Sunday August 31st 2003
The Trip
This entry should wrap up our summer-vacation so it’ll be the last one in English – at least for a while!
We decided (quite wisely as it turned out) to show up super early at the airport (i.e. 2 hours early) and thus managed to avoid the throng at the check-in that forms as 8 airplanes prepare to leave in just one hour. We ate a little at the cantina, and then went to the Icelandic Market to buy some Icelandic food! We bought, among other things, some cheese, hot dogs, dried fish, candy, pita sauce, rye-bread and flatbread. All absolutely essential when living abroad! 🙂
The flight to Minneapols was uneventful, but I thought the food was a little skimpy to last the whole 6 and something hours. We got seats by the wing-exit (= extra legroom) and had three seats for ourselves, which was very nice. We also attacked two Icelandic crossword puzzles from the weekend-newspapers they gave us aboard – only to discover that we hardly know any Icelandic any more! 😉
Much to our happiness, the immigration hall in Minneapolis was as good as empty when we arrived, and since there were a lot of US citizens aboard, there was only one person ahead of us in line! Very unusual! 🙂 The other unusual thing was that the guy in the booth didn’t ask us any questions besides “Are you a returning student?” and “Are you both students or just one of you?”. The rest of his time was spent copying long identification numbers from one document to the next, and then he sent us on our way to the newly instated “special line for students”! I thought this was strange, since usually these guys are really chatty and suspicious, and assumed the guy talking to us next would be the real interrogator…
We then lined up next to a window that led into a waiting room, from which we could see a few “questioning rooms”. When the guy finally called us in to the big room, he looked at our papers, entered something into a computer and sent us on our way to collect the baggage! I guess being Icelandic really has it’s benefits, since I’ve heard students from other countries (guess which!) have to have their picture and fingerprints taken and whatnot…!!
Anyway, we also breezed through customs with our food (“You coming from Iceland? Ok, just go right through…”) and then considered getting on an earlier flight to San Fran, but our bags would have taken the later flight, so we didn’t bother. Instead we got some dinner at Chili’s – and remind me never ever to eat the philly cheesesteak there again! It did not agree with any part of me! 🙁
The flight was somewhat empty, and again we had 3 seats for ourselves and sat at the exit, this time, the front exit. It turned out to be somewhat comfy and somewhat not, since the armrests didn’t go up, but we made do, and fell asleep almost immediately since our bodies thought it was 2am by that point. As noted before, John and Kerri came to pick us from the airport and drove us home, where we fell asleep soon after. And thus concludes this year’s summer-holiday! 🙂
