I’m very behind on these blogs, so let’s go!
I’ve never been out of the country before (sans the one time I went to Canada when I wasn’t even a year old), so tackling a journey like this, with a collective 15 hours of flights and even more hours of layovers, was nerve-wracking to say the least. I flew Portland (PDX) to San Francisco (SFO), SFO to Frankfurt, Germany (FRA), and finally FRA to Marseille, France (MRS).
My flights were interesting, to say the least. PDX to SFO was routine enough. I had made the same trek down not two months prior, for my visa appointment. There was a funny moment when getting beverages though. I asked for cranberry juice and I guess the guy couldn’t hear me well through my mask, but he gets me my juice and then asks “did you say you wanted vodka with that?” I hadn’t said anything remotely close to anything alcohol, and I’m not 21. I just laughed and said no, but I appreciated that he thought I was older than I am, and it got some chuckles out of my seat mates, who proceeded to order a white wine and a tomato juice respectively. Tomato juice guy wasn’t asked about alcohol.
We didn’t have a lot of time on the layover between our first two flights, but the international terminal in SFO was shockingly bougie. They had a Gucci and Hermes store in the airport.
The longest flight I’d ever been on up until that point was a 6 hour flight from NYC to Portland last June, so my 11 hour flight from SFO to FRA was rough. It was my first time on those massive planes with a middle set of seats, which I thought was cool, but Mara, who is also here in Aix-en-Provence, and I were separated and I sat next to a couple who didn’t speak a lot of English. This meant that the entire trip, I felt like I was third wheeling as the two cuddled and watched movies. I also can’t sleep on flights, so I didn’t do more than nod off for increments of 10-30 minutes. That flight wasn’t my favorite.
In contrast to the SFO International terminal, FRA was huge! We got off in terminal Z. Z! I’ve never been to an airport where there were so many gates. And I swear 90% of the gates I saw were Lufthansa.
We had a 5 hour layover in Germany, and I didn’t see a different plane until probably hour 3 of what ended up being 6 (our flight got delayed). They had a whole departments store full of perfumes and alcohol and toys that we walked through directly after going through customs which baffled me. Parts of it felt like we were in a mall instead of an airport. Neither Mara nor I had breakfast when they came around (lady passed right by me after giving my seatmates food. Rude) so we got pretzels. They are as delicious as their reputation entails.
Eventually we got to MRS, and despite us rushing off the plane and collecting our baggage as quickly as possible, we still ended up missing the bus we were supposed to take by less than a minute. We saw it drive away as we were approaching. We had to catch the last bus of the night, which was technically the first bus of the morning. I ended up getting to my homestay after a 40 minute bus drive and a 10 minute taxi at like… 1:30am.
Needless to say, I crashed. My roommates didn’t even know I arrived because I slept in so late. I was so glad that the early start program I was participating in didn’t start until Monday because I needed Sunday to recuperate.
If only I knew what I was in store for with the ESP.
Felicity