Jetlag

Traveling from San Diego to Cork (ORK) takes a very, very long time. I left my house at around 11.30am PDT (7.30pm Cork time) on Thursday and landed in Cork at about 1.3opm Cork time on Friday at ORK airport. In other words, about 18 hours of travel time not including picking up baggage and getting a cab to where I'm staying, but both of those took very little time. As I expected, my attempts at sleep on the long plane ride from LAX to Heathrow were futile. Consequently, I'm very tired. It was quite an interesting journey.

My flight out of LAX was delayed by what British Airways called 35 minutes, so we ended up taking off about an hour late. The baggage dropoff system in the international terminal of LAX is, quite possibly, the most poorly-conceived and convoluted system that I have ever seen. After agonizing through that for almost an hour I went through security and walked to my gate, which was in a half-constructed terminal complete with construction noises. Eventually I got on the plane and spent a little over 9 hours sitting in a cramped seat trying to stay comfortable. On the plus side they gave us dinner and breakfast and their in-flight entertainment system had a very large selection of movies and music you could listen to, all in a very cool touch screen setup.

Heathrow confused me. I do not understand why any person would design an airport the way Heathrow is designed. I went through at least 3 sets of immigration/customs/security and had to walk at least a few miles because my connecting gate was so far away from my arriving gate. As I followed the signs leading to my gate, I seriously began to fear that the hallway would just end and nothing would be there. That was how sketchy-looking and remote this gate was. Apparently AerLingus is not the most important of carriers flying through London.

The view from the plane window as we landed in Cork was incredible. The coastline giving way to rolling, green hills that seemed so stereotypically Irish was an awesome first vision of the island. On the ground, its very strange to have to look to the right when crossing the street, and I was completely disoriented in the cab on the way over from the airport, although that could have been partially due to being exhausted from lack of sleep. Either way, I'm probably going to be nearly run over in the next week or two because I look the wrong way when crossing the street.
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Airports and Islands

And so it begins (almost). Tomorrow afternoon sometime I will get in a car, drive to LAX, give my bag to an airport employee, wait for a few hours, and get on a plane and then sleep sit and try desperately try to close my eyes for the next few hours. Fortunately, I have a window seat so I have something solid to lean against. After that plane lands in Heathrow I'll go through the entire process again except with customs and without attempts at sleep. I'm scheduled to land at Cork Airport (ORK) at around 1pm local time, which is around 5am San Diego time. Presumably I will stumble around until I find a cab to take me to where I'm staying in Cork.

While I'm not looking forward to the whole physical fatigue and jetlag part of this whole travel bit, it has just occurred to me that this will make Great Britain and Ireland the only islands that I have ever flown to in addition to being the first foreign countries I've ever visited. Not that I'll be able to tell, in any case.

Its supposed to be in the 50s and rainy this weekend in Cork, a bit of a wake-up call to Irish weather coming straight from mid 70s and sunny in San Diego. Everything has a downside, I guess.
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British Airways is a strange beast

I got my plane tickets in the mail from British Airways today. Yes, in the mail. Apparently the magic of the internet and such things as electronic tickets are foreign to them, or if not foreign than at least vastly overrated. Unfortunately, these tickets only had "Cork" as the final destination and not the three letter abbreviation for Cork Airport. Normally this would not be a big deal, but Cork's abbreviation is, awesomely, ORK. Every piece of paper that says "Cork" instead of using ORK is a sadly wasted opportunity by the powers that be. Evidently British Airways eschews both ORK and etickets. For these reasons, I will never understand them. Read more