Mr. P waiting for boarding at Arlanda Airport, Stockholm.
11.30 Frankfurt: I’m almost certain that I didn’t sleep for a single moment tonight. I was so worked up by all the packing that I couldn’t relax and by five when it was time to get up, I felt strangely out of touch with my body.
The ticket worked. I was supposed to check in myself with the self service machine, but the machine said that my booking number didn’t exsist. Luckily, the line for the self service assistance desk wasn’t long enough for me to become really worried. It turned out that they had changed my booking, and therefore my booking number aswell, but she fixed it and I got to the right gate more than an hour early anyway.
Amazingly, I managed to fall asleep on the plane, and only woke up to see the beautiful meandering rivers on the German plains when we began our descent. From that perspective, it becomes obvious why German rivers get such pretty curves, and not the Swedish ones. We simply have too many mountains and hills, eskers and drumlins and far too many trees. There is not enough space for the water to be artistic, it has to get to the sea, fast. Around Frankfurt, everything is flat. No hurry there.
The plane was 25 minutes early to Frankfurt, so now I’m sitting and waiting for the gate number for my next flight to appear on the blue screens. Everyone speaks German and almost all the fligts on the screens are Lufthansa. Mine is the only Air Canada.
– : o : –
18.36 somewhere above southern Greenland: I saw a pointless Hollywood movie, ate a late pasta lunch, not at all bad (but then again I’ve never had trouble with airplane food or slightly burnt or dried out stuff – I love the last, dry and hard part of the cheese and spaghetti when it hasn’t been stired while cooking so that several spaghetti strings have stuck together). Then I managed to sleep for an hour or so again. It’s amazing.
Usually, I can’t sleep in airplanes at all, even if I’m tired to death. I remember the journey home from Lima, first a day walking around the city, then an eight hour night flight to New York, nine hours at the airport, another eight hour night flight to Stockholm and I didn’t sleep a wink during the entire journey. Luckily dad and Anna and mom came to the airport to pick me up, because otherwise I think I wouldn’t have found my way home. I was almost delirious.
One would think that after the months in Bolivia and Peru, my body would have learned to sleep anywhere, anytime, when it got the chance. All the long, uncomfortable buss rides, the heat and insects of the jungle, I even managed to sleep on top of the spare tyre, in the back of the truck that had been made into a bus, when we had to spend the night on a bridge in the middle of nowhere because the roads were so muddy and the driver refused to continue driving in the darkness. A rainstorm came and surprised us and all the mosquitos from the river decided to take cover under the tarp covering the truck. Just by stretching out a hand, you would hit tens, if not hundreds. It was in the outskirts of the Bolivian Amazon, malaria territory and during the last months, the news had been reporting about a dengue fever epidemic not far from where we were stuck. Even there I managed to sleep. While volunteering at the monkey reserve, my mattress was filled with straw, and I can honestly say that I have never slept better than I did there. Monkeys can really suck the energy out of you.
I’m letting my thoughts run away with me. I just wanted to say that even after that trip, with all that experience to sleep just about anywhere, I still couldn’t sleep in an airplane. That’s how amazing it is that I’ve managed to sleep now. I must really be tired.
– : o : –
Later, still above southern Greenland: They served ice cream. I’m thinking of the magnetic north pole, if the north they are showing on the map on my personal film screen is the actual north pole or just the geographic one. We’re far enough north for there to be a difference, I think. It’s probably the geographic.
It’s cloudy, so we can’t see the the island below. I would really like to go there, I think. Maybe I could change field, become a quaternary geologist instead. I really enjoyed digging up mud from the bottom of a lake on Gotland in October and then analyzing the carbon in the samples in the lab, after all. Paleoclimatology is intriguing. Very meticulous business. I’m good at meticulous.
No, who am I kidding? I won’t be going to Greenland to take ice core samples anytime soon. I know what I want. I just have to believe that I can make it.
– : o : –
Switching to Alberta time, eight hours in the past – 13.34, above northern Canada: Now the skies are clear, but everything down on the ground is still white. It’s the glacier, magnificent and enormous, you can see where the ice has carved the stone underneath, there are peaks and valleys and bays. Oh, I still want to go, experience a real glacier. Not a melting top glacier, like in Bolivia, but a real, continent sized. I have this adventurer in me that wants to visit extreme places, just to see if I can handle it. Walk on a glacier, ride across Mongolia, climb a volcano in New Zeeland.
I also have this pragmatic in me, the sceptic who asks what would be the point, in the long run. Mostly the pragmatic wins, but sometimes I do lash out. Like now. Isn’t this entire trip an attempt for me to push my own boundaries?
– : o : –
18.39 between Calgary and Edmonton: This plane is tiny, with propellers. Twelve rows, and then mine, which is right in front, backwards, which means that all the other passengers naturally watch me when they look forward.
We fly below the clouds. It’s getting dark, and the plains below are shrouded in some kind of bluish haze. In Calgary, most of the snow had melted away and the yellowish brown prairie fields were a special sight, checkered, just like one of the quilts that I’ve made, and completely flat. Here, nearer Edmonton, the snow still covers the ground and the prairie is interrupted by groups of trees and small forests. On the other side of the plane, I can glimpse the Rocky Mountains, but through my window it’s totally flat as far as the eye can see. And I realise that I lack the term for this kind of landscape in English. I’m quite sure we’re flying above a huge ‘peneplan’, larger by far than what you can ever find in Sweden. But ‘peneplain’ or ‘peneplane’ in English doesn’t feel right. I’ll have to find a physical geographer at Frida’s university and ask.
– : o : –
21.34 International House, Edmonton: Finally, I’m here. In Frida’s tiny room, sitting on the mattress that is going to be my home for the following twelve days. I can’t really think. I’ll tell you more about Edmonton and Frida and everything else when I’m conscious enough to have an opinion.
Katja Malmborg 