Hustle and hustle

Surprise, surprise.

Now that I have convinced my heart to follow my brain back here, I guess I can slowly pull myself back to focus on blogging. I’ve one scheduled post about long-haul flights, so keep an open eye for it. I’m not sure if I’m able to continue balancing the blog with my studies and the volunteering activities. The academic workload for my final year is pretty hectic. There’s a mock trial that is marked as an interim assessment. I won’t know how that is structured until the first lecture. There’s also another advocacy that I have to go through - and, unlike IHL, this one is part of the course.

Oh, my luck.

After spending almost two months away from Adelaide, I noticed that I’m forgetting certain places in my mind. Take my campus as an example. It’s relatively medium-sized, yet I found myself going in circles to find a particular building. It’s okay if I’m a freshman, but I’m now a final year student, for Pete’s sake. Final year students are expected to know their way around the area, especially me as some of the volunteering events deal with commencing students.

Oh well.

I just hope I don’t forget where I keep my things. That’d be a havoc for me and my parents because we’re at least 6k miles away from each other and I don’t want them to pace the floor in worry.

But yeah, I never knew that I have been experiencing the symptoms of jet lag for most of my flights back to Adelaide. I always thought that the heavy head and dizziness from the flights were a result of not having enough sleep on the eve of the departures. I guess it’s not just that. Caffeine or no caffeine, this always occurs. Alcohol or no alcohol, the first thing to greet me when I’m back is not my friends or the residence, but the symptoms instead.

The symptoms this time were pretty bad, to be honest. Although I had the heavy head with dizziness, my head furiously pounded to the point where I almost fell asleep in the shower. When I woke up, I didn’t have the appetite to take my lunch and went back to sleep. I drifted in and out of consciousness. I know that sentence sounds weird, but that’s the only way I can use as a description. I thought that if I woke up in time for dinner, I could pop around the grocery store to catch a quick meal. Nope, it didn’t work out as planned.

I would’ve also skipped dinner as well, but I knew that it wouldn’t be healthy to leave my stomach hungry for the rest of the night. Even though I wasn’t having much of an appetite, I needed something light and nutritious to fill the space. That way, I won’t collapse from hunger or land in the path of gastric. UberEATS to the rescue. I ordered a takeaway in the form of a salad bowl from Poke Bar and waited for the delivery. I noticed that the lethargy and the heavy, dizzy feeling dissipated afer I ate the meal, but the fatigue still remained.

I find this extremely odd. I drank alcohol and caffeine during the last trip and didn’t suffer much from the jet lag. Heavy and dizzy head, yes, but it improved after I had a nap. Not like this time. I stayed away from the alcohol and caffeine yet it worsened. I’m starting to wonder if it’s because my emotions got the best of me in the plane? If so, then I was more dehydrated than I thought because I didn’t drink much water on the aircraft.

The irony of all this is that I only recovered two days after my arrival. It was only then that I could run all of the errands.

The flight experience was a tad bit different this time for a couple of reasons, too.

I arrived at the airport much earlier to avoid the queue at the bag drop counter. I’m not going to reveal much about the process since you and I are rather familiar with it and I don’t want anyone to know where I went for the last seven weeks. Since I didn’t eat before leaving and had hours to kill, I decided to eat a late lunch at the airport.

As I had enough Enrich points for redemption, I decided to treat myself to a Golden Lounge voucher. I just wasn’t counting on the actual Golden Lounge to remain closed on the day of my flight departure, which led me to choose the one closest to my boarding gate (CIP Lounge). I wasn’t about to waste more time finding the one recommended by the staff in charge, albeit it was larger and had more facilities (including toilets and shower facilties).

Although the CIP Lounge didn’t have a lavatory, the place was alright. At least it had plugs for the passengers to charge their laptops and cellphones, if necessary. Towards the back of the lounge were catered food and desserts. Next to that was a refrigerator with all of the chilled drinks, save for alcohol. There were options for coffee, tea, orange/apple juices, or water.

I also flew alone this time around. It wasn’t by choice, let me tell you that. I’m not a fan of flying alone because I don’t like to sit next to strangers for night flights. You wouldn’t know what could happen to your carry on when you are in the toilet and most of the passengers have fallen asleep. I guess I was lucky in the sense that the seat next to me was vacant, which allayed my fears and proved advantageous. While other passengers had to sleep in their seat, I was able to curl up and rest.

In actual fact, I stretched my legs wide enough to prevent the blood clots but made sure that I spared the lady behind me from my smelly socks. It was in their position that I managed to catch forty winks - and found myself waking up as the cabin crew prepared to serve the light breakfast some fifteen minutes later. Don’t worry, it wasn’t the lights that woke me up.