Amsterdam to Nairobi, 6/18

After killing three hours in Schipol Airport in Amsterdam – and overhearing many, many more unintuitive Dutch phrases – I met up with Dan and Adam at a café near our gate. They looked a little haggard but I probably looked more shot, considering that I had mixed up my time zone directions and stupidly tried to avoid sleeping on the first flight.

It was surprising to note how close Nairobi was to the equator. From the flight tracker, it seemed about 150 miles south of the midline, whereas Eldoret looked to be just 50 miles north. That should make for some nice direct sunlight and charred skin considering that Eldoret is also at about 7500 feet above sea level.
Oddly enough, the distance from NY to Amsterdam is just about the same as the distance from Amsterdam to Nairobi, so thought I would be able grab 5ish hours of rest before arriving in Kenya.

I immediately passed out but woke up a couple of hours later to the feeling of something dripping out of my nose. I was too groggy to realize what was going on, so I held my hands under my face until it registered that I was spraying blood all over my shirt. The woman next to me looked at me like I was crazy for not doing anything about it, so she grabbed off my neck pillow and said “Get up!” I complied and stumbled my way to the bathroom and washed myself off in the sink, which promptly clogged, leaving a gross standing pool of bodily fluids. A grabbed a passing flight attendant and pointed to the sink, expecting him to show me some cool Dutch declogging mechanism, but instead he handed me a pair of plastic tweezers (why did he randomly have them on his person?). I took a couple minutes, but I was able to eventually reach into the pool and pull out the drain stop. Still a little sleepy, I staggered back to my seat. From all the shirt stains it looked as if I had been shot in the chest.

Dan shot a glance my way a few minutes later and shook his head as I shrugged. The guy sitting next to him was hardcore passed out and was very much encroaching into (preposition use?) Dan’s personal space. He apparently was a nice guy but had terrible body odor. This led Dan to get up every half hour to stretch his legs, check in and discuss plane exit strategy. Turns out I misplaced my ticket and baggage claim check sometime between entering the plane and experiencing a nose hemorrhage. This will become an issue later if my bags did not make it onto this flight, due to my late arrival in JFK.

Um, worrying is stressful, so I decided to catch a few more hours of sleep before we landed.