How to effectively waste two days of your life

29,5 hours plus 7 hours of time difference means leaving Costa Rica on Wednesday 10:40 and arriving to Slovakia on Thursday 23:15 - two days of traveling - what a perfect way how to waste your time.

As I mentioned, my flight from San Jose (Airport Juan Santamaria - SJO) was scheduled for 10:40. Used to the European airports I was thinking about arriving to the airport around 9:30. But my friends told me, that it is suggested to be there 3 hours before departure and as I am flying by TACA (central american airline) I should be there even earlier, because they use to oversell the flights, so it might happen, that they will "offer" you the flight next day => I woke up at 6:30, arrived to airport at 7:15 and 7:20 I was already checked in and also payed 26$ departure tax to Costa Rican government. So what am I going to do next 3,5 hours? Premek had a great idea to walk around airport, find some good place and watch the airplanes landing and taking-off. SJO is not a big airport, you can go around it within 2 hours, and there is very good place to watch airplanes - at the and of the runway, which is about 15 minutes from the main building - or 1 hour and 45 minutes if you take the other direction... Guess, which direction we chose with Premek.

After walking almost two hours around airport and seeing several airplanes taking off I came back to the airport and went through the passport control and waited half and hour for the boarding time. To my big surprise we left San Jose on time (all my 4 flights to Costa Rica half a year ago were delayed). TACA has another special characteristic - there is no food served on board (unless you want to buy some sandwiches - I didn't find the courage to ask how much it is). As I am not used to have a breakfast I didn't eat anything before departure and was getting quite hungry during the flight. When we landed and I checked in to the next flight, I examined the food court at Caracas airport (CCS) but all the prices were in Venezuelan currency and I decided to wait for the flight to Paris, where we were supposed to have dinner, and it was supposed to leave in less than 1 hour. So I sat down and was watching my airplane to be loaded (Boeing 747-400 is quite a big plane...). The scheduled departure from CCS was at 17:50 Venezuelan time, but Mr. Murphy declared his wisdom again and as I was watching the airplane being loaded I realized, that is 17:30 and we are still in the departure hall (and it will take definitely much more time than 20 minutes to board more than 400 people to that airplane). When we finally headed for the runway, it was 19:30 and I was starving to death. After dinner, which disappeared within seconds I decided to watch some movies - Air France was really innovative, and you could choose from two languages - what a luxury. Unfortunately as we were flying from Spanish speaking to French speaking country, the languages were "logically" French and Spanish and I wasn't in mood to read the English subtitles.

After 6 hours of flight I was so bored, that the idea of reading subtitles didn't seem as bad as it was few hours ago. I realized, that I am really bored, because I was laughing at such stupid movie as "You, me and Dupree". The only learning point of the movie is, that Lance Armstrong is probably interested in show business - this is the second movie, in which I see him acting and again is it very low-intellectual movie (the first one was Dodgeball).

Finally we are arriving to Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG) - of course delayed - and I am running through the terminal corridors to get to the other terminal, from which the airplane to Prague is departing in 25 minutes. It is 9:30 and my flight ticket is for the evening flight (19:00), but I want to try to get to the plane, I would really prefer to spend the day in Prague than in Paris... After trying several counters, even the Sky team VIP lounge, I am told, that my ticket can be changed only, when I pay 109 EUR. Even if they have the available seats, they will not allow me to board the plane... I politely thank for the conversation (read "Dakujem za rozhovor") and fully excited think what am I going to do 11 hours at the CDG. As I spent there lot of time, I would keep the experiences from CDG to special post.

Finally the evening came and I boarded the plane to Prague. One very important point to mention here is that flight was operated by Czech Airlines, which means, that there was Czech food and mainly Czech drinks served. Few months ago I was writing about my first visit of German pub Gasthaus in Panama - well the feeling was even better, when stewardess asked me, what I want from drink and I just said: "May I have a beer?" And the Gambrinus can came to my hands...

In Prague I had around 50 minutes to board plane, so nothing much happened there and I quickly got to the last plane of the day - in direction Kosice. After 29,5 hours from leaving SJO I landed in Kosice and just the last surprise was awaiting me. My passport looked a little but damaged since October (when it got wet and the last page was falling apart), so I was bit afraid of traveling with it, but during my last flight I told myself, that it is ok, no one had any problem with it (police officers in Panamanian-Costarican border, at Costarican, Venezuelan, French and Czech airport) - together around 20 people took my passport. Just the last one - passport officer at Kosice airport started to examine the passport closely and asked me for another ID. But it was 11pm, after 30 hours of traveling, so I didn't have energy to explain him anything, I just gave him the driver license and passively listened to the lecture about how should I go and ask for new passport...