On Thursday, after a beautiful and sunny trip in Provence, the BYU group returned in three or so hours by TGV to Paris without a problem. I spent the rest of the day as a sluth.
Come to find out, that my flight out of Paris was leaving Friday morning at 0730. This meant that I would need to be at the airport around 0545 to do all the preboarding for an international flight. If I were to take public transportation, I would need to allow myself about an hour to get to the Charles de Gaulle Airport, and even the Metro doesn't recognize those ungodly hours. So when I arrived back in Paris on Thursday I went straight to the director's apartment to find a cheap way to get to the airport. Even an airport shuttle wouldn't wake up in time to get me to my flight. So I helped with group luggage and went to the ETAP Hotel where we had stayed the first night. There at the front desk the receptionist informed me that they could call a taxi ten minutes before I needed to leave.
So around 0510 I went down to the lobby and they called a taxi for me Friday morning. The taxi only took about 15 minutes (much faster than I had anticipated) to drive to the airport, and it coast 40 euro to make the trip. Not exactly a Metro ticket... more like 4. Oh well... The funny part is that CDG doesn't start moving until 0600 and even then it isn't awake. So my flight left a little late from Paris, but made it on time to London.
It was an interesting transition coming back to the states from Paris. I spent the first flight speaking in French, only to realize that no one else was. Not even the flight attendants. So when I got on my flight from London to Chicago, I decided that using a British accent might be easier than going to straight American English. That was fun, even though I'm not very good at it. But once I got to Chicago I didn't know where to go linguistically from there. I kept eavesdropping, trying to figure out what language people were speaking, only to realize that it was ghetto Chicago slang that I hadn't heard in three months or maybe ever.
My flight out ofChicago was late due to some tornado warnings? and the airlines did a test on a potential oil leak in the engine. So when I arrived in Seattle, the last flight out to Sitka had already left and the airlines set me up in a hotel for the night and booked me on the first flight for the next morning. Though I really wanted to be home and dump my luggage, I was shocked to enter a very classy Radisson and find that I was in a room with two cushy queen size beds, a really nice bathroom with a bathtub, and CARPETED floors. It was beautiful goodness. (I'll have to attach a picture later of the room and my exhausted self! I'm pretty sure if we had stayed in a room like that on our trips, my director would have put more than 4 girls in each!)
I finally got into Sitka around 1100 Saturday morning. It's nice to be home again, and I think I'm mostly unpacked. Adjusting to the ways of America and the difference of 10 time zones has been a little tricky though. I'm sure it wont take me too long to get back into the swing of things. That's the sad part.