If you look at the itinerary, this is technically day zero

August 13
Duration of day: 8 AM Eastern time – 10:30 AM Ireland time

Written on the plane to Shannon

I wish I could type this on the laptop, because I type so much faster than I write. …it’s been a while since I’ve really written anything, though. I haven’t seen my own handwriting for quite a while.

Today was… uneventful, I guess. Sherry and I were nearly late for the flight from Boston to JFK, but we got there all right. The flight was so short I wonder why we even bothered – you see, we had a 35 minute flight down to NY, and now that we’re flying back over Boston to get there. Although the ridiculous 7-hour layover was fun at times, it’s a little irritating to know it probably could’ve been avoided.

I sat between Freddy and John on the connecting flight, and both of them were pretty quiet. Freddy was working on this summer reading, and both the books looked pretty interesting. Both nonfiction. I never pictured myself becoming a nonfiction geek.

At the airport we went to eat almost immediately… I was really hungry, but couldn’t really afford the overpriced airport food. I ended up getting a really good meal, though – I ate Chris Laux’s pizza crusts, some of Hannah’s garlic bread, the rest of Maria’s ziti and the rest of Emily’s rice. All for the low price of nothing. I love mooching.

I couldn’t access the internet, so that was pretty disappointing.

Now I’m writing with chips on my paper. Thank you for the chips, Freddy.

I don’t know how we whiled the hours away at the airport, but with about half of the layover to go, our gate was changed from gate 8 to gate 27… all the way at the other side of the airport. There was a Wendy’s over there, but I knew it would be too much for me, especially considering what I’d eaten earlier.

I got to talk to you before the flight, which was good – it actually did calm my nervous stomach.

Once we got on the plane we ended up having to wait an hour and a half until takeoff. There were 18 planes ahead of us – it was annoying. Poorly planned our schedule, Delta.

The first half of the flight wasn’t so bad; I sat between Karen and Emily, and they mostly slept. The dinner provided was pretty good. I ended up eating way too much… but it would be absolutely terrible to end up delirious and xenophobic like the last time I went traveling and didn’t eat or sleep enough.

Around the 3-hour mark things started getting really rough, though – I wasn’t able to sleep no matter how hard I tried, and, did I mention? We basically had the worst seats in the plane. We couldn’t recline (or at least thought we couldn’t) for most of the flight, and my back started to hurt really badly. You know I’m no stranger to back pain, and my usual tactic is just to bear it and complain every once in a while. I’m used to it and it’s annoying, you know? But the pain I started experiencing and my inability to relieve it in any way made my cry. I rarely cry due to physical discomfort, so it was really terrible. I cried for at least half an hour. Emily was very accommodating, though. She gave me Advil and switched seats with me and asked a bunch of times if she could help me in any other way (I told you she’s really nice).

Eventually I calmed down some and watched 21. I forget – you’ve seen it already, right? Towards the middle I didn’t think I’d like it too much, because of how much the main character loses himself, but by the end it’d redeemed itself. One thing I found funny, though, was that he wanted to go to Harvard Med School… see, MIT students shun Harvard. The badmouth Harvard kids and the institution a lot. There’s a rivalry. The MIT kids believe they’re superior because in their opinion, it’s far too easy to et into Harvard based on money or connections, as opposed to pure academic prowess. I just found it funny that they made such a huge deal out of “Harvard” when the guy’s from MIT.

I had three bananas for breakfast, and Emily ate my croissant.

Now we’ve landed and it’s another day. The cliffs looked amazing from the air, and we saw plenty cows and sheep! They had those funky energy windmills, too. Smart Irish – they don’t care if they disrupt the scenery for bona-fide renewable energy.