Day 0

Normally there is no reason to write about day 0 - that is the day you get on the airplane and leave for the bigger and better things. Alas in my case i need to. United messed me up so bad that i am planning on writing a complaint letter to united upon my return. Seriously these people are defective. Although I was in the check-in line within the required time - that is at least 2 hours before my flight. However due to staff shortages, the line was huge and by the time i got t the front of the time, it was 40 minutes to my flight and they said the flight was closed. Meanwhile they had been letting people from other flights in front and several people from my flight got totally screwed. This very unfriendly woman told me too bad and told me to go and stand in another line. So i went to the other line with several other very pissed off people - My comrade in arms were two american guys - one (Tom) was studying his masters in Oxford on middle eastern studies and actually he was very interesting. More later. The other guy (chris) was a younger undergrad who was going to Oxford as well for a summer of studies and i guess traveling. Can you believe he was also going for studies in middle east? these guys were totally unrelated. they were both on my flight. Also in the line was a girl from Puerto Rico I think her name was Lucy - she was going to Zurich with her husband who was Indian - you don't see that very often right?
anyway after 2 hours in line, not knowing what was going to happen we were sent to the gate for standby. I was lucky number 13. So it seems when you go on standby it is not a first come first serve basis - people with more mileage point than you as well as people who have paid more money for their ticket end up getting priority. Like crazy we all went to the gate and waited, pretty certain 13 people were not going to miss their flight. Anyway suffice it to say we didn't know until the very end of the boarding time and then I was lucky number 13 - some people in the wait list were not there and so i ended up being the final person they ticketed, Lucky me.
The rest fo the flight was pretty normal - i got the middle seat, with two big guys on one side and two other big guys on the other. Fortunately big here didn't mean fat. but they were all really big.
and i watched The Life of Others, the German movie which got the oscar for foreign movie - and although itwas good i kept falling sleep - lets just say the subtitles were not easy to read.
so that was it. I got to London on friday morning and by the time i got to rouhi's house it was 1pm or so.