Leaving Home

I have been terribly lax in posting to this blog, and I will try now to get up to date.

I left Washington on Tuesday night. Todd and the boys drove me to the airport. The first leg of my trip was an 8-hour flight to Zurich. The flight was full, but I was lucky to be able to switch from a middle seat to an aisle. (The benefits of arriving early!). It was a strange mix of people -- Europeans going home, and Americans going all over. The woman sitting next to me in the gate area was going to Ethiopia. The woman sitting next to me on the plane was going to Bombay. And the older couple sitting across the aisle were dressed sort of like pilgrims (the woman was wearing a long skirt and a white sort of bonnet). They were going to Kenya to visit their son who was on some kind of religious mission.

The flight was uneventful. I watched The Last King of Scotland, which I had meant to see before I left, and was served the first two of five airplane meals I would get in the next 24 hours.

We landed in Zurich at 8 in the morning. I had a short layover -- just enough time to get through security and once again get switched to an aisle seat. Maybe I'm just unusually attuned to religious people, but there seemed to be a lot of them in the Zurich airport. First, there was a large group of Orthodox Jews praying at one gate, complete with the ear curls and tiny black boxes strapped to their heads. (I later learned that these are called tefillin.). Second, a lot of nuns, especially on my flight to Bombay.

The flight to Bombay was only half full. I mostly slept.