Notes to self

Note to self: please for the love of god remember for once not to travel when so incredibly hungover. Or if travel is already scheduled, then please don't get so obliterated that you want to throw up in the car on the way to saying goodbye to the grandparents. 

When I am in this miserable state and have to take a plane, or any form of windowless transportation, I have, what only can be described as panic attacks. I was having the smoothest 3 hour flight from London to Helsinki a few years back, yet I was unable to detach my mouth from the paperbag, breathing heavily and probably freaking the shit out of my neighbour. This is due to the fact, that for some reason I become (only when battling the aftereffects) acutely aware that there is no fresh air on board and I am enclosed in this space where there is no exit and I am breathing the same stale air as a 100 or so other people do. The more I think about this the more aware and panicked I become and it takes only minutes to reach the bottom of the downward spiral, where the sane part of my brain is screaming (almost inaudibly for the one that went berserk) to stop being so moronically childish.  I usually turn all three air-conditioning nipple-thingies towards myself on full, and while I freeze my ass off I have the vague impression of fresh air caressing my face. 

This was of course no longer a problem when the flight was delayed with 3 and a half hours. Note to self:  WIZZAIR sucks!!! Just because they rob maybe less from you, for the idiotic idea that you have to PAY for your checked-in luggage, (which can be a miserable 15 kilos) it is so not at all bloody worth being stuck at Ferihegy 1 for 4 hours, which can, with the best of intentions, only be described as mind-numbingly boring. 

As usual I bought the Economist, but my still alcohol hazed mind could not process it faster than at the rate of a page/30 minutes, so I gave up and bought The Reader by Schlink. Moving as it was, it didn't make for the best travel-reading. Its moral complexity left me breathless and deeply in thought and an airport and later a psychotic screaming and kicking child behind me, did not quite provide the relaxing atmosphere I would have required for reflection. 

When I, of course, missed the last tube, I ended up with one of those talkative cabbies. Naturally, when I told him where I was from he told me he was starving. After a day like that I almost cried from pain hearing this. But he went on telling me that he wouldn't be here if it had not been for a Hungarian man. His Polish father was in a camp and was in the Death March when he was 14 or 15. When he could not go on and laid down in the snow, a man lifted him up and told him he needed to live. So the cabbie's father was dragged up and survived. So did the Hungarian man, who is around 90 now. And the cabbie was born, to tell me this story, take my breath away and give me a lot more to think of than when I started out for the day. 

Note to self: everything happens for a reason.