The Voyage Home

We took the flybussekspress to Gardermoen. The 4:02 one out of Mortensrud. Kanutte walked us to the station. It was dark on the bus. Kanutte'd bought us tickets the night before because none of our cards worked on the website. Make sure to bring a variety of cards to Europe, because working/not working is somewhat without rhyme or reason. I was up for risking it on the bus (haven't had ALL the cards fail at a POS yet), but Kanutte was having none of it. She really is one of the sweetest people I've had the pleasure to know.

The flight to Brussels was cramped and Cara slept through it. I was just glad to be off Brussels Airlines! Going through the Brussels airport was a mess. We had our passports checked 5 separate times, stamped in one place and stickered in another. If Brussels runs the EU anything like they run their airport, that is, for the benefit of the bureaucrats, then the Brits were right to ditch that shit. Of course, this was only solidification of a previously held position. Cara doesn't think we should count Belgium on our list of countries visited because we were only in the airport, but that seems a little silly to me since we've got stamps in our passports, unlike Österreich, Liechtenstein & die Schweiz.

I did not actually escape Brussels Airlines. Turns out our flight across the Atlantic was also with them. I was, to say the least, not excited. Most of the people in line were for the flight were black, which I thought was a little odd but we were flying into DC, right? As we later learned, this flight was just making a pit stop in Brussels on it's way from Kinshasa to DC. And most black people I've encountered in DC weren't speaking French...

Fortunately my second experience with Brussels Airlines was worlds away from the first. The plane was much newer. My seat actually leaned back. There were free movies, free wine and not to bad of food either. Only drawback is hearing announcements repeated 3 times in English, French and Dutch. I can understand the first two well enough, but with Nederlands I just catch the random cognate to English or Deutsch.

• The Man Who Knew Infinity - I've been wanting to watch this Ramanujam biopic for some time and I was not disappointed. It was spectacular. It inspired me to get out a book of math puzzles and play for a while. I miss playing math. There just isn't enough opportunities for these days.
• X-men: Apocalypse - This one was also good. Brian Singer makes good X-men flicks. I also like how he embraced the rebooted universe after Days of Future Past, much as the Star Trek franchise. Cara started off watching it with me, but got bored/uncomfortable and turned it off. She just doesn't fly well long distances.
• The Intern - I saw this running on a lot of other peoples' screens and decided to take the plunge to finish out the flight. The first half was a funny commentary on start-up life which, being relateable to my own experience, was quite funny. Since I've been working with people younger than my kids, I could also relate to DeNiro's "Senior Intern". Then the movie went dark, sad and dramatic. I don't know why they do that to movies.

Landing in DC we got through customs relatively easily, although Cara had a small scare with her brunøst. She did resist the temptation to joke that they were not blocks of C4. Then we camped at a bar and played Pokémon for a few hours. I was a little drunk when we finally boarded our flight back to Tennessee. Getting on the plane I could tell these were Tennessee people and it felt like home.