Delta (formerly Northwest)'s wonderful terminal at Detroit Metro. This is a good place to get in your daily walking requirement! It is light, bright, and hardly ever jammed with people. I bet a circuit of this terminal is at least a mile. (Note to self -- a pedometer would be a fun thing to take on this kind of vacation, if you had one.....)
My daughter and I booked our tickets to Venice a few months apart (it wasn't certain I would be going, when she got her tix). I was able to book a seat on her plane from JFK to Venice, but we took different planes from DTW to JFK. She sat waiting, for hours, in DTW, and I in JFK.
One good thing that came out of waiting was that she realized that we only had one of our pluggy-innie things. This is a technical term for the thing you need in order to deal with the fact that plugs for the USA will not fit into European sockets. Ours have flat blades; theirs have slim cylinders.
Begin "coping with the lack of a universal standard for electrical power" Digression........
Here you see a pluggy-innie thing, and a US iPod charger, which also has a USB port, into which the cable is plugged which connects the charger to the iPod.
Of course the electrical current coming out of the socket is very different, too, between the US and Europe. Most modern communication devices have power supplies, or chargers, which can handle either current. You know how the power cord for your laptop has that rectangular box in the middle? That is the thing that handles the current differences. The iPod charger handles two different currents. AND translates whatever current comes in, into whatever a USB cable expects to receive and transmit....... Pretty clever, for such a small device!
This is the bottom of the charger.
We still have to help with the different physical configuration of the plug/socket -- and, of course, there are more than two standards in this world, for plugs and sockets. I think there are about half a dozen.......
Here's what this one says it can help with. (This is the same sort we needed in France, if I remember correctly.....)
There are flocks of sheep, herds of cattle and murders of crows. I call this a silliness of plugs.......
On the other hand, they are an excellent team, and allow us to use our communications devices abroad with relatively little annoyance. Assuming we remember to bring the pluggy-innie things AND can find a socket to plug the whole shebang into!
As you would guess, you pretty much have to buy your pluggy-innie things in your home location. When you are abroad, you can buy one of these that will plug *their* devices into *our* power, but you can't easily find one in someone else's country that will plug *our* devices into *their* power.
So it was a very good thing that my daughter realized we might only have one of our two in time to rectify the situation. She found pluggy-innie things for sale in the first place she looked, while at DTW, and got one. A very good thing. With the netbook (tinier-than-a-laptop, elderly, slow-but-stalwart computer), three cameras, her iPhone, my formerly-iPhone-now-just-iPod, all to keep fed and happy, two pluggy-innie things were a bare minimum. (Note to self -- next time, have three!)
I wonder what would happen, if you brought a power strip from the USA, and just plugged it (using a pluggy-innie thing, of course) into a European socket? Would it be happy, passing along someone else's current? Would everything be happy? Or would the power strip catch on fire, or make the devices fry, or something else bad? I don't know enough to dare to try it, but I do wonder if that might work. Especially as our experience of French hotels, in 2010, was that sockets were sparce. One of our hotels had exactly one (1).......... (The lamps were wired into the wall, I kid you not.)
End "coping with the lack of a universal standard for electrical power" Digression........
The 27th was a beautiful day in the Detroit area!
That gray-roofed skinny building running all the way across the pic, near the bottom, is that long terminal I showed you above.
One of the things I love about flying is the different perspective we get on our ordinary environment. Just beginning to get green, in southeast Michigan, on March 27.
Clouds. Endlessly different, from the ground or from the sky......
My favorite part of the above -- this line of coherent little clouds, against a background of fatter, fluffier clouds.....
This has got to be a ski resort, don't you think? I wouldn't have predicted they still had that much snow.
We are getting ready to approach JFK. We are flying east, and that is Long Island at the bottom. Love, love, love being able to look at Google maps and identify things I see from the air!!! This is the Robert Moses Causeway, and you can find it on the south side of Long Island, about a third of the length of the island from its western end. Cool.
Here we are, turning to go back west, so we can be lined up to land toward the north.
I don't know why, but I had no idea Long Island was so densely populated. For some reason I thought it was more bucolic.
This is as close as I got to the beach, on this trip. Venice has a beach, but it's on the Adriatic, not the Atlantic or the Pacific, and the weather was so cold and rainy, most of the time we were in Venice, that we decided not to spend 7 euro, each, each way, to take a boat to the Lido to visit a beach.
This would be parts of Gildo and Cedar Beach State Parks.
I don't' know exactly where this is, but I choose to believe that part of that beachiness is Jones Beach, where my parents took me when I was a little kid.
We (you and I) have now arrived at JFK, and are waiting for my daughter's flight to leave DTW, and fly to JFK.
We are (or at least, I am) pondering why I am finding traveling to be so stressful.
I have decided that the old saying about one's greatest strength being at the same time one's greatest flaw is totally true about humanity and our constant consideration of the past and future as we go through our present.
I am sure that our ability (and compulsion) to consider what has happened before (and how things might have turned out if something different had happened before), along with consideration of what will happen in the future (and what we may be able to do to maximize good future outcomes), has enabled us to rule the world.
On the other hand, that sort of thinking also makes it likely that we will drive ourselves crazy, regretting past actions and/or anticipating future disasters.
I am clear that some people are able to don (or were born with?) rose-colored glasses, which let them remember only the good things, and expect only more of the same. I am not one of those people. (And I have to wonder whether their actual outcomes are as good as those of people who are more likely to anticipate -- and so prevent -- bad possibilities......)
In any case, as I wait in JFK, I am doing my best to remain calm and think happy thoughts.
I have worn my French socks, for Courage......
Of course I didn't only sit and ponder. I got a salad and a baked potato (thank you, Wendy's). I took advantage of JFK's free wifi AND power AND USB ports (thank you, JFK!!!).
I watched the others who were hanging out in JFK.
In Detroit Metro's enormous terminal, there are birds. There is a big fountain, with big trees (well, big for indoor trees!) around it. And, of course, people are dropping food everywhere all the time. It seems like good habitat for birds..... I don't know what kind they are, at DTW, but I bet they are sparrows. Or that most of them are sparrows.
What do you suppose they have in JFK?
Yep. I saw at least three different ones.
I drew a pigeon on the iPod, using the small-screen version of Sketchbook Pro. I wish I could show it to you -- but I believe I inadvertently overwrote it with a flower I drew later. Alas.
Pigeons are really sort of weird. They have tiny beaks, compared to the size of the rest of them, and they have that weird head-bobbing way of walking. This guy's left foot is pretty sharp, but you can see where the back of his head was, a moment ago, as a gray blur behind where his head is now.............
My daughter's flight arrived, no problem. She got her iPhone charged up (thank you, again, JFK, for making things easy for travelers who wish to stay connected!).
Time to board!
As we'd booked so far apart in time, our seats were not together. I traveled next to a charming young Italian, who had been in the US visiting his sister in California, who is on some sort of term (year?) abroad.
We had what I found to be an entertaining and informative ride. He speaks wonderful English, but was frustrated by the feeling that people treated him like an outsider. He wishes that he could speak English like a native speaker, rather than with an accent no one seemed able to recognize.
(One of our many conversation fragments was about the difference in Italian accents, and the fact that many of the Italians who came to this country and settled in the east were from the south of Italy. What we in the USA think of as "an Italian accent" is as different from the way Francesco speaks as a Michigan accent is from a Mississippi accent.....)
He said he understood 95% of what was said to him, which seems incredibly good to me, who probably understood 75% of what the French said to me (in 2010), IF they were being kind, and slowing down, and using small words (as they always did, when they realized I needed them to). I was happy that people spoke to me the way they might speak to a child, but Francesco was not happy about that. I wish I had thought to say to him that big concepts can usually be discussed quite comfortably in small words.......
I did tell him that *understanding* is the important thing, not whether you get the gender of an object right, or use the proper tense, but I don't think he was buying it.
I asked him how many Americans he'd actually known for longer than 2 weeks (the length of his recent stay in the US), and reminded him that ... he *was* "an outsider" -- a stranger to everyone he met for the first time in the previous two weeks........ He wasn't buying that either.
Perhaps I didn't understand him as well as I thought I did, but it seemed to me that he was concentrating on being unhappy about the things he couldn't change ("I am older than 2 years; I can never speak perfect English!") rather than on the things he could change. I reminded him that there's no time limit on improving one's vocabulary. And even ancients of 21 years can improve their pronunciation, even if they may never be able to perfect it as they wish they might.
He was glad to have his English corrected, so I tried to help but not in an overwhelmingly constant way.....
We spent some time talking about the "short i" vowel sound, which is found in English but not in many other languages. He found it much easier in one syllable words. He could say it perfectly in "this" but found it very difficult to do in "religion."
These are just a few of the topics we covered in the several hours before we decided to call it a night and try to get some sleep.
I told him "Buona noce," which, I would have sworn, is what they said in Lady and the Tramp -- "This is the night, it's a beautiful night, and they call it bella noce"..... ("Bell-a no-chay," right? No. It turns out to be "no-tay".... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zyQ1x9Jxoc)
Francesco told me "'buona NOTTE' -- I correct *you*!" :-) I thanked him for the correction, and I went to sleep.
In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.
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