Poland 03 - Jet Lag is Sleep Deprevation

I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling 'bout half past dead.

I just need some place where I can lay my head.

"Hey, Mister, can you tell me, where a man might find a bed?"

He just grinned and shook my hand, "No" was all he said.

Those lines from the song The Weight by The Band kept running through my mind as we came into Warsaw, Poland. They are 7 hours ahead of the Central time zone. At the time of my trip, they were only 6 hours ahead because they had not gone to daylight savings time. We swapped over the day before we left Paducah. Oddly enough, we sprung forward again two weeks later, the day before we left Poland. I've never done that twice in the same year.

The longest flight was from Chicago to London, and if I slept during the almost 9 hour flight, then I would have had a normal, Polish night's rest. Idyllic, eh? Yeah, that didn't happen. I had planned on it, but sleeping outside of the confines of my bed at home seems to be almost impossible. One of my biggest concerns about the trip was my inability to sleep.

I saw plenty of happy people on the plane, delightfully unconscious in sleep-induced comas as the plane roared through the night. How could they do it? How could they sleep sitting up in that roaring plane, with a tiny United Airlines pillow that probably wouldn't even pass for an airbag in Barbie's dream car?

Amazingly enough, when we arrived in Warsaw, I wasn't that tired. Przemek, the pastor of the church that contacted us and arranged our meetings picked us up at the airport. We drove an hour and a half to Ciechanów (pronounced Chi-hon-off) where we would be for the first week. We then attended a prayer meeting that evening. By the time I got to bed, I had been up for 31 hours. Oddly enough, it took a couple more hours to go to sleep, and I only slept about 4 hours last night. I told you I can't sleep away from home.

At any rate, I felt fine the next day as we started to explore Ciechanów. As the saying goes, sleep is overrated. In the next blog entry, we will explore the city of Ciechanow.

By the way, do you see the bald guy with the headphones in the image above? That dude rocked out during the entire flight from Chicago to London. Yeah, glad I wasn't sitting by him as he head-banged for almost nine hours.