The time I write about in these posts may not be near the time I post them, because the Internet is scarce for us right now. (I’m starting to Jones, but that’s another story). Our flight out here was pretty uneventful, very routine. A couple of firsts though: first time on a US airline; first time in US airports, first time across the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, first time in Brazil, of course, and all that comes with that.
US Airports
I noticed a few things that are different from Cdn airports that are worth mentioning. Airplanes speed into the terminal once the land. They move a lot faster that Cdn planes. And the urinals are made for midgets. Seriously, the urinals in Seattle and Houston airports are about mid-thigh level on me, perhaps lower. All Canadian urinals come to my waist! It’s like the average age of US citizens is 10, or the average height of American males is much less than Canada. I stopped doing this probably about ten years ago, but when I really had to go back then, and the only urinal available was the short one for boys, I’d half-squat down to use it. A tinkle in the US brought me back to those times.
Houston to Sao Paulo
This is probably the longest flight I’ve ever taken: 9h 55m. Took a while to take off, due to some “minor” technical difficulties. The idiotic pilot would come on every five minutes to update us on the “minor” problems. Reminded me of George Carlin’s routine on Jammin’ in New York about airports. Once we got underway, things went smoothly though. We flew Continental for this flight; they have the coolest thing I’ve seen on an airplane: a computer program that updates the progress of the flight on a map. The map will zoom in to view more detail, and change from a top-down view to an ass-end view to see what’s ahead of us in a 3-D map. They’d also show the time difference between origin and destination, flight speed, temperature outside. Really cool, every airline should adopt this.
Sao Paulo
This town is freakin’ huge! Once it came into view, that’s all we could see: no fields, no outskirts, just city as far as the eye could travel. Sometimes we couldn’t even see that much, because of smog. There’s palm trees (a first); they are a pure metric country, no pounds, inches or fahrenheit; and Brazilian money has pictures of birds on it, and uses Monopoly money colours just like Cdn currency. We just hung around the hotel(fenced, with barb wire) most of the day. Check-in was super easy and everyone has, so far, been very welcoming. We haven’t seen that many of the teams. We met the Vietnamese team, but they had flown for 30+hrs, so they didn’t stay around long.
One thing that occurred to me on the flight, was the Simpsons episode in which Bart calls someone in Australia to see if the water flushes in the other direction. Well, since I’m in the Southern Hemisphere, I figured I might as well investigate. But, alas, a minor setback: the toilet bowls in the hotel are a different shape and they have more jets of water, so the water “falls in” the bowl rather than swirl around. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed. We move on to Foz de Igacu tomorrow, so there’s hope, I’ll keep you posted…