En Route to Asia

So, I realized in uploading some of my photos to My Flickr that it may be a bit redundant when I upload them here, so what I’m going to do is link to the photos, and then elaborate on some of the stuff that I said more briefly (or not at all) on Flickr. Sound good? Okay. (Also, please let this be your warning that there are tangents aplenty related to these photos, so you’ll get all the scoop on those HERE, not on Flickr.)
We’ll start with THIS ONE and THAT ONE. The one of the cards is a game of rummy about to begin. On the plane on the way out there, since it was supposed to be night time (in the time zone we were coming FROM, as I recall, but not in the air at the moment) they closed all the shades and cut the lights, making it all dark and sleepy. It was also ‘movie time’ as one of the flight attendants said, and was it ever… boring. So we played cards for a long time. Rummy, it was, and it was pretty even I think. We had a running game going, and had all intentions of keeping up with it at later times on other planes and in other terminals, but somewhere along the way the tally was lost, so we kept a mental note. As I said on Flickr, that was before LF caught the death and was completely and entirely miserable. He looked to me to be sleeping, but later said he didn’t for even a second, which made me feel even horrible-r for him… Anyway, the flight out there was miserably long (I speak of it only mildly since I wasn’t dying), but I DID spill water all over myself and was thankful for a change of clothes. It seemed so much longer going out than coming back, but I didn’t know that on the way there, so it was surprisingly less dreadful on the return, which was nice, because I was in no mood for anything else to be unhappy.
The second photo is one of a foreign exchange student sitting at the window a seat over from me. The girl between us was the one I got to talking to that explained that she and 21 others were foreign exchange students coming back from some college in Illinois. It was super cool because she wrote down her name in Japanese, and we talked about where she lived and what it was like to be in Japan, what they did for fun, where they went on vacation, etc. They (all of them) were so timid and peaceful, and it was really enjoyable to talk with them about things. I felt like the world’s biggest goofball for not speaking any Japanese, because they struggled with English, but did the best they could and we communicated fine. At one point, when I said we were visiting China as well, she asked me if we were going to see “in China, they… they have a big… a big… um, a long castle….” And I guessed the Great Wall. She was so thrilled to get that across, and it made me laugh, not at her, but because it was awesome. More to come later.