Sayonara Seattle: Retroactive Post

I haven't slept for more than four hours in the last 36, so maybe that might account for my jumbled emotional state right now. As I type this, I am hurtling hundreds of feet per minute towards Japan.

I had stayed up until 2 am last night, getting packed for the next three months and then woke up at 6 to continue preparing while my mom and dad left this morning to go to a doctor's appointment for my dad. My plane was due to depart at 12:55pm this afternoon, and I was starting to worry when Pone and my parents still weren't home by 10:30. They get home at last, and we load the two huge check-in luggage, my carry-on luggage, my laptop case, my niece Kyla who's knocked out in her car seat, and her diaper bag, into our van and get on I-5 to SeaTac.

Unfortunately, after merging onto the freeway from the entrance ramp, traffic just stops moving, we hear emergency signals and spot a truck heading to some point up ahead of us. Luckily we get past the accident that had been slowing everything down, and get to the airport by 11:00. However, I was to find that this was merely the first in a series of occurrences that seemed determined to prevent me from getting to Japan.

We unload everything from the car and go to the curbside baggage check-in. There are several people there, but we eventually get the attention of a friendly baggage handler. He then promptly tells me that the weight limit on check-in baggage was not the 70lbs that it normally is if you go to the Philippines, and which my mom and I had argued over about trying to pack everything and still remain under the limit, but rather 50lbs: which left us with 40lbs to redistribute in my already full carry-on luggage. Fortunately, there was a Filipino man also traveling to Japan right behind us in line, and who had also been unaware of the different weight restrictions, but after talking with the Filipino baggage handler and my parents in a Tagalog conversation which I barely understood, I found out that he'd be willing to take on some of my excess packages.

After getting my boarding pass, I head over to my gate, say rushed good-bye to my family and head through the screening process. I get my stuff through pretty quickly, but they tell me that they've just got to look through my rolling carry-on luggage, which I readily agree to. They take out my things and wipe down the inside of the luggage and scan it for stuff. I think nothing of it, until the machine alerts of her an EDT (no idea what that is) hit, which makes her call someone else.

As he looks through a folder of info, she tells me that she's got to go through the purse I had inside. Again, I agree and it's not until she starts pulling stuff out that is covered in something liquid that I realize that something has gone very wrong: the bottle of prescription cough syrup that my doctor had prescribed for me in case I got sick again in Japan, had broken and leaked all of its contents into my purse, covering my umbrella, lotion and other materials. They didn't make a big deal about it once they found out that it was just cough syrup, but that left me with a huge mess to clean up, aided by the roll of paper towels they gave to me, but my Coach purse is ruined, and it sucks even more because that was the ONLY purse I had brought with me.

I get most of it dealt with and head to my gate with the guy, Leo, who's carrying some of my stuff. We make it to the gate, and after waiting for only a short time, find that they're starting to board. It was going through that boarding ramp that started doing it for me. It was when I realized, there's no going back. I get on the plane, make it to my seat, struggle with getting my luggage into the overhead compartment and take my seat next to a Japanese girl who looks to be about my age (we haven't spoken). From there, as more and more people of Japanese descent get on the plane, I realize just how scared I was about going to another country and that I've left my life and everything that I know behind, but I take some deep breaths and calm down. I sorta dozed as we were preparing to get ready, but had to wait through a half hour delay as they had to do something with the water tank. Finally, our plane pulls away from the terminal and we make our slow, bumpy way down the landing strip.

At one point, there were these loud thudding noises coming from below us and I felt a brief flash of fear as I thought about it being a sign that our plane was going to crash on take-off, further helped along as our plane started to slow and then stop. However I was relieved to find that we were stopping because we were waiting for a plane in front of us to start their take-off and then noticed this line of planes behind us all waiting for their chance to take-off, and all of a sudden, instead of being scared, I was excited as my plane's engines fired up and thrust us into the air and towards Japan.

As we cleared the cloud cover and got into the sunlight, I remembered what it was like when I had gone sky-diving and the extremely unnatural sensation of falling fast through the clouds. The feelings that I felt then mirror a lot of the ones that I'm going through now:; fear about what it's actually going to be like; excitement that this is something I've never done before; sadness that no one is with me; disbelief that I'm actually going through with this; but pride as well, that all of my talk about traveling was not just talk, and that I can actually walk that talk.

So, to everyone at home: I love you all but I'm happy I'm doing this. See you in three months.