Have you wondered what international air travel looks like these days? A ghost town.
Being a germaphobe... in a pandemic, you can imagine my anxiety about traveling halfway across the world in not one, but THREE different airplanes. That's a lot of sanitizing for a family of four! I was the crazy person who used a wet wipe to sanitize every surface one could touch on a plane before Covid-19, so imagine my stress this time round, especially when we were asked to change our freshly sterilized seats and clean our new ones all over again. But once we were settled into our germ-free sanctuary, I felt quite at ease as the staff was extremely welcoming, all of our food and toiletries were pre-packaged and the flights were empty. There was a moment of guilt as we peeked around and counted only 15 passengers on the entire jumbo plane. There was not one other passenger in our whole section besides our family! We couldn't believe they were flying a plane that empty across the Atlantic. The environmental side of me cringed while the germaphobe side of me sighed.
All of the international terminals in the airport looked abandoned... like there was some sort of global pandemic going on. The flight reader boards in both San Francisco and London only displayed four outbound international flights. Masks were required and everyone abided except for 10-15% of people who chose to dangle their noses over their masks which was killing me. I couldn't get this meme (below) out of mind every time! Social Distancing signs were displayed everywhere and you could easily choose to have a whole giant section of the terminal to yourself.
The only time I felt at risk was when an airport employee chose to sit down for a break a couple rows from us. You know the guy who sits too close when there are plenty of gigantic empty sections surrounding you? He removed his mask, bit off the top third of a pear (I've never seen someone do that before), spit out the stem and seeds onto the floor not once, but three times. Then he moved on to picking his nose a couple times and making a phone call, practically shouting across the terminal while I imagined his spit flying in our direction. After all of us were thoroughly grossed out, we relocated to the other side of the terminal and waited for our gate to be assigned. Other than that, flying was a great experience. There were no security lines, no flight delays, no customs line and friendly staff.
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