The Longest Travel Day

    Yesterday was the longest travel day of my life.  I spent ten hours on a plane which took off right as I was supposed to sleep.  It was a 1:30pm flight; since I work at night, that's effectively when I go to bed.  On the plane I only managed to get an hour of sleep, setting me up for an exhausting second half of the journey; a day within a day, it would seem, as I was set to land during sunrise in London.  It was no less gruesome for my beloved Kairika, who landed the same time I did, yet spent three more hours in the air.
    She flew in from Bangkok and I flew in from Seattle.  The total length of our two flights was roughly two-thirds the circumference of the Earth.  The only geographic super-entity we didn't collectively fly over was the Pacific Ocean.  Meeting her in London was a greater challenge than I'd imagined, because Heathrow Airport has five terminals and the one I landed in is far away from the others.  Hardly anyone could have known that they'd landed outside the heart of the airport without knowing beforehand.  Once I found out, I had to haul my luggage at least a mile getting to and away from the train that connects the terminals, putting a lot of strain on my muscles (my two bags don't have wheels for support).
    Luckily I didn't have to wait long for our rendezvous, as she came out of the Arrivals Gate at terminal 2 only a few minutes after I got there.  Kairika looked even more beautiful than when we first met, when she came to Seattle a year ago in celebration of our birthdays.  We may be doing this every year, as our birthdays are only three days apart.  It's not just the dates that coincide, but the year as well.  She is only three days older than I am.  Curious how such astrological implications work in the scheme of life.  That the love of my life was born so close to me is personal proof that the houses which weave our fates are as real as the sciences that discredit them.
    We took a train to Paddington and rode in a taxi for the remainder of our route to St. Pancras, where the Eurostar train would take us across the southeast of England, under the English Channel, and into the cultural hub of western civilization; that storied region of northern France, where the threads of Parisian innovation sweep through the rest of that great continent, and beyond.  It was an admittedly joyless and dull ride, as we'd spent most of the day waiting for transfers in the sedations of sleep.  Most of the Eurostar ride was spent catching up on sleep with those precious few opportune moments that call for it.  One particular time I looked out the window after waking from a nap, only to spot an unoriginal landscape of grass and farmland before nodding off to sleep again seconds later.  It seems that Europe's lack of natural beauty is supplanted by its cultural one, whereas in the far west it's entirely the opposite.  Out there, no elaborate baroque cathedrals can be found.  Museums filled with classics and rare objects are nowhere to be seen.  Monuments, bridges, and iconic towers are replaced by gorgeous mountains, rivers, and a desert that built its own version of these things.  Where we've come the ancient cities are like the National Parks of the west, each as original as the next, only far younger and built by more primitive forces.
    Getting through Paris for the first time was as mesmerizing as it was frustrating.  We were scheduled to meet someone at our room just ten minutes after the train arrived.  The room was only a mile away from the station, but there were a couple things I hadn't foreseen- one being that it was rush hour, so the wait for getting a cab was 20 minutes long, another being a sneaky, greedy cab driver, who took us as far away from our room as the train station was.  He did this after getting stuck in a traffic jam which had delayed us 10 more minutes.  I noticed this because it was only one direction from the station to our room, and he'd gone about 20 blocks the wrong direction after turning.  I pointed this out to him and his excuse was, "Oh, Paris has so many one-way streets, that's why I have to come all the way down here to turn around", which turned out to be bogus because the map later showed me many opportunities where he could have done it earlier.  We ended up being an hour late, looking for a room in a bizarrely shaped building where no host was to be seen.  I had also nearly lost my wallet.  Compounding all this with my state of exhaustion, a host who later found us and appeared to be frustrated, and a room that is unexpectedly inferior in nearly every aspect I can imagine, I nearly broke down in agony.  But I held it all together somehow, and we're all settled into this strange room with its bathroom window, quirky sofa bed (which we had to make ourselves), and paint job done by someone who had a stroke.  The only redeeming quality is the view, which looks out on northern Paris in admiration, the same way any tourist would.