Travelicious #2: Terror at 38,000 Feet

I departed Newark a little late. The plane didn’t start boarding on time. There was a lot of pre-boarding. People didn’t queue up in any kind of sensible fashion for general boarding. Finally, a bunch of other planes had to take off before we got our chance. We got into the air a good 45 minutes later than scheduled. The pilot hoped we would get a chance to make up some time as we crossed the Atlantic.

This was my first experience with Jet Airways. Knowing that they are an Indian airline but not much else about them, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Most of the crew and passengers were Indian. I found out the plane was stopping in Brussels on its way to Mumbai. For those continuing onward, that meant about 8 hours to Brussels plus another 9 hours to their final destination–way too much time on a plane for one day!

All safety instructions were given in Hindi, then English. They had a rather creepy safety video, done with quasi-anime CGI. I remember when airplane safety videos had actual human beings in them and I wonder why we don’t still do that. CGI is relatively expensive, and it’s not like it would be hard to do the videos in a real environment. Airlines already have access to planes, crew, and passengers, so just bring a camera and a script in there and go! Maybe give some people a first class upgrade for agreeing to demonstrate in the video.

Moving on, this cute Indian girl sat next to me. She wasn’t very talkative, although we were both polite to each other. It wasn’t until we began our final descent that she finally started to get chatty. She explained that she grew up in New Zealand but spent the last 11 years in New York City. She was on her way back to India to visit family. I told her I was on my way to Budapest and her reaction was like that of most people: “Hungary? Why there??” Ha! For anyone who still hasn’t figured that out, it’s pretty simple. Traveling to Europe is nice and all, but Western Europe is, of course, very Western. It’s not dramatically different from being in the US, in my opinion. The time I spent in Brussels (to be described in the next blog) seemed to bear this out. I wanted to go somewhere more unique and different. My friend Nikki had been talking up Budapest for over a year so I decided to bite the bullet and make that my first trip to Europe.

The in-flight food was, I must say, pretty good for food served on an airplane. You could choose between vegetarian and non-vegetarian. I went non-vegetarian as I am a vicious carnivore. Then they asked if I wanted Indian chicken or grilled chicken. Duh! I went for the Indian food. The chicken was chopped up and in some kind of seasoned brown sauce. In the dish was also rice and a single green chili. A small bowl contained chickpeas and baby corn. There was also plain yogurt (yuck) and rice pudding, the latter of which was excellent. Rather than being plain rice pudding, it had small bits of fruit in it–melon and some other things I’m not sure about. The only thing I didn’t eat was the yogurt. Just not a fan of plain yogurt, eh. I offered it to the girl sitting next to me but she didn’t want it either. To drink, there was apple juice and water.

Dinner having been served around 10PM New Jersey time, a few hours later we were served breakfast. It is very strange to lose 6 hours, let me tell you. Breakfast consisted of a raisin muffin and some mixed fruit. I also opted to have coffee with that, which wasn’t bad.

Since it was dark for most of the flight, I didn’t see much of the Atlantic Ocean–as if there is much to see in the first place. But the timing worked out so that I could quite easily see Ireland during the sunrise. I got a sense of how rural most of the country is, most of the landscape carved up into farmland, and the towns I saw were all pretty small. Britain was definitely more urbanized, at least from what I could tell from the air. As we descended, there were numerous ships in the English Channel. I’d never given much thought to how busy that bit of water must be, but it is very heavily trafficked.

At this point you’re probably wondering where the “Terror” in the title comes from. Well, it doesn’t come from anywhere… except my brain. Got you to read this far, though, didn’t it? You can’t argue with success.

There was some mild turbulence and we didn’t get to make up much time due to strong headwinds, none of which bothered me since I had a long layover ahead of me. Hitting the ground an hour late was fine with me, though I’m sure it was inconvenient for some of my fellow passengers.

As for the plane itself, the A330-200 is a pretty sweet aircraft. On the back of each seat is a Linux-based entertainment and communications terminal. There’s a (wired) remote that you can use to control it. On one side of the remote are the standard controls: volume, channel, home, play, stop, etc. Flip it over and it’s both a QWERTY keyboard and a game controller (d-pad and four action buttons.) Most of the games sucked major ass, though there was a 3D pool game which wasn’t bad. There was a selection of movies and music which wasn’t great but it was better than nothing. I got see Tron Legacy which I hadn’t seen yet, so that’s something. Way more luxury than I’m used to having on a plane.

I would also like to mention that it sucks trying to sleep on a plane when babies are breaking out crying every few minutes. Argh! I propose crying children be sent down to the cargo hold, along with their parents. The kid behind me kept kicking my seat, too. What the hell, kids? A couple dirty looks embarrassed her father enough to control her.

And there you have it, somewhat scattered ramblings regarding my flight from Newark to Brussels. Next up: Brussels, city of Dutch things.