Flying High

Hello world, yes never fear I have survived the perilous trip to Romania. My plane left Melbourne airport at 11:15 on the Monday night, we flew for 14 hours, during which time the sun never seemed to rise, I ended sitting next to Lesley from Britain who was very nice, but her snoring made it hard to get more than 4 hours sleep.

Arriving in Abu Daubi as like stepping through the looking glass, the place was built on the rich oil wells of the UAE, and you can see why it is called the jewel in the Emirates crown. One of the more beautiful sights was to watch the sun rising over the sand covered runways of the airport, the low sun giving the impression of never ending desert. Anyway after a 7 hour layover there I was on the way to Frankfurt Germany, at one point during the flight I managed to sneak my way into the business class area, I’ve got to say that the business class are of Etihad is really really good, you get to spread your legs out in a decent sized pod area with a bigger sized screen than the cattle (economy) class. My enjoyment was cut short however when I saw the lady with the beverage cart coming down, so I scurried back to economy for the last 3 hours.

When I arrived at Frankfurt, we were pushed through security and thrust into the transfer area. Now Frankfurt isn’t like Abu Daubi, While Abu Daubi is nice to look at and casual, Frankfurt is full of metal cages and cold grey surroundings. One of the interesting things I did notice in Frankfurt was this idea of Smoke boxes. In the actual airport smoking is forbidden, however they do set out these glass boxes in which people can go and smoke. I thought that these would be a great way to combat smoking, imagine down in Lygon Street a glass box which is the only place you can smoke, would you go in there and light up? Anyway after one security check, I was forced to do another to get to the boarding gate, so as I put everything down and stepped through and for the first time in the entire trip I was pulled up for an item of luggage, it was a rocking snowman I had bought for Christmas next year, now they took it off me and walked it around a corner, however they didn’t go far enough and I could still see them. They patted it down a bit and wiped it with a cloth, I was beginning to wonder why they had bothered when they pushed the play button and just sat back watching and laughing, when it finished they call over more of their friends and played it again. They had only wanted to see it play.

So I finally got my connection to Bucharest and arrived at my destination. I was picked up by Alex, the desk officer at Projects Abroad, we piled all my stuff into his small, dirty and kind of beat up car, we set off for Brasov, now the trip from Brasov is supposed to take around 3 hours, maybe closer to 2 on a clear night as you slow down to go through the mountains, Alex managed to blitz the whole thing in  one hour and forty-five minutes, as he told me, “in Romania you have to be aggressive or you go nowhere”. So it was at 3:00 in the Romanian morning that I finally arrived at my accommodation, I met my lovely host mother Rodica, who showed me my room, it is a small 4 x 4 meter room which I’m going to share with another volunteer called Josh, he hasn’t arrived yet from Belgrad, he and 3 other volunteers have gone there for 4 days. I just hit the hay straight away dead.

So that was the trip across, this morning I’m off to an induction session with Alex, and then.. well who know what.

Talk soon, Jackson