jettsetting, part I

after a great final night in d.c. i awoke excited and ready for my next big adventure. the plan was quite simple: fly from washington, dc to frankfurt, wait in the airport for a few hours for my flight to barcelona, find my way from the airport to a city square and then meet up with damon and gretchen for a quick lunch before hopping on a bus for a different airport up north for our flight to paris. all in all a complicated way of going from d.c. to paris.

i knew that i was in for more than i had bargained for within the first forty minutes of the initial flight. after witnessing a heated argument between my rowmate and a flight attendant curiosity got the best of me and i made the mistake of asking the man next to me what was wrong. he responded with a picture on his digital camera. for future reference, this is never a good sign. the picture was of the back fin from our plane, which happened to be missing a huge metal panel with all sorts of colored wires completely exposed. apparently he had shown the picture to the flight attendant prior to take off but she showed little interest in it. the next seven hours were spent drawing nervously in my notebook and watching mr. beans holiday movie out of the corner of my eye. after about 20 minutes of mr. bean i decided that if the plane were to crash my death would have surely been less painful than watching a mr. bean marathon, regardless of how mangled things would get. luckily, the plane landed in one piece. i gave johnny photograph a highfive and exited into the strange and sterile world of the frankfurt international airport.