My wife saw the above at an online booking agency, and so here we are again at O'Hare. I can see an Iberia Airlines plane out the window, but it's at another gate. We're flying Alitalia. Waiting to board with us is a choir from Saint Marcelline Catholic Church of Schaumburg, Illinois, traveling on to Rome. They say their trip includes performing at an audience with the pope. The choir director's Ph.D. is also somehow involved.
Our plane, the "Marco Polo," is a Boeing 767, so we won't have Airbus rattles. We're near the front, in the two seats next to the window, except the seats line up so there isn't a window for us. Instead of the center seats, across the aisle from us is the wall of some forward crew area of unknown purpose. We're about as isolated as you can get in coach class on a jumbo jet.
We brought our noise-cancelling headphones. There are opera and classical selections, so I'm set. The movies to sleep through included Surviving Christmas, something Italian, and Fantastic Four. We continue our reading from the waiting area. For a Spanish theme, I'm reading History as a System by Jose Ortega y Gasset, and my wife is reading Drunk in Madrid by Joyce Elbert.
Dinner is airline cuisine with an Italian bent, but Alitalia always throws enough prosciutto on something that I can make sandwiches with the dinner rolls. We switch to ear plugs and settle our brains for a long night flight's "rest".
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