A BIG WORLD

The memory of my first flight is one I will never forget. Although it was my second chance to visit another country but the thrill of travelling by air got me very excited for my trip to the United Kingdom. Waiting for my flight in the afternoon, I spent all morning thinking about how it would feel to take off and I feared the thought of throwing up as the plane left the ground. I could not stop imagining myself in the plane and feeling fulfilled that I finally travelled by air. I knew it was the start of something new and I expected more good things to come my way.
My father told me a lot about travelling and connecting flights in international airports. It is a good thing I was going on this journey with my best friend, Amanda.
It was six o’clock in the morning when we arrived at Heathrow, wearing our big winter jackets as we expected to walk into a cold UK. The airport was bigger than I imagined after reading articles about it on the internet. Walking up the corridors to flight connections following the big purple signs, I kept looking outside the glass walls, the most airplanes I had seen in my life parked on the other side of the glass.
All I thought as I turned my head from one plane to another was ‘wow.’ When we reached the flight connections desk, a friendly attendant welcomed us. He seemed interested in our visit to the UK. This made it easy to engage in a conversation with him and he quickly assisted us to connect to our final flight to Glasgow. The attendant informed us that we needed to take a bus would take 10minutes from our terminal to Terminal 5.
As we went down on the escalator to the pickup spot, I wondered if the airport could be ‘that big’. Could we really drive around in a bus and still be within the airport? I kept my eye on the time on my cellphone throughout out the drive. Ten minutes was not just a round up figure, but the exact time it took to travel from Terminal 1 to Terminal5.
Moving on from the liquids. My full body was scanned for any metal. After walking through the metal detector, I had to go back, take off my shoes and walk through it again because I forgot I had a piece of metal in my clothes. This is the part I should have been scared on my journey, but as I approached the security guard motioning me towards her I smiled at her it did not matter that she did not smile back, I just smiled because I knew I did not do anything wrong except pick the wrong shirt for travelling.