260: One Long Day

I've slept like six hours in the last 48, and honestly I couldn't even tell you what time my body thinks it is right now.

I'm writing this at ~9:30PM Amsterdam time, which is like 1PM Pacific time, but I spent genuinely 20-some hours in transit and in airports, it's been a weird couple days.

Lemme just start from the beginning:

I woke up Sunday morning at like 8:15, showered, did a tiny bit of last-minute packing, and then had my Italian conversation zoom, which was fun, but also kinda snuck up on me. I had been so distracted with everything that I forgot about it until that morning, and it's timing very much got in the way of me taking the bus to the airport, but that's okay.

Giuseppe wasn't there 😦, but I did get to have a nice conversation with a new person, which I'm always a fan of. It was a fun conversation, and I got to teach her about the American dialectical differences between University and College, because in Italy everyone just calls it "university", the word college is hardly used, and here they're very different things. It was fun to actually talk linguistics, it's something I wish I did more in my life (that's a VERY long list though).

The other fun part was that Chiara was from Napoli, and her boyfriend (almost) has my ancestral last name, Oliviero vs Oliverio, it was cool to find out.

After that I did some very final packing (I always forget some stuff), and then I ubered to the SLO airport. SLO was (mostly) uneventful; I did end up almost missing my flight (this will come up again) because they DIDN'T CHANGE THE SCREENS. I heard a couple things about a flight to Phoenix, but I was in group 6, so I didn't worry about it the first couple times. The departure screen didn't display a gate though, it just said "tba", so I was super confused, but I was just reading my book until there was almost nobody left in the terminal. They came on and made the final boarding call, which I did notice, and I was probably in the last 5 people aboard. It was very silly, but why no displays? I'm not listening all the damn time, update your static trackers! Not to mention if someone was deaf or hearing-impaired, they would have just been screwed!

The flight to Phoenix was fine, I just read my book, but then I had literally 7 hours to burn in the Phoenix airport. I spent a ton of that time just wandering around, I busted out the camera and took some pictures (including the one on yesterday's post), but none of them were quite what I was after. I should've brought my longer lens for the shots I was after (planes in motion), but I don't have any use for it in Europe, so it's not that big of a deal.

I did see a man with the coolest hat case ever, I asked him about it, and it was a dedicated hard-case for cowboy hats (he said he had his and his wife's hats in it), and he looked like a proper cowboy.

I also got a rare outfit compliment myself, there was another ball-knower in the phoenix airport, and he complimented my Destiny shirt, which was fun. The shirt I was (am) wearing is from such a niche thing from within Destiny that it's essentially impossible he knew the specific thing, but the ship that's on the shirt is relatively well-known, so I'd bet he just recognized the silhouette.

I had lunch at Panera bread, which was fantastic.

The flight from Phoenix to London was a little funky, because American gave me essentially no information on it beforehand, I had to wait until it had a gate assigned on the TVs, and then go to that gate and have the gate agent confirm my passport and print me physical tickets. This, of course, took forever, and when you're doing it for a billion people (really bit plane) it takes even more forevers, so I got to stand in line for a really long time (yippee!), but I made it on the plane okay.

It was actually a remarkably cozy flight, even though I was in the normal-person cabin, I still got a pillow and blanket, and two meals! Dinner was served an hour or so into the flight, and was actually pretty good. I would rather eat that lentil shepherds pie than some of the stuff I eat on campus. Breakfast (served like 6 hours later) was also quite good; I had an egg and cheese omelet with mushrooms on top! The flight was super long, so I finished an entire book, slept fitfully for like 3 hours, and got bored enough I designed myself a fidget cube in CAD.

London was alright, but a little strange. Heathrow is a huge airport, and I was put through security again, even though I was already in the airport (strange). That adventure took a solid hour, and then I had a little bit of time where I had to wait for the big departure screens to tell me where to go (again). I made it there, and then managed to end up at the end of the check-in line again, so I was one of the last people on board, and they yanked my rollie and checked it (which is fine, tbh).

I did have a really fun interaction during security in Heathrow; there was a person in front of me in line who's style caught my eye, the way they'd dyed their hair, in conjunction with their fashion and accessories, they just had a vibe. I've been trying all year to give more compliments to strangers, so as they were grabbing their stuff from the scanner output I stopped them and told them I loved their vibe. I specifically said "Excuse me, I know this is a weird compliment, but I love your vibe". They were definitely shy, but the way their face lit up made it totally worth the jump to make the compliment. I think a lot about making people uncomfortable, and I think it's the main reason that I hesitate to give compliments, but I need to start looking at it from a total-impact perspective, rather than an immediate one. This person was definitely momentarily uncomfortable when I first grabbed their attention, but that graph swung fully the other way once I'd given the compliment, and they told me I'd made their day, which felt awesome. I think the total impact of the compliment was a definite net positive, so I'll have to keep that in mind the next time I have the chance.

I finally made it to Amsterdam around 6PM local time, and then I got to have the fun old-timey experience of figuring out where the hell I was going data-less. I had wifi in the airport, but I don't speak dutch, and it's a huge airport, so I had to figure it all out, and I did! The mobile kiosk at the airport itself was closed, of course, but I asked one of the information desk people and there was a store just outside Amsterdam Centraal where I got myself a european SIM card. The guy working the little shop was super helpful, and my phone has two SIM slots, which I actually think is dope, so I just toggled everything in the settings and it works!

The hotel we're staying in is only a short walk from Amsterdam Centraal, and I was (obviously) able to take the train from the airport straight into downtown. I had forgotten a little bit how much I fucking LOVE trains. I love trains. So much. They're unquestionably the best form of transportation.

There's a machine-learning experiment that I bring up occasionally because it fills me with joy; essentially, some researchers took dedicated transport-focused AI and fed it information about the systems that it had to build transportation for, and without fail, every single time, it designed trains. Trains are the mathematically and practically ultimate form of transport. The researchers were annoyed, so they even ran a version of the model specifically without ever mentioning trains, they only fed it information on cars and planes and bikes or whatever, and it still made up trains. Even when not prompted by the history of trains being awesome, the model decided on its own that trains are the best form of transport.

The hotel we're in is kinda bougie (no complaints from me, there's a reason my sister always loves traveling with mom), but it means I didn't even have to leave to get food. There's a VIP lounge on the first floor that (of course) my mom has access to, so I had snacks for dinner. They were like, proper good snacks though. Quiche, hummus, crackers, soda, bread, it was good food, and that's what I count as dinner.

It's now 10:40, and I'm literally falling asleep at they keyboard here, so I'm going to call it and go to sleep. I'm going to have no trouble sleeping tonight 😴.

I'll also be scheduling this one, so for consistency's sake it's going to come out at 11:59PM Pacific time.