Time travel

Traveling across the Atlantic has become a kind of routine for me. Possible entertainment could be flying with an airline that has not yet flown. The possibilities are also slowly being exhausted. Interchange airports have fairly identical shops and do not differ fundamentally. The only difference is the gift shops.

The plane is the fastest and most uncomfortable form of traveling from continent to continent (unless we pay at least 5 times more for a bisnes class). Overall, it would seem that huge long-haul Airbuses are more spacious. This is definitely not true. Knees always touch the chair in front of you, and if you encounter a less empathetic person who additionally unfolds his chair, 8 hours of flight are in a fairly jammed position. Tightness and twisting my body by centimeters in an airline chair is not the worst discomfort for me. The inside of the plane is loud enough to raise your voice quite clearly in order to talk to a fellow passenger. In this way, the monotonous hum of the interior of the plane is additionally flared up by the unintelligible voices of people echoing like an echo.

A flight to Europe is usually organized in the late afternoon. This time I flew out around 6pm. In Europe at the same time there is a night that slowly engulfs the west and flows into the ocean. On the other hand, the plane is approaching darkness at a speed of well over 900 km / h. Outside the airplane window it gets completely dark after the first two hours of flight. Usually we are after dinner on the plane. The cockpit lights go out and the windows slide down. It will be a short night. The darkness is still moving west and the plane cuts it in the next, less than 3 hours, with its dizzy blunt east. the last two hours of the flight are with the lights on. The windows are usually still closed because for the eyes the juicy sun in the middle of a “biological” night is an extreme shock. Breakfast is served although according to my American time it is actually after 1am. My body is tired of falling asleep in an uncomfortable position and the unexpected morning makes me lose the sense of space-time, despite the fact that I understand what happened and why it is daytime outside the window. The most critical hours are generated at the transfer airport. The body does not react to caffeine, fatigue becomes so burdensome that you actually lose some control of what you say and do. My flights to Warsaw from other European cities always require about 4 hours of waiting for the next flight. If you’re traveling alone, taking a nap can be risky as you can just sleep your connection off.

The flight to Warsaw is actually a game. There is a lot more legroom on regular airlines in smaller planes. Exhaustion makes me sleep almost the entire flight. I land at around 4pm local time the next day. The first night in the new time, I sleep quite normally. The body needs to reset. After the first night, time adaptation begins. Eating inaccessible delicacies in a reversed day and night system usually results in a blockage of the digestive system. At midnight, when my whole family and friends are sleeping, I am 16 according to my time and there is no option for me to fall asleep. When I fall asleep from boredom around 5 am, I only sleep for about 5 hours because the charmider of the apartment wakes me up. I do not feel any hunger because my body thinks it is the middle of the night, I only pack coffee and relaxants for breakfast. I get hungry around 4pm.

If I come for about 2 weeks, after 5 days I work fine. Regular sleep regulates well-being, hunger occurs at the local hours, the digestive system still fails, but I know it will be a challenge for my entire stay and everything will be back to normal if I pack local food from North America into myself. Although my digestive system would be disrupted by tasty Polish food, it takes around 24 hours for everything to return to normal when I return to my new continent.

This time my journey was only 7 days and as soon as I switched to the new time I had to come back. The return flight takes place during the day and is not so tiring. The time change is playing tricks and I actually land around the same time and day as I left Europe. Tired of all changes (temperature, water, food, time, mode of the day), the body has a clear sense of return to normalcy. It is true that I wake up again the first night at 4 am, but the local food and water work like a balm and after two days I am fully functional.

I have to work a little longer to stabilize my psyche. During my last 10 day trip, I visited Pasłęk, Warsaw and Montreal. I have lived in each of these cities, and each one has shaped me in some way. Memories of places, people and events strained my mind a bit. After returning, I dreamed of traveling, late and canceled planes, planning new connections, and when I finally woke up, I was really asking myself where I was.

Living in a new environment and being with people I have met recently is kind of a typical environment for me. Such a kind of norm in which I had to learn to function. I was wondering if I actually had a sense of belonging, now after I left my native Pasłęk at the age of 19, and to this day I have not lived anywhere else anymore. I think I belong to each of these places. All these places mixed up with each other, in each of them I know people who are in some way connected with the cities where I lived. A group of my closest friends are people who also lived in at least two or three cities / countries. For me, attachment and a sense of locality are temporary experiences, rediscovered during each trip to new and old places.

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