Day Zero, Part 1: San Francisco To Philadelphia

The best part of my flight to Philadelphia had absolutely nothing to do with flying. I’d listened to the US/Algeria game with my parents in the car on the way over, and found myself wanting absolutely nothing more than to destroy all the members of that former French colony’s soccer team (normal behavior, I think). After saying goodbye to my folks and going through airport security (yeah, yeah, boring stuff) I wandered over to the airport bar, where I stood outside and watched with the assembled crowd. It was around 9 am, so naturally everyone was drunk. And when Landon Donovan jumped on the Algerian keeper’s mistake and pounded the goal into the back of the net in stoppage time, the room exploded. Everyone talks about how much American’s hate soccer, but in the San Francisco airport bar in Terminal B, near gates 20-30, we were all rejoicing.

I was joined on my flight to beautiful Philadelphia by a group of about 14 high school students on a trip to Israel. They were all quite nice, but enjoyed shouting at each other as we got on the plane. That was quite enjoyable, especially as I was trying to fall asleep standing up. Things settled down once airborne, and I (of course) found myself wide-awake. Chosen ways to keep me entertained on the flight: listening to the audio book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, reading my Ireland 2010 guidebook, and examining farming patterns from an aerial view. I don’t want to mention my airline by name, so I’ll call them something else. GlU.S. Glairways. There. Identity concealed. Anyway, GlU.S. Glairways has deemed at some point in its past that 5 ½ hour flights across the country don’t need in-flight entertainment, which to me just reeks of contempt for passengers. By not showing a movie (or ANY TV entertainment, for that matter), GlU.S. Glairways has taken the one potentially positive thing an airline can provide and left it back on the ground. Oh well. Hopefully they’ll decide that an overnight flight to Europe is good enough for a 30-minute episode of Two And A Half Men.