Teen Life Stories you should know about Growing Up

Flight Experience and Land of Freedom

Every year my parents would always bring my sister and I to travel so that we could take a breather from studies and could make some good memories together as a family. It usually means a lot of great savory food and desserts, great sceneries and great travel moments, except when conflicts arise within the family. I still remember there was a time when we travelled to the faraway land of the USA, United States of America, where they call it the land of freedom, land of laissez-faire capitalism and opportunities. I was stoked and extremely ecstatic the night before I boarded on the plane of the United Airlines. "Woohoo! What could be better than visiting the beach at Santa Monica? Or going to Adele's and Shawn Mendes' concert at the Staples Stadium?" I could not sleep for the whole night and ended up sleeping on the 13-hour flight the next day instead.

The flight was painfully long and arduous. I could barely sleep because all I saw and heard were babies crying with kicking feet just behind me and heard people overtalking loudly as if they were on their own talk shows on the Morning News from Global News. When I wanted to go to the loo and have a leg stretch, the toilets on the flight were barely sanitized and there was always that pungent smell that made people want to puke. It was disgusting but what could you do when you had no other choices? The flight attendants were old and mean, which was a strong juxtaposition from the general idea of flight attendants that you would imagine them saying in a gentle and non-aggressive voice, "Coffee, tea or me?". Or at least that might be the dream of all teenage boys going on a plane. It would be an honor for them to be flirted by a flight attendant. 

The foods were not particularly appealing either. They were very bland and tasteless, and what do you expect anyways? They were meals just to make you feel not peckish anymore, and to let your time on the plane go a little quicker whilst you were looking forward to the exact minute to land your destination. You know that on the plane where the very-small tv shows you the exact time when you land? On the page where it shows the world map and the altitude of how high above you are from the ground? That was what I was looking at for the whole 13 hours. 

So, thirteen unacceptably long hours later, I landed on this "land of freedom", I realized that something was wrong with my face. Very wrong about it. I had a bad feeling about it - I could not feel my lips. They had turned dark crimson, a result of extreme dehydration of being on a plane. Because for some reasons, being on a plane sucks away all the moisture and consists only half of the moisture in the air than the air of normal outdoor environment on land. Believe it or not, it is a hard cold fact of science. Such a great plunge of humidity makes your lips, eyes and nose stay in an extremely dehydrated situation, which may cause you to have nosebleeds, irritated and itchy eyes and really dry lips. And after being in a flight with all these irritations, I was knackered and in extreme dehydration so I decided that once I reached the hotel, I would be hitting the sack at once.

But things turned out for the worse. When we were reaching Los Angeles, the City of Angels, where it was famous for its sunny weather and warmth, the weather was turning really chilly. It was an eye-opening experience for me, and quite a contrastive experience compared to Hong Kong. When we landed and reached our destinated hotel via uber, we hurriedly put our luggage up to the room and went out for our midnight cheat meals. 

On the streets in Downtown Los Angeles, some drug addicts and drunken people were scattering along the sidewalks, looking disoriented. Contrastively in Hong Kong, streets are relatively safer and quieter with less nuisance. People usually feel relatively safer to walk in streets and streets are usually very clean with less trash on the streets when compared with those in Los Angeles. If you cannot picture it, just imagine streets you see in Japan or Singapore, which are two countries famous for their cleanliness and tidiness as parts of their national pride. If you have not heard of it, Japan has this thing where its citizens will tidy up their rubbish after competitive sport games and even tidy up other people's rubbish as well because being clean and responsible is something they regard as part of their national identity.