Crossing the Atlantic

Though I’d asked for an aisle seat and apparently had been awarded one (that clerk lied to me !), I consider myself lucky because I was seated between two very nice and very charming gentlemen. They were both South-African (one of Indian, the other of African descent) and on their way to a conference about waste management. That led me to my first innocent stupid remark : "oh ! So you’re the garbage men ?"

They laughed it off and proceeded to explaining to me that we could not push our seats back at all. To this, add the fact that I’m 6 feet tall, that both my neighbors were over 6 feet tall and that the flight was over 8 hours long, and you will understand why I came home with a terrible backache. My companions were wonderful though so we fixed the space issue by removing the armrests and sort of leaning on each other to sleep.

The company does not have a film projection like most airplane companies, but instead provide us with an individual crystal screen and one can watch whatever they want on their own schedule. The concept is great in the absolute, but when the seat ahead of you is laid down, you cant see a thing. So I saw "Bridget Jones : Edge of reason" and half of "The Incredibles" in yellow and green and with only sound in certain scenes. To make matters better, my monthly womanly troubles manifested themselves in the middle of the flight. Oh well. Another passenger was in the same predicament but measured 6 feet 6, so he actually spent pretty much all of the flight standing up. I guess my flight wasn’t all that bad after all.