Flights number Kaksi (KAWK-see) and Kolme (KOLE-may) & arrival in Finland

I have finally arrived here in Finland!

In Seattle, I kept waiting in the Lufthansa line while doing sudokus, word searches, and just plain old waiting. Then I heard someone behind me say, “Are you going to Finland?” I turned around to see someone else wearing a crazy blue blazer covered in pins (but I wasn’t wearing mine, I hung it over my suitcase. It was Cindy from Northern California who is going to Vaasa, which is near my town of Kauhava. We swaped stories of how we had both gone to the United counter for our ticket but were redirected. Cindy didn’t have any bags; she said they had been checked through but she still needed her ticket. We were the first to get our Lufthansa tickets because the long line grew behind us. We proceeded to go through the security checkpoint. Cindy checked her ticket and said that we departed from A15. We got to A14 and realized A15 didn’t exist. She had checked the ticket for our flight from Frankfurt to Helsinki. We made it to the right gate and met up with the students who had flown in from Portland, Oregon. I bought my lunch at a burger restaurant.

On the plane, I had an aisle seat. Cindy was across the aisle from me and I had a stranger beside me at the window. We had the personal television screens in front of us so we could choose what we watched or listened to for the entire flight. The headphone jack was two pronged. Luckily, I had packed the converter from two prongs to one prong for headphones which allowed me to use my personal headphones, not the ones provided. The Seattle-Frankfurt flight was ten hours long. I had time to watch three full length movies: Mary Poppins which was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as always, Rio which had me laughing so hard, and Water for Elephants which was really well done. For dinner, we were served our choice of chicken or pasta (I had pasta) with a dinner roll, a rice salad, a chocolate brownie, a slice of cheese, and real metal cutlery! Breakfast was an omelet with some hash browns, a bun, and some cooked spinach.

In Frankfurt, we had a 5 hour layover. We went to the gate on our ticket (A15) and found a little corner where we could congregate. We North Americans were so much louder than all the traveling Europeans around us. During part of our wait, some scouts gathered in the corner beside us and I realized they were returning home from the World Jamboree in Sweden, a camp attended four years ago in England. The scouts were from Italy. Meanwhile, more exchange students kept gathering. At one point someone looked at the TV screens and informed us we all needed to move to gate A42, the very last gate in the terminal. On the way there, I along with some other students checked the screen. Indeed there was a gate change but it was to A17, not A42. So we dropped our bags at A17 (with some responsible people to watch them) and went to tell all the others that they had moved far away for nothing.

Anyways I had a window seat and basically slept the entire flight. I was over the wing and the sunlight reflected onto me for the duration. Because I was so hot when I awoke, I thought that I had gotten sunburnt…but I didn’t.

When we got off the flight we got our bags and “went through customs” which was just a door. No one looked at my passport or my visa. After we were met by the Rotarians and had a two hour bus to language camp. I am in a room with another Canadian; he is from New Brunswick.