My lovely girlfriend will be taking her first intercontinental flight tomorrow evening and she'll be landing in Europe on Tuesday morning. It will be her first flight outside Asia and of course she's a bit nervous. She's flying alone and she has two stopovers before her final destination, where I will be picking her up.
I flew to other continents at least 12 times in my life and I must say I mostly had pleasant flights. I love the food, I love the movies and flying is fun to me, too. Sure, sometimes I had an annoying person next or in front of me, but I thought to myself: Only few hours and I'll never see that bugger again. And it worked. Even though flights, who take over 10h seem long and small things can be annoying, mostly nothing bad really happens.
You take off, you watch TV and eat. Then you sleep. Wake up, eat, watch TV and land. That's how I'd summarize an intercontinental flight. If you manage to sleep for at least 6h and watch 2 movies, the flight passes in no time and you still feel fresh when you arrive in your destination.
Of course it's even better, if you meet an interesting person on board. Last time, when I flew from Vienna to Taipei, I sat beside an older Austrian woman, who was pretty bubbly from the beginning. She was 50+ and told me how she married a man from Zimbabwe and she even lived there for a while, before they moved to Vienna and eventually split up. She told me that in recent years she's traveling to Asia. She was headed to Thailand and Cambodia at that time, where she wanted to stay for 3 months. We sat side by side and chatted like old friends most of the time. But when we reached my stopover in Bangkok, we went separate ways. It's funny, but the seemingly good friends we've became on board suddenly changed to what we were before: Strangers. We said take care and good luck and walked away pretty quickly. I probably won't ever see her again.
For me, flying long distance is a blessing. It's amazing how one day you're in Europe and the next day you're on the opposite side of the world, having a completely new life and becoming a foreigner in an instant. Isn't it like a kind of time travel? I don't know, but sometimes it's like a dream. And I feel I'm so lucky to be able to experience that. So happy that intercontinental travel is affordable these days also to average people, not only the rich. It's one thing to read about a foreign culture, it's another to see it, live it first hand. It's a precious experience and I'm so happy, that my girl has the chance to see my continent and my home country Slovenia with her own eyes. I will be her proud guy and hope she can take my encyclopedic monologues about European history, hehe.
Do you have any tips for my girlfriend about how to have a good long distance flight?
Do you have any funny experiences from your long distance flights to share?
How did you feel before and on your first intercontinental flight?
Do you have any funny experiences from your long distance flights to share?
How did you feel before and on your first intercontinental flight?
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