. The flight itself was uneventful, luckily, although I did get a nervous feeling when Bowie's 'Space Oddity' came up on my playlist (a song about an astronaut who dies in space). Having to swallow to get the pressure off my ears while not producing any saliva was also an unexpected challenge.



When we decended below the clouds above Edinburgh I was met with the sight of a hill that was bigger than the highest hill in the Netherlands, although here it was nothing but a speedbump when compared to other Scottish mountains. At the airport I met my friend Camile, and my host, Will. We took a tram to Will's house, where I dropped off my stuff. After quickly walking past the shop where I will be working for the next 2.5 weeks, we said goodbye to Camile and went back to Will's house. There we watched an episode of Game of Thrones and had dinner (or 'tea', as the Brits call it for some reason) before departing to St. Andrews, where we watched a concert performed by Will's brother. I am not a huge fan of classical pieces, so the charms of the concert were lost on me.



When we got back it was 23:00. After watching one last episode of Game of Thrones I called it a day and went to bed.

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