safely home

[aryanhwy]

Most of yesterday was spent waiting and en route. Since we were in no big hurry for getting back to the airport in Lisbon (Joel's flight was at 3:30pm, mine a little after 7:00pm), we slept as late as we could and still get breakfast, meandered down to the train station in the rain, and then took the train to the center of Lisbon and then a bus (which went all over the city thus affording us our only look at Lisbon; we also saw the St. Jerome monastery and the Belem tower from the train windows. Lisbon looks like a nice city; I hope we can actually visit it someday) to the airport. We were both able to check in, which was expected for Joel but unexpected for me since some airports don't let you check in so far in advance if you have any checked luggage, and it was about 6.5 hours before my flight. But since we were both able to check in we were able to head through security, find something to eat, find Joel's gate, and then sit together until he had to board. I then had something like 4 hours to kill (and had used up all the books I'd brought with), and was a bit worried because I hadn't seen any bookstores yet. I finally found a map of the terminal and found where the stationer was, and was almost completely thwarted by the fact that all the books they had on the shelves were in Portuguese. Thankfully, persistent looking turned up a small turnstile of books in French, and more persistence lead me to the one of books in English. Picked up two books (list price $7.95, purchase price ~13EUR, grrrr...), of which I read one while waiting and am about 100 pages into the other. Had an uneventful flight back, landed within a minute of the scheduled time, was one of the first people off the plane and the first to the luggage belt, which by that time already had our flight's luggage on it but I didn't see my bag immediately so I went and purchased my train ticket, and when I turned around there was my bag directly in front of me, so I grabbed it, got to the train hall 2 minutes before the next train to Amsterdam central was leaving, and got into Amsterdam central with enough time to walk over to the bus stop and have to wait only about 7 minutes for the next bus. Our plane landed a little after 11pm, and I got home a little before midnight, by far one of the smoothest and quickest post-flight experiences I've had.

So now I've covered everything except for Monday and I will write about that, but I should get back to work now.