Pavel's Blog

I enjoy travel, really I do. That is to say, I enjoy being in interesting new places, seeing new things, and meeting people of new cultures. It's the getting there I'm less keen on.

Our flight to Helsinki was the expected interminable sardine experience, with a brief episode of liberty in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, some people whose luggage was checked through failed to check in to the next flight, so our take-off was delayed almost an hour. Naturally, that was an added hour of sardine time, not liberty time. Overall, we left Seattle at about 1:30pm on Sunday and arrived here in Helsinki at about 1:30pm on Monday, essentially losing a full calendar day in fishy fermentation.

But I'm not bitter.

I did make one interesting observation during the trip, though. The bathrooms on our flight to Amsterdam had a feature I've never encountered before, and now I have to wonder why not. There was a tall, thin, cylindrical compartment alongside the door, with a tall, thin, spring-loaded door at the top, labelled with a picture of a hypodermic needle. It's clearly intended to allow diabetics a place to safely dispose of their insulin injectors, which is so obviously a great idea.

Now I'm curious, though: how do diabetics (and other regular hypo users) usually dispose of their used equipment when such a handy option isn't available? Or maybe that's something I don't actually want to know...