- Going to a city I had never been before (Washington DC and its suburbs, including Fairfax)
- Travelling abroad alone (I have travelled abroad before, but never alone)
- Being hosted by some people I have never seen and at a place I didn't even know where it was (George Mason University)
- Attending a conference with people like me (techies) from schools like mine (international schools with an american-style curriculum) and in which most of didn't speak a word of my mother tongue (spanish) and for sure most of us used english as a second language
- Leaving my country for a long period of time (almost 3 weeks)
Apart from that, leaving Caracas by plane is a real pain now because the highway that connects the city to the airport in the coast has several briges across deep valleys and the longest one collapsed last January, and the government has just built a narrow road (if that can be called a road) to connect these two sections of the highway and there are schedules for separate kinds of traffic (personal cars, small buses, trucks and all that stuff) so one has to plan ahead in order to be at the airport on time. So, to avoid all this s***t, I decided to sleep on the night of the 16th of June at a hotel near the airport -I didn't want to wake up at 3 AM because I had to be at the airport at 6:30 just to find out that the queue down the road was stuck because the rains had caused a flood and the mud had covered it!
So, after leaving school at 4:30 I picked a cab to drive me home to take my luggage and then leave me at the station where the buses that leave for the airport are parked; it was very funny to me that the cab driver happened to be Ecuadorian because during that week, Ecuador had showed up as the surprise cinderella team of the Football World Cup, so we were talking about that. How I found out he was Ecuadorian? he had folded a car's flag next to his seat, and you know how curious I am :-)
Then, I took the bus to the airport, I stopped at the international terminal and then I picked up another cab to the hotel. Bloody hotel! I had such a hard time trying to find a hotel room, and c'mon, finiding a room at a cheap hotel on a Friday, is not an easy task at all! I called every single hotel in near the airport (many were motels, actually) and none of them had rooms, so I asked the superintendent's assistant and she called the last hotel I had just called, and after she identified herself as calling from the school, they booked me a room! SH**T!! Anyway I did NOT sleep in that hotel, as it was a motel, and the cab driver offered me to drive me to a decent place. It was ... a very sui generis place, with its curtains with all the solar system printed on the fabric, Israeli sattelite TV on the system, and many same-sex couples dining on the hotel's so-called restaurant.. what the hell was that? I have no idea.
Anyway, I watched TV until I fell aslept, but I woke up earlier than the time set by the watch; in fact, I woke up, took a shower and got all set even before it rang .. I was like anxious to leave everything for quite a few days and "disconnect" from the reality.
When I arrived to the airport, I saw many kids from the school, with their parents, of course. Well, only one and her mom greeted me very nicely and we chatted a little, but not too long since they were on Business and I was on Coach -anyway, it was Delta - the official carrier! ;-)
The trip was OK -good entertainement, but a little poor if you compare it with what I had flying jetBlue (which you can read in a next post) but oh well, the in-flight service (including Mozart's 250s, "Failure to Launch" with Sarah Jessica Parker and Will&Grace) was good except for those perfect scrambled eggs that come out of a box, which I despise and the latino steward trying to speak spanish with a mixed mexican-argentinian-puertorican accent, hehehe. That was funny!
Once I landed at Atlanta's Harstfield-Jackson airport, my journey continued. Man, that airport is HUGE! The inmigration procedure was very smooth, it took me less than a minute standing at the booth with the officer, then picking up my suitcases .. and then the train to my next gate, because my flight to Washington DC was departing in less than an hour, so I had to move my ass off!
But I hated the connection time -too short! I had to take a bala fría from a Taco Bell Express fridge and literally gulp it in front of the gate while waiting for my flight to DC. I am sismply not used to eat while walking or out of a table; as a venezuelan, I need to sit down at a table and eat like a cow. Finally, I boarded my plane to DC and as an observant jew, I opened my siddur in the plane and started to say the prayer for the traveller (Tefilat ha-derech) and to my surprise, there was an american man in his early 50s, looking at me with his eyes widely opened and with an expression on his face that mathed that one of disgust! After I finished praying, I closed my siddur, and looked back at him (I know, my face said something like "what? got any problem with that, mister?") and he said something I didn't recognise and then said clearly "why don't you go back to your contry, camel shepherd?" and stood up and looked for another seat. Ha! I think this guy thought I was a muslim .. and to be honest, I don't care. Fu**in' redneck!
At the end, I arrived to Washington-Reagan Airport exactly in the time the captain calculated (excellent timing eh?) and looked for my bags, and then for the Metro station, to catch it and take a ride to Fairfax-GMU station. Given the excessively high tariffs charged by cabs in DC, I was decided to save as every penny as I could. And so I did! Once I arrived there, I took a cab, driven by a very nice Eritrean man -our ride to Mason consisted mostly on a conversation about coffee, and the awful cofee americans drink. Finally, I arrived at Mason, after 15 minutes wandering around the campus, looking for my building. There it was, Hanover Hall (for registering and checking out towels and linens) and Amherst Hall, the bulding which was set to be my home in the next week. 
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