Sleeping in airports

When I booked my tickets to and from Malaysia the only flights arrived at about very late (about 1:00AM). I spent some time online trying to figure out how to get from the airports in KL and Shanghai to the actual towns and where would be most convenient to stay. In this investigation I stumbled upon a great website: sleepinginairports.net.

For KL I found that it would be easy and not too expensive to just go to town and get to my hostel (and the ratings for sleeping in the airport there were not good). For Shanghai, since I was actually arriving in Hangzhou (about one hour by train or two hours by bus away from Shanghai center) with the late arrival it would be easier to just stay in the airport. Since the airport was new, there were no reviews, but I decided to chance it. I ended up finding a great spot- padded bench seats with no armrests, quiet, no people and with a power outlet close by. I watched a movie and then put on my face mask and went to sleep for about 5 hours. In the morning I found my way to the train and (after going to the wrong address once) checked in at the hotel where I would meet the students from Denver that would arrive later that night.

I spent a little bit of time adding my reviews to sleepinginairports.net for some of the airports I've been stuck in including Iceland, Amsterdam and Tirana. The website is great for those of us lucky enough to fly standby, but not lucky enough to make it out on the first try. My mom wished she had know about the site before they came to see me- it might have made their overnight in Seoul a bit more comfortable. This time in China was the first time I had chosen to sleep in the airport instead of just getting stuck there, but now with this site, I might be sleeping in airports on purpose more often.

Naptime

It’s never been any secret that I like to sleep. One of the major issues that I had with my job as a substitute teacher was the fact that I had to wake up at 5:30 every morning. I just think that is cruel, and studies have shown that teenagers do not function as well that early in the morning (and neither do I). One more of the unexpected perks of Peace Corps is the amount of sleep that I have gotten over the past year. I think that if you were to take a poll, you would find that PCVs as a group (at least in Albania, but I hypothesize that it is similar in other places) are very well rested compared to our counterparts in America (or even our previous selves). I just sleep more here. I go to bed early (not much of a night life to speak of) and I wake up later (work starts at 9:00) and I often take an afternoon nap. I don’t think that I’ve been this well rested since elementary school. This has a lot to do, of course, with the slower pace of life in countries like Albania. Naptime is part of the culture here. The first question that is always asked is “are you tired?” (the correct answer is usually ‘a little’). You don’t hear about sleep deprivation here like you do in the US. I think this is something that we can learn from the rest of the world . . . and now it’s naptime!

The hardest part of my day

I've often joked that the hardest part of my day is getting out of bed. I love sleeping. Really I do. If I believed in an afterlife, my idea of heaven would be snuggling into a soft, warm bed with lots of blankets and pillow and sleeping. It has never been more difficult to get out of bed than in the past two weeks. My bed is not particularly comfortable (I sleep on a communist-era fold down couch), but compared to the rest of my house it is certainly warm. In fact, I think that if I didn't have the promise of internet at the office (plus a heater) I would probably just stay in bed all day. When I get home from work it is hard to do much but start the fire and crawl under my covers to get warm. Reading, knitting and watching tv or movies are pretty much how I'm filling my time (since these don't require that I get out from under the blankets).

The second hardest part of my day is when I contemplate taking a shower. In this case when I say "shower" think "pouring warm water out of a bucket over my head." This is because I have now been without running water for more than two weeks. Luckily, my landlord has been providing me buckets and bottles of water from his house every few days- enough for me to cook, drink and take an occasional "shower" with. I now realize, not only how lucky I was in the states to have hot and cold running water, but how lucky I have been for the last few months to have hot and cold running water here. I know that many volunteers in different parts of the country have to live by a city water schedule in which their water may run only for 4-6 hours a day (usually a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening). Because I have a water tank and pump I usually have water whenever I have electricity (which, since New Years, has actually been 24 hours). But two things seemed to have happened: when I was in Gjirokaster, it got cold enough that my pipes froze (and got colder after I got back) and it seems, my pump died. So, even though the past two days have been warmer (and a lot of the snow is melting, creating gross slush everywhere), I am still s'ka uji (without water).

not a morning person

and I don't think I ever will be. Just ask my first period calculus teacher from senior year or any of the students in the first period classes I teach now. I've never understood why high schools start so damned early- in Denver it is between 7:15 and 7:45- and I don't think that I ever will. Studies show that teenagers are not alert until about 8:30. Neither am I. The worst part about having to get up early is the feeling that I have to go to bed early. I'm not to good at that. I should go to bed by 9 o'clock to get my required 8 hours. Throughout college, my earliest class was never before 9 AM and every job I've had since then started at 9 or later. So I got used to going to bed late- at the movie theatre I didn't even get off work until 1 AM usually. The problem is that now I have to get up by 6 but I don't really go to bed any earlier. Why does school have to start at 7 AM? Maybe I have to rethink my choice in profession.