Me, my mom and my dad exit the plane after our trans-Atlantic flight. It's around 4 AM and we have just touched down in Amsterdam. We make our way over to the main concourse area to get some breakfast. It takes a while to get there; Schiphol is a gigantic airport: it takes 38 min to walk from one end of the terminal to the other. My dad explains how it was a smart move by the Netherlands to build such a big airport and be a global aviation hub. I yawn; I've crossed seven time zones, and even though I don't feel jet-lagged I am tired. I have lost all sense of time.
My ear starts to pick up languages other than English. I'm in line at a coffee shop behind a group of cute Dutch girls. I try striking up a conversation first in English than in German. I fail. I should've known that while German and Dutch are similar languages, the Dutch are not too fond of Germans or their language (for obvious historical reasons). Perhaps, I could've played up the fact I was from Canada (where the liberators came from). I'll leave that for a next time.
Me and my family eat up and make our way to our second 7+ hour flight. For the first time I feel international. I begin to sense how small the world is, that at any given moment I live on the same sphere as the one that my friends are sleeping on back home, that Barack Obama is winning a Nobel Prize somewhere on, that people in Angola are struggling to feed their families on. It is a humbling feeling.
What will I feel once I'm in Africa?
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