7 / 12 & 13

Woke up at 3:15.
Scratch that.
Woke up at 3:45.
First experience at an airport went smoothly; however, it did take all I had not to cry as I went through TSA and realized that I'd be without my absolutely wonderful parents, amazing friends and family, and clearly the most important: my dogs, for the next two weeks.

I arrived in Minneapolis and with my boarding passes for these first two flights already being printed all I needed was to find my gate, seemed simple enough, and get on another plane.
As we began to land in JFK I soon realized that they would not make it easy and the flight attendants were not going to tell me which gate I should be headed to like they did on my last flight (I realized this was because a. I needed to switch terminals and b. I had an 8 hour layover so the plane wasn't even there nor had a set gate for me to go to). But we landed nonetheless and it felt pretty cool to be in New York even though I never actually went outside or got to see the city so I didn't buy anything touristy. It was now 2pm in New York and I hadn't eaten anything since a 4am breakfast sandwich before the first flight, so goal number one was to find food. I headed over to the closest restaurant that I recognized: Wendy's. The next step was to figure out what the heck I was doing. My next boarding pass was not printed and after some googling, I found out that I was indeed in the wrong terminal. I then figured out what a terminal even was and found that luckily I would not have to go security again as Delta has two terminals in JFK and I just needed to take a nice little shuttle ride to the right place. Thank goodness for an 8 hour layover that allowed me the time to determine all of this without stressing too much.

I sat at gate B22 for quite some time bouncing between doing homework, trying to get a cat nap in, and writing this. I decided that a nap was not working but i had also read the same page of my summer AP Lit assignment sits times and still didn’t remember what it said, therefore I decided on a self guided tour of this new terminal. It had a lot more shops, and a lot more moving walkways! (FYI: No matter how prepared you think you are to step onto said walkways, you’re not really prepared and you better be actually prepared to catch yourself on the hand rails that you swore to yourself that you wouldn’t need.)

I then met up with another student on the trip here and we shared a flight to Amsterdam where we would meet up with quite a few of the others as well. It had felt like a week and we still had one more flight to Delhi.


We FINALLY arrived and by 3am we all got through customs and everything seemed fine. We picked up our luggage and headed to our hotel for the night, The trip to said hotel was quite the culture shock to say the least. Surviving our first drive in India felt like quite a large milestone. Red lights mean very little if no one is coming and neither do lanes in the road - some roads don't even have the lines at all - and tuktuks often drive on the wrong side of the road. Every median we passed was covered with sleeping people. Even at 3am there were people everywhere. But we are finally at the hotel and I cannot wait to get a few precious hours of sleep in a real bed after a 25 hour travel day.