Live from Greece, it's Thursday Morning

Leaving Maine

Food on the Plane

Flying over the Alps

Morning in Frankfurt

 Made it safely to Greece, waiting for the flight on to Corfu. The body takes time to adjust after flying, and I'm currently a little foggy, so I apologize for any grammar errors in this post. After jumping around time zones and altitudes multiple times in a day, it takes some time to recalibrate everything. Anyhow.

On the flight to Frankfurt, I sat next to a German couple, on the flight to Rome, I sat next to an Italian couple, and on the flight to Greece a Chinese/Asian/Oriental/whatever the politically correct term is young woman. The couple headed to Germany spoke zero English, a fact I realized when I arrived on the plane, and they just stared at me as I sat down. I didn't know if they wanted a bow, but they just kept looking at me, waiting for something. Still, it's amazing how we humans find ways to communicate. For instance, I was able to understand the German woman when she communicated "Why is that moron sticking his bag in our department, when he has his own further up the plane, and why is his full!" We had a bit of a scare on the flight. We were about halfway across the Atlantic, and I hear someone yell for help and a flight attendant a couple of rows ahead of me. I usually feel pretty safe on flights, but when I cross large bodies of water I get anxious, as emergency landings usually mean landing in the Atlantic. Fortunately, one of the elderly women had just fallen asleep on the toilet, and one of the other passengers overreacted and thought she had had a heart attack. My German neighbors woke up long enough to look around, look at me expectantly, shrug their indifference and go back to sleep.

So far my language work is coming in handy. Hite's hints: When going to a foreign country, learn the basic stuff, even so much as to say 'hello, please, thank you, goodbye.' All the stewardesses on the flights have English as their second language, and they prefer to address people in their native language. While it's unreasonable to know how to order in different languages, giving a thank you in the native language goes a long way to fighting the arrogant and stupid American stereotype. So far I've heard German, Italian, French and Greek. It helps that I can read Greek, speak and read Italian and have picked up things from mom in German and French, but if I hadn't I would definitely have done research before.

I'm off to go through security and meet up with the archaeology team, so I'll post next either in Corfu tonight, or tomorrow once we reach Butrint.