Other than the obvious suckiness of doing an all-nighter though, I also made a new friend - a Chinese girl who randomly started talking to me in Chinese while I was waiting in baggage claim (I have no idea how she could tell I knew Mandarin) and it turned out she was doing the same thing I was, except traveling in the opposite direction; she was to head to Santorini in the morning. So we watched each other's bags and kept each other company for as long as she could stay awake, and I felt pretty proud of the fact that I not only managed to carry on a 3 hour conversation in Chinese but did so while exhausted.
The worst thing was that I could watch three movies at once and even keep track of our flight progress at the same time. I've never had ADD so bad before.
(And it was really weird to no longer be worried/thinking about where I'm going to stay tomorrow or how I'm going to get there.)
And holy cow, I slept 11.5 hours straight the night I got home. But I suppose that's what happens when you get up to watch the dawn, catch an hour's nap after, then do a full day's hard scramble around an island and volcano, then catch a a flight, pull an all nighter at the airport, catch another 2.5 hour flight, wait through the 4 hour layover (cuz you don't dare nap after you nearly missed your second flight by nodding off for 30 mins unexpectedly), and then mostly only cat-nap through the next 12 hour flight and then valiantly try to stay up for another 7 hours in order to adjust to PST in one night.
It's weird not to hear church bells chiming anymore.
Los Angelex, CA