Home Again, Home Again
Whew. Home at last. It's 6pm Toronto time, and my body is insisting that no, it's midnight, and since I've been up since 4am I should crash right about three hours ago. I'm forcing myself to stay up until ten or eleven, so that when I do crash I'll wake up more or less in sync with the rest of this timezone.
After getting up at 4am to catch a 6am flight to Amsterdam, we had a six-hour layover before it was time to catch our flight home. We ate in the food court, and watched, along with dozens of other bleary-eyed passengers, as a group of three children marched and paraded and danced and clapped and laughed as they followed around their little toy airplane. It had blinky lights and would change course if it ran into anything and it played an accelerated version of "It's a Small World After All" at OMG A SHRILL FIVE THOUSAND DECIBELS THAT JUST BORED INTO THE SIDE OF YOUR GODDAMNED HEAD. The mother seemed content that her children were amused, and it just played, and played, and played that same damned song.
And then.. the children abandoned it. They went off to do something else, leaving it blaring away as it trundled around the food court. When it swept past me, I bent down, picked it up, flipped it over, and turned it off... at which point, the food court startled me by bursting into applause. I bowed to the cardinal points of the compass, the Hero of the Food Court.
As we left the food court, we heard it start up again. The children had apparently returned. We fled.
When it was time to board our gate, KLM made exactly three announcements: "We have happily overbooked this flight, so at this point we would like to request volunteers to catch a later flight to Toronto", followed two minutes later with "We are now allowing World Class, BUsiness Class, and passengers with small children to board", followed three minutes later by "All other passengers may now board". I don't know why she didn't just crack a whip and yell "Hyah! HYAH! STAAAAAAMPEEEEEEDE!".
Without question, the most poorly organized boarding of any flight I have ever experienced.
Once we got aboard, things calmed down quite a bit. The in-flight movie was "King Kong With Scary Bits Removed And Bizarrely Edited To Shorten It To Two Hours Exactly" (because, you know, if it was much longer, people might have walked out), so I opted for using the portable DVD player to watch "Four Brothers" instead.
And then we got home and I'm too tired to think of a good way to tie all this together.
The End.
After getting up at 4am to catch a 6am flight to Amsterdam, we had a six-hour layover before it was time to catch our flight home. We ate in the food court, and watched, along with dozens of other bleary-eyed passengers, as a group of three children marched and paraded and danced and clapped and laughed as they followed around their little toy airplane. It had blinky lights and would change course if it ran into anything and it played an accelerated version of "It's a Small World After All" at OMG A SHRILL FIVE THOUSAND DECIBELS THAT JUST BORED INTO THE SIDE OF YOUR GODDAMNED HEAD. The mother seemed content that her children were amused, and it just played, and played, and played that same damned song.
And then.. the children abandoned it. They went off to do something else, leaving it blaring away as it trundled around the food court. When it swept past me, I bent down, picked it up, flipped it over, and turned it off... at which point, the food court startled me by bursting into applause. I bowed to the cardinal points of the compass, the Hero of the Food Court.
As we left the food court, we heard it start up again. The children had apparently returned. We fled.
When it was time to board our gate, KLM made exactly three announcements: "We have happily overbooked this flight, so at this point we would like to request volunteers to catch a later flight to Toronto", followed two minutes later with "We are now allowing World Class, BUsiness Class, and passengers with small children to board", followed three minutes later by "All other passengers may now board". I don't know why she didn't just crack a whip and yell "Hyah! HYAH! STAAAAAAMPEEEEEEDE!".
Without question, the most poorly organized boarding of any flight I have ever experienced.
Once we got aboard, things calmed down quite a bit. The in-flight movie was "King Kong With Scary Bits Removed And Bizarrely Edited To Shorten It To Two Hours Exactly" (because, you know, if it was much longer, people might have walked out), so I opted for using the portable DVD player to watch "Four Brothers" instead.
And then we got home and I'm too tired to think of a good way to tie all this together.
The End.