| << Prague, day 4 | 2003 > November | Coming To Your Country >> |
Thursday, 13 November 2003
Returning home ::
Tuesday night, I got packed, set the alarm for 5:30 (taxi due at 6:30) and was ready to lie down and sleep by 12, but sleep wouldn’t come. Anxiety about travel? More likely, it was that the afternoon full cup of “coffee” from the corner deli was made with an espresso machine! I made the best of being awake by playing some music and looking up place names for photo captions. For fun, have a look at a Czech computer keyboard layout sometime; there are more accented characters than French or German. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to get the correct characters into my photo labels—looks like iView only knows about the MacRoman character set, which doesn’t have all the Czech characters needed for places like Nové Město, Vyšehrad, Ûzejd, and Malá Strana. Ah, I could write the Unicode numbers there as I just did here...
At Prague passport control, I got asked again “is that your picture?” I laughed and said, “yes, would you like to see my driver’s license?” Strange, in my three recent overseas trips, involving passport control in Thailand, the U.K., and Germany, only in the Czech Republic was there question if that picture was mine.
I forced myself to stay awake long enough to look out the window as we took off from Prague. The Czech countryside has a quality to it I can’t describe and had never seen elsewhere, except in some 19th-century paintings in the museum the day before. Beautiful.
I fell asleep somewhere over Germany until we landed with a bump at Heathrow. I walked dazedly through an endless maze of passages to a bus which took me to Terminal 4, where I had to go through security yet again before being deposited in the middle of a giant shopping arcade, with no obvious place to sit for the three hours before my flight. I noticed that another flight to San Francisco was just about to depart and considered seeing if I could get on it, but I had two bags checked and everything I knew about post-9/11 security is that checked luggage doesn’t get separated from the passenger.
I finally found a place to sit, in a small boarding area that later turned out to be the one for my flight. A woman came around and took a survey about the quality of my transfer experience at Heathrow. I told her that all the signage was fine, the bus transfer went fine, the second security check didn’t take too long, but overall, I had to rate the experience as poor because it was just too hard to find a place to sit down for a 3-hour layover. In retrospect I’d like to have said that maybe they should convert some of the retail concessions into additional seating.
Somewhere over Greenland, I came to the realization that I wasn’t just sleep-deprived, and my nose wasn’t just running a little; I had a fever and was sick. 21 hours after hopping in a taxi in Prague, I was in my apartment. 30 minutes later I was sound asleep. I slept solidly for 11 hours.
| << Prague, day 4 | 2003 > November | Coming To Your Country >> |