Departure day! (Part 2)

There we were met by the YFU Travel Staff and they did attendance and we went on to the check-in lines (which were long but not bad—taking only about 20 minutes). I weighed my bag, and as I was putting it on, I saw it hit the 49 lbs. mark of the 50 lbs. allowed. Oh no, I don’t want to pay $125 for another bag, but it turns out that it read 49 lbs. because I slammed my bag onto the scale, so it fell down to 47.9 lbs. That’s great, but a scary encounter. “All YFU students after check-in proceed to security,” a YFU travel staff member shouted. He made quite a big commotion of the regular civilians waiting in line. I went on with Harold to the security, and set my stuff in the basket and this TSU lady told me I had to take my laptop out, and I immediately followed her instructions. I was then told to go to a scanner and I walked through it, beeping as I went through.

“Step back, do you have a belt?”

“Oh yeah, I do”

“Take it off and place all your things on the tray”

I did so, and there we go! No beeping noises. I took me a while to organize my belongings again, putting things back in the bag. Harold and I proceeded to gate 96 of the international terminal (see photo) and I decided to start typing up my day with Microsoft Word so that I can simply copy and paste to my blog when I get internet (It’s been extremely limited access and also there’s internet you have to pay for at SFO). We’re boarding at 10:30 AM (I’m sure my friends at school are having break at school and about to go to Ms. Daniell’s English class!).

So the people over the intercom calls over people to start boarding by seating numbers. I’m waiting in line and all of the sudden, my friend Adam loses a bet while playing cards and has to do the Radio Exercises we’ve been doing at the university while listening to a radio (see “radio exercises Japan” on google for more information). So he loses and has to do it in front of EVERYONE at the gate (see my video, will be posted later). Absolutely hilarious. So I start boarding, and call my dad of my status in the airport, and we begin to pull out of the gate. As we’re doing so, I think something was wrong near or in the airport because I could see a bright red helicopter on the other side of the airport and a fire truck racing to where the helicopter was. But nonetheless, that didn’t affect our departure time despite already being delayed 30 minutes. We moved across the airport and held short of runway 28R (Runway 28 right) and could see two planes landing (see photos). Once they landed, we took off and I could hear the thunderous roar of the engines of a 747 take off on runway 28R (28 right) and the beautiful view of San Francisco (see video), the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Californian coastline.