// cali
so. spring break has come and gone. since i finally did something eventful, i guess i'll bore the world with my lame attempt at explaining my oh-so wonderfully average life, if just for this past week.

like my last trip i wrote about, this will be in reverse chronological order. i think i'll do a day an entry, so i should have 8 entries by the time i'm done.

like ta hear it hear it goes...

// stranded at DTW (1 of 8ish)
i spent my first day of my spring break befriending a middle-aged indian businessman at the metro airport (DTW).

the day started by me missing my 7:45am flight out of grand rapids (GRR). when i called the night before to check on my reservation, i was informed that my originally scheduled 7:20am flight out of GRR was going to be delayed to 8:10am. i assumed this meant that i could get an extra hour of sleep and get to the airport by 7:00am. well, the lady i talked to was a ponce, and the whole "ass out of u and me" thing played out to my misfortune. after getting things fixed up at the counter, i was re-routed to DTW and would arrive in cali by 1pm pst instead of my original 11am pst.

DTW was supposed to be a 3 hour lay-over from 9am to 12pm est. a departing gate change for my connection from A70 to A10 reaffirmed the festering feeling that this wasn't going to be a good day. i decided to hike the approximately 1 mile walk between the gates since i was still happy that i didn't have anything to do.

i spent the greater part of the morning passing the time talking with a guy that lived in the co-op i live in. we just ran into each other for the flight; he was headed to cali to start his job in silicon valley. during a gap in conversation, i noticed that the departure time was delayed an hour. they changed it about a half hour before our original departure time, so the plane was parked outside. it didn't make sense, and i found out there was a problem with the water system on the plane (actually, i overheard the northwest airlines customer service rep at the counter say it was a clogged toilet).

this was the first of 4 time changes: 12:20pm -> 1:10pm -> 2:30 -> 3:30 -> 4:50. somewhere in there, my fellow co-oper called his company's travel agency and got a different route. people were extremely pissed about the whole thing. especially since the change from 2:30 -> 3:30 also involved a gate change. i guess that backed up toilet grounded the whole freak'n plane.

while waiting at dtw, some random indian business man started conversation with me. i had nothing better to do, so i decided to be sociable. i had grown tired of people-watching all the ornery folk stepping up to the airline counter: a umich jap (could have even been a wasp) freaking the hell out that she's missing her father's sickbed, uncountably many overweight and balding businessmen in cheap and not-so-cheap suits yelling their lungs out trying to inflate their (un)importance, passive-aggressive housewives chiming in from the sidelines with well-timed and very audible quips, etc. it was a reality tv orgy, but i knew better than to have fun and feed my ego by belittling these people... just as it gets boring feeding my ego by belittling reality tv watchers.

i learned a lot about the indian culture from that businessman. he was a modest businessman who owned a few best westerns in fort wayne, indiana and los angeles. he was trying to head back home to his wife and baby daughter waiting for him in la. we talked at length about the differences and similarities of being first and second generation of immigrants of korea and india. we talked about arranged marriages, family loyalty, stress, corruption of youth, work ethics, morality, business, economics, religion, simple pleasures (like his daughter's face or great food)... pretty much anything and everything. we even talked about courtesy and manners at a passive-aggresive volume near the airline counter. all we were missing were a few brews and it could have been two friends just chillin' on a porch shootin' the shit.

eventually, we boarded the plane at around 6:00pm since there was an unannounced wait for a flight crew to arrive (the original one was reassigned to other flights since the delays took so long). even though he sat in the row directly behind me, we never talked throughout the flight. we just exchanged our goodbyes and warm smiles when we finally de-planed at LAX.

i'll never see this middle-aged indian businessman ever again in my life, and i don't feel any better or worse about it. it was just a great way to kill 8 hours of time reconciling cultures and generations.