Hurry Up and Wait

Shannon Airport, Ireland

I hate flying.  I absolutely hate it.  Life is pretty tough when you're almost 6'2 and you're stuck in an airplane with 160 other people for over 12 hours total of traveling time from Virginia to Qatar (excluding the 11 hours it took from me to fly from Hawaii to Virginia to begin with).  A lot of the deployment process so far has just been waiting.  Go here to the AMC terminal on Naval Station Norfolk.  Do NOT be late.  Hurry and check in.  Hurry and do this.  Hurry and do that.  Sit there and wait.

Get on the plane.  Let's go, let's go!

Sit there and wait.

Two hour layover in Ireland.  Oh baby.  We go drink!

"Attention in the plane.  This is your captain  speaking.  I've just been informed by the colonel that there will be a zero tolerance policy for drinking alcohol.  So please, stretch out your legs, relax, and have fun, but do not consume any alcoholic beverages."

WHAT??  I'm in fucking Ireland and I can't drink a beer?

Presumably it's because they don't want us to get drunk and then fly into what technically is a war zone.  The Guiness was like 9 euros a cup though.  I'm not sure what that translates to in American dollars, but I'm sure that it's pretty damn outrageous. 

 A dialogue that actually happened in real life.

Person A:  What's those words above the English part of the sign?
Person B:  I dunno.  Must be some foreign language or something.
Person A:  Maybe it's dutch.
Person B:  Naw, man.  I think it's like French, or Spanish, or something.
Me:  I think it's Gaelic.

*brief pause.

Person B:  You sure it's not French or Spanish?  It looks like it to me.
Me:  Yeah, it's not.
Person B:  I think it is.
Me:  I took five semesters of French in college and two years of Spanish in high school.  It's not.
Person A:  What's Gaelic?
Me:  It's the language that the indigenous peoples of Ireland spoke before they got fucked by the English.
Person A:  The British fucked the Irish?
Me:  Yeah, like the Americans fucked the Hawaiians.

*brief pause

Person A:  How did they fuck 'em?
Me:  From behind.
Person A:  You Hawaiian, Sergeant Yi?
Person B:  Of course he's Hawaiian, stupid.  He told us earlier he's from Hawaii.

178 days left and counting