55 Liters of Stuff in the Bag, 55 Liters of Stuff

55 liters. What does 55 liters mean to you? Probably nothing because America is overflowing with idiocy and doesn't use the metric system like the entire rest of the world. I definitely didn't understand what 55 liters was until a few weeks ago. Then, 55 liters became the amount of space I would be living out of for two months. One week? Six months? Who knows? Anyway, my backpack is 55 liters total, 40 in the main pack, and 15 in the day pack. However you are doing the math, it looks small. Unless it's in beer. Then it's a lot.

Literally, it is just Liberia, Myanmar, and the US not using the metric system.

Packing was definitely an adventure in itself. Over the course of a few weeks, I managed to buy 11 pairs of shoes, a kit to wash my clothes in the sink with accompanying rubber clothesline, a silk sleep sack, and over 100 dollars worth of socks. Do not fear, most of the shoes were returned, although I can't say the same for the socks. SmartWool socks are a damn delight and you can rip them from my cold, dead feet. Also, if anyone needs help rolling clothes, I can now roll mine to drill sergeant precision levels. I literally learned from a YouTube video made by a Army Ranger. Due to my planning ahead and purchasing everything I needed fairly early on, I was able to have my pack fully ready exactly five minutes before I needed to leave. Not exactly sure how that happened, but I do seem to recall at some point during my all-nighter that I was no longer going to try and carry-on, which meant readjusting the entire bag, and probably costing me that one hour of sleep I would have gotten. I also remember staring blankly off into the distance a couple times and thinking exactly no thoughts. The brain with sleep deprivation is a wondrous thing.

It's a t-shirt burrito!

My trip from the global power that is Langhorne, Pennsylvania to Naples, Italy felt like quite a whirlwind. I'll give you the short version. It went like so: drive from my house to Trenton train station, take train to Penn Station, take train to Jamaica station, take Airtrain to JFK, get checked in and have my personal space violated by security, possibly moon somebody while hurriedly putting on shoes without belt, buy outlandishly expensive food, wait around a few hours, take nine hour flight to Istanbul, have six hour layover in what are undoubtedly the most uncomfortable chairs ever created, take two hour flight to Naples, take bus to hostel, almost cry from exhaustion when you realize you need a five cent coin to take the elevator to the hostel on the 7th floor, go out looking for ways to break money, fail at breaking money, fail at breaking money, finally acquire five cent coin, return to elevator where a fellow hostel-goer has paid coin making yours irrelevant, almost cry again, check in, flop onto bed and into coma with no time to cry tears of happiness.

Additionally, I had the pleasure of sitting next to some interesting people. On my flight to Istanbul, I was seated next to a man on his way to Jerusalem to visit family. He owns what I think may be a sandwich shop in Jersey, but I'm still not certain because he kept calling it a bakery. I know he has five children, one of which is an extravagant spender. The extravagant spender buys a new car every year and has four full walk-in closets. My seat-mate thinks that immigrants shouldn't bother coming to America unless they work three jobs. I know what all of his children and grandchildren look like since I saw literally every picture on his phone. He believes in smacking your child every once in a while to prevent them from using "the marijuana drug." He has been married to his wife for 38 years. She is a good wife because she does not let herself go. He does not like shrimp. I know all of this because I listened to him for quite a while since the man brought absolutely nothing with him onto the plane to occupy himself. For a nine hour flight! No music, no book, no tamagotchi, nothing. He also let me know early on that he is incapable of sleeping on planes. To top everything off, his little TV in front of him was broken. Oy vey. I wanted to get a little sleep on the ride over though, so I was able to squeeze some naps in. Every time I would wake up, he would just be staring straight ahead at the broken TV, apparently creating his own shows. You have to have a decent imagination when you bring nothing on a flight.

This is tangential, but I have a theory that the government is running an organization that creates movies based on wonderful books with the sole objective of ruining them for readers. By doing so, they are hoping people will be so disgusted by the interpretations that they will stop reading books entirely, thus becoming a society like in 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. Case in point: The Giver. I find it almost offensive that you have an excellent story, Jeff Bridges, and the incomparable Meryl Streep, and still find a way to muck it up. It can be nothing less than a purposeful, tactical move by a high-ranking agency in the American government. Possibly the same agency that decided on not using the metric system.

I was so excited for my second flight, because I was going to sleep the sweet heck out of that flight. When we started boarding I got super pumped because there were approximately 25 of us, and pretty much everyone had a row to themselves. Naturally then, an entire family sits down next to me, and I mean like an aunts, uncles, extended cousins type-of-family. Lucky for me, the guy who sits next to me gets to chatting and immediately labels himself as a people-person. Oh, Sleep, I hardly knew you. I now also know countless things about this guy, but I'll spare you the details of this one. It turns out that Turkish Airlines ended up being my savior for a little of the flight because even on an hour and a half flight, they still served a meal! When you get a meal on an airplane, all of your concentration has to go into eating it. It's the rules. I think it's because the tray tables are so tiny and the utensils so blunt that you really have to focus. Either way, with my neighbor happily munching away I was able to fall asleep a couple of times with my eyes open. When our plane landed, my seat-mate insisted on giving me a hair-clip he bought for his mother, (what an A+ son!), and in return I would give him my number so he could contact me when he comes to the United States from India. That's when old Alice Eisen made an entrance. Surprisingly, her phone number is one digit off from mine. Small world!

I am also happy to report a small accomplishment. Within six hours of being in Italy, I ate a slice of pizza.