Flying Out to SFO
An evening flight to Mumbai and an early morning flight from Mumbai to San Francisco (SFO) through Paris. I collected my iterinary from the travel desk and it took me a little while before I learnt to read that and the return-ticket handed over to me with it.Anand, my ex-manager, gave me a good idea of what to expect in SFO. I learnt that it would be hard to get vegetarian food though Amici's pizza and Mc. Donald could get me something we call vegetarian (Sea-Food is considered vegetarian in the US). He told me that the bay area weather would be pleasant mostly, but unpredictable sometimes. As always, I was not prepared at all when I embarked on my journey - but I thanked God I thought of picking up my old grey jacket. Personal travel would be
the biggest hurdle. I could use public transport - buses, trains, walk(!) - or trouble some colleague to take me places. He told me also that walking around Redwood shores, my final destination, in the evenings could be risky, if I wander too far away from the hotel.
On the early moring of 27th I was on a Delta Airlines flight to SFO, via Charles de Gaulle, Paris. A Boeing 767-300 With 6 seats in a row and two aisles, it was a big aeroplane. To my left was seated a midwife going to Nice (it sounds like 'knees'), near Paris and she was going back after a vaction trip with friends. I noted that Kerala, God's (mine too) own country, was not one of her destinations. The person on the right, I recall, was Indian and we never talked.
When food was served, I learnt that the travel desk had not marked my request for 'vegetarian' food. I spared the travel desk girl at my office, because she was one of those good faces around ;). Vegetables picked from the standard non-veg meals, bread and cheese - there is no place for dislikes when you are hungry. I made it a point I filled the empty space in my stomach with fluids. I would have won the 'Greatest Apple Juice Drinker onboard' award if they had one.
Touch down at Charles de Gaulle (CDG) airport. I'd completely lost my sense of time by then, but it must be around 10'O clock in the morning. I had a decent stop-over time and I took a stroll around the transit launge. With flights parked, taxiing, touching down and taking off every minute, the airport was huge by all means. This is the airport from which you could have caught a Concorde for a supersonic flight. The only Concorde that ever crashed took off from CDG in 2000. The next flight of a Concorde was in 2003 when it took off from CDG to Toulouse, its place of construction. That was the last flight of a Concorde.
I found a billboard in the lounge that read "Oracle Applications 11i"; I missed a camera then. Security was tough at CDG and they could strip-search you anytime. The police cars plying on the tarmac had the Renault/Peogeot faces.
From CDG to SFO, I got a window seat and seated next to me was a German, who worked for Solectron (we'll know it as the parent company for Force Computers) and was going back from Bangalore. We had a nice chat. When I told him I was finding it hard to break the hard French bread he asked me to try German bread sometime. Then, he said, I would appreciate French bread better. I drank apple juice. I slept. I drank apple juice. I slep...
When I was not sleeping I tracked our route shown in the over-head screen and looked outside to see how the place actually looked down below. We flew over UK and Iceland, over Greenland and crossing Hudson bay to Canada before heading south towards SFO on the west coast of the US. For the most part over Iceland and Greenland, I remember, I was looking at vast stretches of snow covered land, where it was hard to distinguish the ups and downs in the terrain. Once over Canada, it was more earth-like (!) - with green stretches, mountains and snow covered peaks and valleys. Huge puffs of clouds often obstructed my view and at those times as per my plan B, I went back to sleep.
The touch down at SFO International is etched in my mind. It has two pairs of runways that end near the SF bay and the plane approached it from the north, crossing the SF-Oakland bridge, and flew a little over the bay itself till it crossed the San Mateo bridge. It took a u-turn in the sky to align itself with one of the east-facing runways (the other two face north). One more circle over the bridge and touch down.
Although I said SF International is smaller than CDG, to really appreciate its size, check that out in google earth. It lies to the south-east of South SFO and between San Bruno and Millbrae facing the San Francisco bay on its east. Easier still, search for Millbrae and after google shows you where it is, zoom out till you can see San Bruno on top. Voilà!, to the right and facing the bay, the airport. (I had to install google-earth just for this description).
Quickly out of the airport, I called up my hotel for the complimentary pickup. Soon I was on highway 101 heading towards Redwood Shores. Although I was in a mood to chat with the driver of the van, he was so tight-lipped that I decided to watch the traffic instead. It was pleasant weather when I stepped out of the van. I remembered the lines from Oscar Wilde (they showed on TV in the airplane), "The warmest winter I ever spent was one summer in San Francisco". Having checked into hotel Sofitel, it was around ten in the morning on a Saturday. I took a shower and crashed. After all, my biological clock was yet to be set to the Pacific Standard Time.
posted by ദീപക് -:-Deepak @ 5:27 AM
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