Departure
About damn time, too.
Boarding the plane is simple and straightforward as with any other; I arrived at the airport with time to spare, said my farewells to my parents (all of us successfully keeping our composure), checked my backpack, cleared security quickly and took my time heading to the gate. Now waiting to board between the typical archetypes — the testy senior couple, grumbling about the TSA under their breath, and the horde of schoolchildren returning home from a class trip, all speaking about three times as loud as necessary (and in French). We funnel ourselves one-by-one into the aircraft, squeeze impossibly past each other in the flailing search for our seats and eventually have ourselves completely situated. I´ve been wondering for the past few days how exactly I´m going to feel when I do board the plane. Panic? Elation? Relief? Each of these (mostly panic) had come at varying intervals over my final days at home — so I thought it would all come to a head when I got settled on the plane. But there I sat, buckled in and clamped between two much larger passengers, with a mind completely blank.
There´s been a recurring trend of unexpectedness in my preparations for this trip — hardly a single task came and went over the past three months in expected fashion. The seemingly titanic obstacles and logistics went off without a hitch: I successfully acquired year-long multi-entry visas to both Russia and China, which I was assured would be the bureaucratic equivalent of eating soup with a fork. Hardly any difficulties involved, in reality — on the other hand, just about every mundane mission I undertook was suddenly mired with sudden inconveniences. Picking up travel medications at the clinic — surely five, maybe ten minutes? Absolutely not; they misspelled my name on the prescription, and had to completely rewrite my patient profile. I was stuck there for 90 minutes longer. Getting glasses adjusted at the optometrist? The attendant skipped over my name on the list, and it was almost two hours before anyone was able to help me.
As pettily frustrating as these instances were, I thought they were probably good exercises in flexibility — surely not everything would be going according to plan on this trip (my departure had already been delayed by two months). And sure enough, upon landing in Lisbon, I made my way straight to the metro, the fastest way to make it to my hostel. Of course, the metro´s closed — there´s an employee strike, only affecting the few stops near the airport. Go figure.
After finding my way to the airport´s bus stop with my meager Portuguese, and having successfully squeezed my way onto the single most tightly packed vehicle I´ve ever seen, I managed to touch down at my first night´s accommodations only three hours later than expected — bedraggled, exhausted and completely ecstatic. My first night of freedom. It was a rough start, certainly, but I imagine the rest of this adventure will be absolutely riddled with abrupt plan changes. I suppose that´s going to be half the fun.
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