Travel Memories: 3. Go East

Flying is a perfect oportunity to test with your own eyes if the maps you know do not lie. And if you are over known places, you can identify that city or village, or "look, that is next to the railroad track", or "hey, that's my house", etc. Flying to faraway lands has an even more special charm, if one is able to see anything through the window apart from clouds. One can see, from up there for the first time, lands that one maybe followed a hundred times in a map. It is wonderful to observe how lands, fields, or crops change. Italy is not the same as England, how much snow there is on some mountains. Make out the coast off Marseille and realize how close I am to home. The first time I crossed the Atlantic and followed the coast from Halifax to Boston in the middle of winter. Or go in through Atlanta and contemplate some southern US states. To see the long line of the Pyrenees or the snowed show of the Alps. The sunset over the Dalmatian coast. I like this exercise.

When we took off from Frankfurt, almost two months ago, it marked the time I was flying more to the east of Berlin. Those are lands that popped out in many readings, documentaries, news, soccer games. I do not know why, but I always get the idea that I will see something extraordinary the first time I fly over a place. On second thought, I will, but it may not be distinguishable from anywhere else. In any case, I didn't had much time because we were going fast towards dusk and night: to see the white Carpathian mountains, is that Cracow?, ah, those lights must be Kiev. And in the morning, flying over southern China, very strange mountains, following a railroad track... Many things to see, without the possibility of identifying them, even if the plane screen tells you where you are.

Of course, sometimes, the only thing to be seen are clouds and clouds as far as the eye can reach, hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. A white sea, apparently as smooth as an ice rink, that covers the magnificient Sun to everybody underneath.