Left Syracuse Airport at 7:50 am on January 7th and arrived in Lyon, France at 10:20am local time January 8th. With a 6 hour time difference, that means it was roughly a 20 hour travel day. Factor in my inability to sleep on planes and in airports and you get approximately a 37 hour span where there was no sleep. Nothing can start good when your first impression comes after that many hours without sleep. Packing was another issue. One large checked hockey bag weighing 65 pounds is not a good idea. Especially when you have to hike it, your carry-on, and your personal item on and off a bus and through the metro system in Lyon only to find out that you have to now walk it a couple of blocks to the apartment building. Two bags with wheels would have been a lovely thing to have many times through the trek.
Nine hours in JFK is also not a good experience. Nine hours in any airport is not going to be fun but JFK.... no good. I felt like herded cattle after a couple of hours. After the security checkpoint there is only a limited amount of space in which you can go; and I went just about every square inch of it. Added to that was the obvious lack of English being spoken. Little did I know that British Airways would share a terminal with airlines that have mostly non- English speaking customers. There was the Spanish airline Iberian Air, multiple far east airlines, and a good dose of airport workers who of coarse were not fluent in too much. Needless to say by the time I got on my 747 to fly to London I was more than ready to hear some English and a British accent.
Not too fast. I don't know if it was just my seat or my flight or if that is the usual crowd on one of those flights, but there was again a lack of English being spoken. I thankfully had the aisle seat, but the two people next to me were Italian and spoke maybe one word of English that I heard being "wine." In front of me, no English, behind me, no English, and pretty much the rest of my section, no English. Oh and I forgot to mention the nice little Hasidic Jewish family, who also did not speak English, who decided to bring their very small baby on the plane and who sat 2 rows in front of me. Before the plane even took off, this was not a good situation. The flight took off on time and i got settled as best I could in the very tight seats. I got myself all calmed down in order to watch a movie on the screen in the back of the seat in front of me. And then the entertainment system went down and the pilot brought the good news that the system needed to be rebooted and this rebooting would only take 40 minutes. I was getting tired after not sleeping in the airport for 9 hours so I closed my eyes with the hope that I could catch some sleep. When I was finally falling asleep, the pilot again decided to come back on the speaker and announce quite loudly that the entertainment system was back on. So no sleeping for me. The meal cart came around and the meal was quite good which was a nice change of pace for me except for one small detail; the nice lady sitting in front of me had reclined her seat an enormous amount and did not put it up during the meal. My seat was all the way up so I could eat my food and now the headrest of her seat was only inches from my face because she felt the need to eat laying down not to mention her seat was broken so it reclined a ridiculous amount. Of coarse my seat could not recline that much so what little room I did start with was now gone.
The rest of the flight to London Heathrow went without too much drama except for the fact that I obviously got no sleep. When we got to London, the pilot said that we were very early due to the heavy tailwind that we had coming over so I thought that this would be good and I could relax a little more in the airport before my flight to Lyon. O BUT ANOTHER CATCH, it was about ten to 6 in the morning and he said that it was actually against the law for him to land before 6 so he decided to make a couple figure 8's in the sky before deciding to land at quarter after 6. I could not have been happier to land and get off of the plane. But again not so quick. The airport was having trouble with the gate and they had to call some engineers to the gate in order to get it to work and hook up to the plane which took another 15 minutes. I finally get off the plane at about 6:35 and then had to find my way to my next gate for my flight to Lyon. I found the board of what number gate I had to go to and then I looked at the board and it was in the same terminal thankfully but it was the complete opposite side of the terminal and the sign said allow 20 minutes to get to the gate. One 20 minute walk later I was at the correct gate ready to board my last flight.
The flight to Lyon on British Airways was not bad at all. Plane was not crowded and everything went off without a problem. I was about to fall asleep which would have been nice but then we landed and my sleep was prevented again.
Lyon airport is very nice and no problems there. Baggage arrived with me and I collected it and started my hike with 120 pounds of luggage on my shoulder. I met Sharon, the representative from the school at the airport and she was to take me to my apartment with the rest of the kids in the same program. Sharon was very nice and spoke English which was a nice surprise. She turns out to be from the US so there wasn't even a weird accent that came with the English.
We made our way to the apartment building on the mass transportation which was fun with all of my bags without wheels. My shoulder was throbbing by the end of the trek. We got on a bus then off a bus with the bags, then on and off of a metro, then walked up to the street and walked 2 or so blocks to the apartment building. Then the news came about the lack of an elevator in the building. Could it get worse? O yea, I also wouldn't be able to get into my apartment until after 2 pm and it was a little before noon. I would expect something like that to happen. I finally got into my apartment around 2 pm and it was surprisingly nice inside. We had to do some room check with the landlord type lady and that's when I started to think I wanted to go back to the airport and go home. My apartment was temporarily with no heat or hot water.
I unpacked and got on the internet so I could have some contact with the outside world since there was no television and no telephone in the room. The internet was the only thing that was keeping me sane. A large group of other students in the same program got here around 4pm and then the cherry at the very top of the very large cake, the internet went down for a long time.....
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