Flying to Tianjin
I will be spending the next months in Tianjin to study. I've already had an exchange experience during my first university degree, it was in Lisbon, a city that I've loved and love. This time I am in Tianjin, China.
It will surely be a different experience, from not speaking the language, to going to a much bigger city (13 million vs the 2.8 million of Lisbon) but, first of all, starting from the distance to travel.
This is not my first time in an international flight. I did have to reach Italy somehow, and I did go back to Brazil a couple times. But it was all when I was little, and I do not remember much at all.
The days before departing I did get a little anxious about flying so many hours. And also because I had to change planes 3 times in the span of 23 hours. When I reached Shanghai and it was so bright outside, I had a moment where I did not understand what day or how many hours had passed. The airport of Shanghai was, for a moment, a liminal space where time had no meaning anymore. I drifted in and out of sleep during the whole flight since I took motion sickness tablets, I was not sleepy but I was tired.
I got on the big plane to Shanghai in Frankfurt. When the plane was taking flight I thought I would be feeling fear. What I felt instead was fun, going up into the sky even thought the plane's wings seemed so thin and trembled in the wind was, fun!
What I noticed in the few times I was awake during the flights was the very different landscape seen from above Germany and from above Shanghai-to-Tianjin. Reaching Frankfurt there were forests with small villages popping now and there, green was the predominant color. In China, instead, the landscape was dominated by constructions, cities, and brownish fields. What stood most out were these rectangles that took over parts of the cities, skyscrapers perfectly aligned.
Well, in the end I did reach Tianjin.
