Home, sweet home

I'm back from Finland. And boy was it a pain in the ass.

I shared a taxi with three other people to the Helsinki Vantaa airport. I was forced to check in my second carry-on - I guess they're pretty anal about that. But it was okay because I had no problems getting it back. Although I also got a 'United States passenger manifest' or something like that I had to fill out before boarding the plane to New York, with my full name, flight and destination. Felt 1984-ish..

The flight to JFK was fairly uneventful, but that's where the fun started. Immigration and customs took nearly half an hour, I'd say. After picking up my bags and saying goodbye to Andres and Erinn, I went up to the terminal and had a bite to eat because I had an hour and a half of layover yet. Then I moseyed over to my gate, going through the silly security procedures, and discovered that the gate had changed from 22 to 7 - which was in another zone that would require me to go through security again. And by the time I got back there the line for the security checkpoint was extremely long and it took another 15 minutes to get through that.

I sat down in front of the gate and soon enough a lady on the PA system announced that the plane, which had come from Rome, had been delayed, and they still needed about an hour to refuel and clean up the plane. Bad enough, right? Then we got onto the plane and spent another hour waiting because the toilet was busted and they wanted to fix it. Then we spent another hour waiting because once we got moving we were the 15th plane in line to take off.

Finally we landed in SFO and I got the hell out. There had been quite a bit of mail for me. I got my Bank of America credit card (yay), and two CDs which I'd ordered - coupled with the Finnish CD I bought in Finland, my new acquisitions are:

Fun.

I need to sleep for work tomorrow, which is even more fun, because I just got slapped with a deadline.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Rajaton - Butterfly