times flies, Alex flies

vendredi 28 mars 2008

The week passed by very quickly.  Before I knew it, I was waiting at SFO.

I have to admit, it was a somewhat annoying flight.  I remember that on my last flight to Paris, I was surrounded by 18 to 20-year-old college girls, most of whom visiting Europe for the first time.  One of them had a voice not unlike Kerri Strugg (the gymnast from the 1996 

Atlanta Olympics); in other words, forever young to her meant forever having the voice of a ten-year-old girl, despite her twenty-something year old body.  Since I wasn't traveling with a college group this time, I was expecting something different, less annoying.  Well, I had 12 to 15-year-old girls around me this time.  Apparently, American families like to take their young daughters to Paris, but not their sons.  There were about ten or twelve kids from different families, not one boy among them.

One of these girls was a bit feisty during the flight.  I unfortunately happened to sit in front of her and had to endure her periodic (once every minute) kicks against the back of my seat.  I tend to get motion sickness even when a car drives over a bmp or when someone coughs on a ship, so you can imagine how I was feeling during the entire flight.  After a while, I finally turned around to ask her to stop acting like she was eight months in utero.

When I looked back, in the dimly lit ambience of the lovely square airplane reading light, there appeared a vision.  I saw a sickly looking girl who resembled a young Lindsay Lohan (think back to her Parent Trap days) posing for her mug shot after a wild drunken night of alcohol and drugs that I can prescribe.  I pitied her as she looked more sick than I was feeling, so I simply told her to stop kicking.  I had thought about getting up in front of her to kick her a few times in the shin, but my sympathy prevented me from doing that, not to mention her dad sitting across the aisle from her.  I probably should have kicked, since she never stopped.

So after long flights from SFO to ORD (how does one get ORD from Chicago O'Hare?) and ORD to CDG, I dragged my nauseated body out of the plane into a beautiful airport lobby singly decorated with a huge banner featuring the the company... no, not some internationally known French company like L'Oreal, it was an internationally known American company called Oracle.