Where's she been wandering?

The first time I stepped off a plane, I could not be prepared for the mass of emotion accompanying the claustrophobically hot Egyptian wall of air which hit me in the face. It was as if both of them had been building up for the past 16 years, ready to explode on top of me as I made this historic step! Yes, I know, 16 is quite a late stage to embark on a flight for the first time! But it was definitely worth the wait!

Aeroplanes had always scared me a lot when I was a child. The thought of being trapped in a metal cylinder thousands of feet above the ground, was a nightmare that led my family to use other forms of transport for years. But I couldn’t exactly hop on a coach if I wanted to reach Egypt sometime this century and it was about time I put my fears to bed.

But the moment that I want to describe is after all of that initial anxiety. I had made it and, to my astonishment, I was still alive. Relief was emotion number one! Excitement was the far stronger and more important emotion that followed swiftly afterwards. I had never experienced it quite so intensely before. It bubbled up inside me and eventually erupted in an uncontrollable giggle as I looked around at my first taste of the world outside of Europe. Five hours ago I had left a cloud-filled, drizzly England and now here I was in a humid, foreign land, poles apart from the one I had departed. Everything was different, from the great sandy desserts we had flown over ten minutes earlier, the unbreathable air and the odd smells; to the palm trees, rickety transport and crazy drivers. But I couldn’t be happier. Suddenly I felt as if my life was truly beginning! My world, that was so painfully narrow, was starting to open up, meaning I could embrace a whole host of new experiences. All that culture, which I had read about so fervently, was right here in front of me, waiting for me to take advantage of it.

I was wrong about planes. They were not the flying tin cans I viewed them as. They were pure magic.