Up early.

My second day in Bratislava. The birds are chirping, the sun is out and I can hear sirens in the background. But mostly, my room is very quiet, it faces a lovely courtyard, called the summer terrace. After being up for three hours in the middle of the night I managed to fall asleep again and slept till 5:30 am. Feeling a bit off kilter but no major headache, which is a bonus after the last 10 days or so. Breakfast starts at 6:30 on weekdays at the very lovely Hotel Marrol's where I am staying. I woke up hungry so I decided to get myself down to the dining room. I was not disappointed. Now that I am finally here, I am starting to get excited about the trip and emotional about being back in Bratislava. Before the trip, in the last few weeks,I could not muster much enthusiasm for this month-long excursion, what with just being back from China (after recuperating from a nasty viral bronchitis prior to that trip) then dental surgery immediately after China and having to take time off work to recuperate, then being super busy at work for three weeks and finally coping with my usual pre-trip preparation and packing anxiety. The flight to Toronto was fine and didn't seem particularly long though it was its usual 4+ hours. We were a bit late arriving-the flight was delayed because a flight attendant didn't show up for work (though she did finally get there) so some time was spent looking for three volunteers to relinquish their seats so that they could reduce the number of passengers. Once we arrived, I had about three hours to wait. This time also passed relatively quickly, I talked to my sister and had some food and then it was time to board the Austrian airlines jet. There was a bit of a surprise waiting for people on the gangplank just before the door to the plane. A stern Austrian flight attendant was pulling people out of the line because they were taking too much or or too large a carryon. I don't know what they did with the excess and I was a bit worried but she looked at my bags and waved me on. Once on the plane, we were welcomed with the traditional "Grüß Gott" greeting, background waltz music and colours of orange and yellow and green and pale blue. I was flying economy and I could see the problem with the stowing of large items, the plane was so old it still had ashtrays, with tiny overhead compartments and no entertainment system in the back of the seat. Fortunately, my bags were fine and fit into those tiny spaces. Speaking of tiny, the seat and the leg room allowance were minuscule and, of course, I had a burly, youngish German-speaking gentleman sitting beside me. This leg of the journey, with its 8 and a half hours of flying time, seemed interminably long. I wanted to but could not sleep and I had neglected to charge up my iPod and I had not brought any reading material. They were playing movies on the overhead tv monitor but I just could not get enthused about any of them. Making the trip more unpleasant was the constant nagging migraine/hedaches that I'd had on and off since Thursday. Anyway, we eventually landed safely in Vienna. The route from the plane through passport control to the luggage seemed a bit long and labyrinthine, but I did finally manage to get my bag and go through "nothing to declare" to the exit where I expected to see my nephew waiting for me. No one resembling family came forward to greet me so I hung around to see if he would show up. I texted my sister to see if she knew where he was, wondered whether he was waiting somewhere else, kept looking around at the various guys who were standing around but still no Roman. My sister texted to assure me that he was there so I took another look around and finally saw a young man who could be him sitting down, looking a bit worried. I called his name, he looked up and recognized me. It turns out that he was waiting for a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and I am now sporting a very short, not brown, hairstyle. Anyway, we were both happy to finally make contact, he'd been waiting for me since before 8 am and was worried that I had not made the plane or who knows what. He hadn't brought my flight information with him so he was not sure what flight I was coming in on. But he heard some Slovaks talking and found out that the flight from Toronto had just come in and was going to wait for another 15 minutes. So neither one of us gave up on the other and we finally met!