Crossing the Pond

While this is a bit of a late start now that I am somewhat settled into my new University I figured it is a good time write a bit about my trip so far. Starting from the beginning with the flight across the pond, aka the Atlantic Ocean. I flew on Continental Airlines out of Newark International Airport on my IFSA Butler group flight. The flight left at 9:50 pm (EST) on January 1st, 2011 and was scheduled to arrive in Dublin on January 2nd, 2011 9:30 am (Ireland Time). The trip to the airport was nice with little traffic and we arrived about 3 hours before departure, when we entered the building the line for Continental International flights was incredibly long
, resulting in a nice hour and a half wait with about 120 lbs of luggage to be dragged along during it.

My girlfriend, Arielle, is also studying abroad in Ireland for the Spring semester and was flying out on the same flight as me. The night before the flight we called Continental to change our seats so that we could sit next to each other on the flight since previously there hadn't been any seats available next to each other. When we boarded the plane we discovered that the seats that we had been assigned were the ones in front of the fire escape isle on the plane. This would not have been a big deal if there was not a tiny white sign that read "due to fire regulation these seats have limited recline". While it said limited, it might as well have read zero because thats how much the seats moved back. It was basically impossible to get comfortable in those seats because they forced us to literally sit straight up almost falling forward. Due to this unfortunate seating assignment I was unable to sleep at all on the 7 hour flight to Dublin. Now it would not have been a big deal really because I usually can't sleep on long flights like that because I am just to pumped to go to another country to fall asleep, but since this fight was on New Years Day and I had not gotten a lot of sleep the night before, I had been counting on a long nap on the plane to rejuvenate me for my 9 am landing time in Dublin.

Don't let the smirk in the picture fool you, my eyes are telling the real story. Also you can kind of see the terrible white sign in the lower left. Other than the lack of sleep the food on the plane was alright and there was just a little bit of turbulence on the trip. We were delayed a little bit on the tarmac in Newark so our time of arrival in Dublin ended up being around 10:15 am in the end.