This was a day mostly filled with not knowing what time it was. I boarded a plane out of Honolulu at 9:30pm and flew to Seattle. After six hours on the plane I arrived at 5:15 in the morning and having adjusted to Hawai'ian time my body was trying to tell me it was far too early to be waking up yet. I don't know whether my stomach thought it was breakfast, dinner or something else entirely but I had a smoked salmon bagel with Washington Salmon at the airport.
My experience of Washington State: an airport with a surprising amount of fish artwork
Two and a half hours later I boarded another flight during which I tried desperately not to sleep because I knew that I would be arriving in the other Washington at the end of the day local time and the very last thing I needed before the first day of actually needing to be in a university work frame of mind was having my time zones completely muddled.
This was harder than it may seem as my body was still insisting that it was sometime before six in the morning and that I hadn't had a proper sleep in over 24 hours. Being completely out of whack with sleep also makes waiting at airports less than serene, a fact which I discovered when the flight got in early but the luggage made it to the carousel late and again when the hotel shuttle company told me to wait in their competitor's bay. In any event it took me over two hours from exiting the plane to leaving the airport.
Taken a little before midday, meanwhile my brain insisted it was closer to midnight.
I eventually got to the hotel and met up with Roomie, whose name has been changed to protect the innocent. I felt that we'd get along pretty well from the start and he never complained about my snoring so that was a bonus. A group of us got together and went to the Applebee's next door to swap stories about our trips so far and start bond as a group of displaced Aussies, specifically the horror stories of our plane trips, a topic that I was thankfully unable to contribute much to.
After dinner it was back to the room for a discussion about alarms, showers and all the fun stuff related to cohabiting. All in all a fairly short day, I could probably work it out and I'm guessing it would come to, at most, two thirds of a standard day and most of that spent on aeroplanes.
I guarantee tomorrow will be more interesting.
Culture shock for the day: I got talking to a fellow Australian on the trip from Seattle to Washington and he asked me what team I supported. Now I was assuming that he was talking about AFL, seeing as he came from Adelaide, so I answered Hawks. Strangely this made approximately half the plane adore me and the other half loathe me. Turns out I was on a plane full of NFL supporters heading to DC to see the Seattle Seahawks play the Washington Redskins. Turns out just because someone is an Australian doesn't mean they follow Aussie Rules, Rugby or even Soccer.
Next Time: All the monuments of ever and a train station food court.
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