The longest day in my life!

Ever wondered if you could see sunlight for a continuous stretch of 20 hours!? It just happened to me, well it has happened to many other people as well. Its nothing new trust me! When you take a flight to US, it happens that way. :-)

I was on my 2nd international flight, the first one being the one to Singapore that hardly lasted 4 hours. This was loooooong! Had three legs, and in which one leg was further broken into two.

The complete itinerary was as follows

Kolkata --- AI 101 --- New Delhi ---- AI127--- Frankfurt ---AI127----- Chicago ----AA1489 --- Tucson


I saw daylight at Frankfurt; the flight reached at 6:30 am local time and since then it was day for the next 20 hours!! We had to wait in the transit room at Frankfurt for 3 hours before the flight was ready for the next broken leg over the Atlantic. I was getting thrilled already to have flown over Europe and landed, no matter for how much less time! The greenery of Frankfurt was charming.

It was nearing mid day at Frankfurt when we flew off to Chicago. It was supposed to be an eight hour flight, and I started inventing ways to avoid jet lag and stuff. Slept for sometime, watched one Hindi movie, one Bengali movie. And a couple of music videos. And then since I didn’t manage to get a window seat (well I got one but the seat was a dud! Somehow there was enough leg space there but no window!! Can you believe a window seat without a window? :O) I had to sit in one near to the window and that one was closed too because of the sun beaming directly on it. Couldn’t see much of Atlantic. I took a periodic stroll and drank loads of water. Someone back home suggested me to drink loads of fluid on board. Caught up with the Air hostesses ( they were aunties :P Air India recruits aunties only I guess, might be a part of their recruitment policy!! ;-)) But those aunties were really sweet. They gave me a cup of coke every time I asked for it without getting vexed… and they also called up the captain to enquire about the area we were cruising over. The captain reported “Greenland”. I thought “Wow!!”. There were patches of water and land mostly. Greenland is really green.


I walked past all the passengers so many times in tandem. I don’t know if my strolling was disturbing people, but it was not possible for me to sit idly like that continuously. It’s a different experience altogether. I have made many train journeys before, all more than 30 hours, but this journey was totally different. I never had brushed my teeth in an aircraft! And since the journey was so long and through day time mostly, I had to brush my teeth almost 3-4 times. I brushed every time I felt it was morning. Lol!


We had a roller coaster ride when we were getting down at Chicago. Before the landing I could see Lake Michigan and the Chicago Skyline, it was a strange feeling as I had seen that so many times in movies and on the TV. The fact that I was seeing that in front of me was a different feeling altogether. The pilot prepared for landing and hurled towards the runway and then suddenly when the plane was about to touch down something went wrong. It was a free fall, and we were scared. The plane again took off and swerved in the air as if the captain had mistaken the proper runway! There was an apologetic announcement saying the runway was not clear. I was very scared. Pankhuri was sitting besides me and she was scared too! I tried amusing her and myself in the process by discussing about a crash landing and more! That way we were relieved off the tension. The plane circled in the air one more time. It was a big circle that it made; it flew into Michigan Lake once again and we could see the skyline encore. Finally the pilot confirmed about landing and we touched down. “Welcome to USA” I said to myself!


The immigration and customs looked more of a mere formality than the over hyped posts on Edulix and soon we were out. I spent my first 10 $ in buying a calling card. And then it pinched when I couldn’t find water anywhere and had to buy it paying 2.3$; the calculator in my mind converted it to INR 120. Gosh!! A small bottle of water for 120!! The flight to Tucson was after 8 hours from that time and god only knows how we spent those excruciating eight hours waiting at the domestic terminal, half asleep, half hungry. The four hour flight to Tucson was a breezer as we slept completely in that and that refreshed up a bit. So you see - our morning was at Frankfurt - 8 hours to Chicago, 8 hours waiting at Chicago and 4 hours flight to Tucson, totaling up to 20 hours of daylight for us!! We just kept praying for the day to end!. Yaar yeh to khatam hi nahi hota!!.. (Dude, the day doesn't seem to end!) -- that's what we thought all the time!! But I would say one last thing -- Air India rocks!! the food and the hospitality, I liked everything. I don't know why people avoid Air India!!

I’m not been able to shut that calculator down, even for a moment although people around here tells me not to convert anything. Well I guess, I need to get used to spending quite a lot out here. And now that I have luckily managed a research assistantship ( Which pays almost double the Oracle salary back home), I guess it will start biting less once I get to see the money being credited in to my account!!