Life Outside PLT1

Welcome to Washington DC: It smells of jet fuel here

December 3, 2007 on 2:54 pm | In News | | hackra

(Scroll down for tldr, pictures to follow when I feel like it)

Ok, so it’s probably not the most accurate description of the capital city, but given that I’m passing through here with roughly 12 hours of sleep for the past 96 hours, it’s the most cogent description I am likely to provide.

The trip over was marked by conversation with the cute girl from the windy city sitting next to me (I neglected to get pics, my apologies) and Air NZ’s new in-flight entertainment system. While I was impressed with the content (Numerous recent release movies, a collection of TV series episodes and many albums worth of music), I wasn’t impressed with the controller/remote. Sluggish and unresponsive (button presses would go unrecognised, control lag ranged from nothing to 5 seconds or more and the prevalence of sub-menus made navigation and selection a somewhat arduous task if the controller decided to play-up (read: All the time).

Fast forward several movies (Stardust, The Simpsons), an hour playing Shining Force 2 and watching the CSI episodes encoded on my PSP and I was in Las Angeles. Collecting bags and incorrectly filling out both of the necessary arrival forms proved no real obstacle to my ultimate objective: Finding my parents so I could resume leaching food and other essential resources (Internet, Jokes about receding hair lines, transport, etc) off them. Five seconds after stepping out of the Terminal I get ambushed by a well dressed African American attempting to garner donations for “The Homeless”. Being a long-time pessimist about the trustworthiness of people who loiter around terminals soliciting tourists, I told him the truth, “I don’t have any American money”, this obviously wasn’t good enough “We accept foreign currency too”, I was ready for this, “I dumped my foreign cash before I came here because I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend it”. I walked away victorious, but feeling a little bit down about the whole thing, ’cause hey, y’know, “The Homeless”.

Having duly txted my parents “Outside now” and received a coherent response (at least something that counted as coherent from Mum using predictive txting) “Fiue+Mins”… Twenty minutes later they roll up in the rental car, they’d been “at burger king” (this is odd given Dad’s avowed dislike of fast food chains). What follows next can only be described as a two hour drive along the freeway to Marriott Newport Beach (We saw the Goodyear Blimp ^_^).

Upon reaching the Marriott (which we scored via a Timeshare exchange), I realise that I should’ve gone to LA with my family a week ago. Free internet, 3 TV’s (with many many channels), ocean views, multiple bathrooms, full kitchen. I could’ve done what I did at home for the past 6 days (Watching TV, playing WoW, randomly baking biscuits, inciting bizarre two-way exchanges of insanity over MSN), I’d been foiled once again by relying on my keen sense of lethargy rather than objective planning (does anyone even do that anymore? I’m beginning to suspect that no one ever has or will).

A short time afterwards, I am comfortably perched in the couch watching CNN when my parents announce their intention to head to a nearby shopping mall (they somehow managed to talk $150 worth of shopping vouchers out of the resort, I decided not to ask exactly how they did this).

The next day was entirely comprised of: Not sleeping (had to get up at 5:30 to catch our connecting flight to Washington DC), waiting for delayed flights (snowstorm in Chicago) and giving up on driving to our friends’ place in Charlottesville due to the fact that it was already 11pm and we still hadn’t managed to pick up our rental car. Crashing out at Best Western in Leesburg (and taking full advantage of the complimentary breakfast buffet) I managed slightly under 6 hours of sleep (2am-8am).

The next morning was spent driving and now we’re in Charlottesville. My internal clock is completely shot, I keep asking what time it is because I honestly don’t know if I can trust the time given to me by my cellphone/iPod/Laptop because they’re all had their times changed repeatedly to try and keep up with time-zones. After much comparison I now believe that it is 20:46 on Sunday the 2nd of December. This may all be part of a vast and Byzantine conspiracy to make me kill the president (or steal his waffles, or something), my brain is too addled to be able to tell.

tldr - I’m in the USA, I’m tired, Washington smells like jet fuel. Now in Charlottesville, still tired.