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4:10 PM June 24, 2003 (6.5 hours travel time)
Sitting on the Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to LAX, I am dreading the long flight home. Fortunately, the captain announces that the flight is shorter because of the jet stream, and the flight should only take 13 hours and 40 minutes rather than 15 hours and 15 minutes. Not that much shorter, but thank goodness it is shorter.
The plane is crowded. While people might have been apprehensive about traveling to Hong Kong, it seems that people in Hong Kong or traveling through have no qualms about traveling to LAX. I am in a window seat again, the row is full, and there is a young man who looks Chinese sitting next to me. I see later, as he fills out his paperwork that he is 16 and has a US passport, so I am assuming that one or more of his parents are Chinese and that he was in China visiting relatives.
As I sit there, trying to figure out what to do with my time since I was not sleepy, the gentlemen sitting in the seat in front of me leans his seat all of the way back. His head is almost in my lap. I am thinking “Great! 14 hours with this guy’s head in my lap”. As I am sitting there thinking about how rude this is, I start feeling the 3 year old girl sitting in the seat behind me start kicking my seat. What a great start to a LONG flight.
As we are flying along, time was at a crawl. I was actually looking forward to the food they were going to serve. I usually do not eat on flights – my stomach is temperamental and I have IBS, so it is not usually worth it. But, I knew that some food would reduce the boredom factor, so I accepted the meal which had chicken and noodles. One thing to note is that I am a vegetarian, so this was a meal that I couldn’t really eat. But, it came with a salad, a really good dessert, etc. so I could eat that. I also drank some apple juice. Fortunately, the food tasted good and my IBS stayed quiet – so it was a good reprieve from the boredom.
During this time, the young man sitting next to me disappeared for a good two hours. I don’t know where he went, I don’t know where he ate – but fortunately I had some extra room for a while. After dinner, I decided to try to take a nap. The gentlemen in front of me had his chair fully reclined again, so watching a DVD wasn’t a good option, and the kid behind me stopped kicking for a while – so even though I wasn’t tired, I wanted to try to get some shut eye. Well, right about that time, the young man came back and climbed into his seat again. Just as I was trying to get comfortable, the kid sitting next to me started letting out the most awful gas/farts. I thought for a second that the awful smell was coming from the comfort rooms which weren’t that far away. Nope – it was coming from him. I don’t know what this kid ate before he got on the plane, but it smelled like something crawled up in him and died.
So there I was, unable to sleep because of the kit farting next to me for the rest of the flight; unable to watch DVD’s clearly because of the guy in front of me who had leaned his seat all of the way back so I could see the top of his head – and periodically the little girl behind me decided that kicking my seat was a fun thing to do.
The time passed slowly, I didn’t get to sleep at all, the smell of the air was foul with the kid next to me passing gas (methane) the whole time, and I was missing Niña. The flight home couldn’t have been much worse unless I had come down with an illness.
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