Thursday, May 27, 2004
day zero: Road Trip, In-Flight Miracles, German Beer And Arrival
Bought my ticket the night before,
hotwire continues to dominate online booking in the "Southern Californians named Al Abut" market, Yesi and I went up to LAX, got some dirt nasty San Diego cuisine (aka Mexican burritos) to eat on the way up as a form goodbye to my waistline as we now know it, she came up with me and was going to drive my car back, spending the night with her family up there before coming down.
Lo and behold,
Lufthansa is rolling out
in-flight wi-fi across its whole fleet by 2006, it's free until May 31st! So I went forth and geeked out, instant messaging to my heart's content with only one purpose in mind: to embrace and extend the status of my technological coolness. Mission accomplished. For those 45 minutes or so, pinging friends with opening lines of "I'm flying over the Grand Canyon, what are you doing?" was one of the most fun things I've done in a long while. I even jetted off a few emails, one to my parents to let them know that I'd gotten on the flight and was on route, something that should be especially soothing to their nerves because I had missed my flight the previous Thursday. So absolutely cool, can't even explain it.
And all this was accomplished not because of but in spite of the ergonomic conditions. It's news to no one with a modicum of life experience that airlines treat people like chattle, yet it's still a shock every time you are forcefully reminded of exactly how bad the conditions are. The lady in front of me puts her seat back, her head is in my lap and I can massage her temples without even straining to reach. The ogre behind me puts his knees on the back of my seat, pushes me up into practically a standing position. Finally, with a 7 hours down and few short hours left to arrival, I took the opportunity of Mr Legpress getting up to go to the restroom to put my seat back so that I could finally relax, but hey, new depths of rudeness: after a short while, he actually tried to shove my seat up and even tapped my shoulder, asked me to put my seat back in place so he could relax! I was apoplectic on the inside, a red-faced steaming mess and looking back, I'm amazed that I held it in check and didn't tell him to shove it. Let's just say none of this was the best conditions to type into a keyboard, held in my lap with the screen practically parallel to the floor, keyboard plastered to my chest. But addictions must be fed, the network beckons.
Munich was cool, at least from what I could see from the 6.5 hours I was there, with about 4 of it downtown. There was a cool cathedral and some plazas but I was a man on a mission - bratwurst and beer in a beer garden. And mmm, boy, was the mission accomplished. Giant half liter mug, steaming hot german sausage, relaxing outdoor benches completely shaded under trees in the middle of the town plaza... beautiful. Had some shnitzelwurst too, some kind of hot dog kind of thing, some smaller sausages in a bun. Geeking out went well too: per my friend John's mantra, I went lofi punk rock, made do with what I had and took as many shitty low quality pictures as I could with my cameraphone. I also took out the voice recorder attachment for my iPod and grabbed a bunch of random audio of crowd noises, trying to capture a bit of the relaxing touristy vibe of the place: the clink and clank of lunchtime conversations, a group of people laughing and clapping at a street entertainer, whatever I could get near. I think some of those might be neat in a little Flash piece, as background audio for the cameraphone pictures. Also dictated a few notes, whatever popped in to my head, observations, thoughts, etc, but now that I listen to the output on the iBook, man, the voice quality is craptastic. It really peaks out, anything slightly too loud turns into static. Ironically, that means that it picks up crowd and general ambience noises really well, whereas my voice dictations turned to junk. I think I'm going to have to hold the thing at arms length and/or whisper in a very quiet setting if I want something even remotely audible.
Unfortunately, the beer relaxed me a little too much and I ended up falling asleep on the train back to the airport, waking up with a start to a completely still cabin at the end of the line, not a soul in sight. Scary moment of panic, let me tell you, until I could dig out my cell phone and train map, see that I'd been asleep only about fifteen minutes and only had three or four train stops to backtrack to. Half an hour later, I was kicking it in the airport terminal with still about an hour to kill, sitting at one of the clean fast food joints and screwing around on my laptop, continuing my new fascination for the last two weeks: writing the new school javascript that plays nicely with XHTML/CSS. Making my way towards the gate, I went through the border control booths and had an overly extended exchange with the officer, entertaining as it was. He took longer than usual looking over my passport, sighing and frowning, examining its every detail, holding it up to my face through the tollbooth-like window, passing it under a black light, looking it over intensely while occasionally peppering me with questions because 1) my long haired, goateed rock star look clashed with the ruddy-cheeked preppie youngster in the photo, and more importantly 2) he had a rookie officer sitting next to him observing as a trainee and he was making an obvious show of poring over my documents, trying to make an example of Rowdy-Looking Young Ruffians Like Me. She smiled and laughed at me a few times, which drew a subtle rebuke from the serious veteran under his breath and had the obvious effect of bringing her back to the task at hand. If he only knew what a harmless technogeek I was... then he'd probably ask me to make him a website for something or another. Nah, better to look like a biker gang reject.
The flight to Istanbul was awesome, especially considering that it was the exact opposite of what I expected: a tiny turboprop tincan, a flying nightmare, an Indiana Jones-style cargo plane with squawking chicken coops, feathers flying everywhere, no seats and only bags full of feed to rest on, the pilots jumping out with the last parachutes moments before we slam into a mountainside and I have to make do with an inflatable rubber rafting boat. Okay, I'm sorry to tap into people's xenophobic stereotypes about Eastern Europe/the Mideast and I've never been on anything that bad, no matter how much cramped the space has been on a short 2.5 hour hop from the middle of Europe to it's easternmost edge. And this plane was soooo comfy, way more seat space than on the larger transcontinental plane for some reason, enough to stretch out and take a well-deserved nap. Which I promptly did. It was so much more comfortable than the flight from Los Angeles that I forgot to put my seat back before falling asleep, yet I snoozed just fine. I awoke briefly to scarf down the mac and cheese dinner, passed back out and woke up later to a beautiful heartwarming site: Istanbul at night, a million lights reflected off of the waterfront, truly a city in love with water and the centuries of trade that came with it. Man, I thought San Diego was water-based, but it's not really the same, everything's either way recreational (Mission Bay and the beaches; surfing, windsurfing, sailing, jetskis, etc) or way industrial (the harbor; navy ships, cargo fleets, etc). Water is something abstracted away in San Diego, something that you actively choose to become involved in when you need to unwind or relax. It's different here, it's integrated into the city life and it's an unavoidable presence - you take a ferry across the Bosphorus Strait to get from one side of the city to the other, go down to the fish markets to get fresh food for dinner from the fisherman that caught it, it's not something that's there only when you choose it to be, like the Pacific Ocean is for us. That's not better or worse, it's just different. It's hard for me to imagine what life would be like in a completely landlocked area. I think that's why LA feels so alien to me, especially the valley - man, what a hole. No fresh ocean breeze to lift your spirits, seagulls to dance for your entertainment, ugh.
Anyway, I landed just fine and things are going great. This is Al Abut, reporting from Istanbul...