Redefining the term "long day" [UPDATE]

it's almost 3 p.m. and i'm sitting here in the frankfurt airport waiting for a flight to d.c... i've been up since 3:30 this morning to catch an early flight from prishtina to vienna where the frankfurt flight was delayed... no biggie since i had almost 5 hours of layover in frankfurt anyway... i get to d.c. at 8 p.m. local time and two hours later board on a flight to buenos aires where i will arrive at about 11 a.m. local time on saturday... i already feel like something the cat dragged in but i guess i'll be able to stumble on through to tomorrow... if you never see any more posts here, you'll know i've succumbed to terminal jet lag...

[UPDATE]

an hour before departure time, frankfurt got about a half inch of snow meaning that the plane had to be de-iced before we could leave... it took them an hour and a half to do which wiped out whatever respect i had for german efficiency... we rolled in to the gate in d.c. at 9:20, not quite an hour and a half late which gave me a little more than half an hour to clear immigration and customs, re-check my bags and get to the gate... tight but within the bounds of possibility...

but...! guess what...? the immigration and customs area in the midfield concourse was C. L. O. S. E. D. so they had used the once-upon-a-time-in-the-distant-past very innovative but now hopelessly antiquated dulles people-mover thing to get everybody, terminating and connecting passengers both, over to immigration and customs in the main terminal, guaranteeing a big slowdown... to top it off, i was selected for screening at customs, so by the time they finished poking through my bags, i would have had to teleport across the field to the gate and even then, they probably would have already closed the door...

SO-O-O-O-OOOOO...

i'm at a hotel for the night and am re-booked for tomorrow night which means i will miss the baptism and family celebration for a friend's twin daughters in buenos aires on sunday...

bah... sometimes travel is SUCH a pain...

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Traveling can be a bitch

it's now 8 a.m. saturday and i'm in heathrow airport, london, where i arrived about an hour and a half ago... i fly out to dubai where i land at midnight and transfer to the 03:30 kabul flight... by the time i land in kabul at 07:00 sunday morning, i will be burnt toast...

i haven't slept well for the past few nights anyway and i didn't get much more than a couple of hours of restful sleep on the flight from d.c. to london... i doubt i will get much on the flight from here to dubai either... needless to say, i will crash once i hit kabul... they may see me in the office briefly tomorrow afternoon... then again, they might not...

i'm a pretty resilient traveler and generally manage long flights and multiple time zones well, but there's no question that it takes a toll...

p.s. let me add a very positive note... yesterday in d.c., i asked the taxi driver taking me to dulles airport where he was from... i know the world is full of serendipitous coincidences so i was only mildly surprised when he told me he was from afghanistan... i told him i was on my way there for the 5th time and we had a wonderful, wonderful conversation for the 45 minutes it took to get to the airport from georgetown... we compared perspectives, shared details of our work and our families, and mutually deplored the despicable extremism we're witnessing in both his country and mine... it's those kind of encounters that brighten a day and make life just a little bit more worthwhile...

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Back in Kabul and coordinating across time zones

well, i knew i was going be covering a lot of ground the first part of this year, but, honestly, i'm now getting a little disoriented... i left the u.s. for argentina just before new years, and, less than two weeks later, headed to jordan for a couple weeks of work... then it was back to argentina and, on the way back, i took advantage of a 9-hour layover in london to go into town with a colleague for a walk in battersea park followed by some delicious indian food...

i was back in argentina again for less than two weeks before heading to afghanistan... i spent the last two weeks of february here in kabul and then headed back to jordan for another two weeks... last evening, i flew from jordan to dubai and then back to kabul this morning... i've got six weeks more in afghanistan before heading back to argentina for the month of may and then back to the u.s. to teach a summer class... i knew it was going to be challenging for this old fart to keep jumping multiple time zones, but, so far, i'm still in one piece, physically at least... you'll have to solicit the opinions of my colleagues about my mental and emotional state... HA...!

it's not only the multiple time zones that cause head-scratching, it's also that we're in the season for going on or coming off of daylight savings time, depending on whether you're in the northern or southern hemisphere... that's complicated by the fact that most countries don't change on the same dates as the u.s. does, plus there are many countries that don't observe daylight savings time at all... (see link here for a complete breakdown of daylight savings time worldwide...)

the above can lead to the kind of interesting situation where, depending on the date and the countries, their time zones could be either three hours apart or one hour apart... an example is argentina and u.s. east coast time... when argentina is on daylight savings time and the u.s. eastern time zone isn't, they're three hours apart... when u.s. east coast time is on daylight savings time and argentina isn't, they're only one hour apart... when both are on standard time, they're two hours apart... and then, of course, there are some years argentina doesn't observe daylight savings time AT ALL...! if you're not confused yet, just try coordinating a conference call with afghanistan, london, argentina, and washington d.c... fortunately, there's meeting planning aids that can help (see here...)

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Heading back to Afghanistan

yeah, yeah, yeah... if i'm not a candidate for the dreaded fatal disease of "terminal jet lag," i probably will be soon... i'm writing this in buenos aires prior to heading off to the airport for the long, long trek back to kabul... i go to sao paulo, change for a non-stop to dubai (it's a 14-hour flight), spend friday night there, and fly on to kabul on saturday afternoon where i will see this lovely sign welcoming me to the country, a scene that i so desperately wish was their reality... ah, well... stay tuned...

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Door-to-door in 48 hours

well, not quite... from the time i woke up at the project compound in kabul at 5 a.m. on friday, finished packing, and headed to the airport, until i walked in the door here at my son's in northern nevada this afternoon, bags in hand, comes to about 47 hours... but, add in time to do enough unpacking to uncover the top of the bed so i can crash later, shoveling four months of mail into two stacks (read later and toss), eating dinner, and displaying some of my treasures for the family, i am now at the 50-hour mark, the first time i feel like i've actually stopped moving since friday morning... here's hoping i don't wake up at some ungodly hour due to the 11 1/2 hour time difference... thank goodness i managed to sleep a fair bit of the 14-hour flight from dubai to new york...

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