My plane left for Germany on June 17th at 2:20pm. The airport suggested being at the airport by 11:20am. I finished packing at 10:45am. I started out the packing my two suitcases in an extremely anal manner, even making a color-coded Microsoft Word document detailing where each item was packed in each suitcase. Towards the end, however, I was just shoving things in where they would fit. Some things didn't fit. Oh well.

At the airport, my mom dropped me off at the ominous sounding "Terminal 2," where international non-stop flights departed. My mom kept shaking her head, saying, "In all my 30 years in Vegas I've never been to Terminal 2."

Well, apparently she wasn't the only one. Walking into Terminal 2 of the McCarren Airport felt like stepping back in time to 1976. Apparently they have not updated (or cleaned) it since then. Even the parking ticket was yellowed. It looked like they bought rolls and rolls of parking tickets in bulk back then and haven't used them all yet.

My gate, Gate 4, was located conveniently right across from the miniscule and non-threatening security checkpoint. As I was about to enter the line for security, a man who was clearly dressed as a suicide bomber

made his way through the line. After he surprisingly made it through security without so much as a warning or stern frown from a TSA agent, I watched him like a hawk to make sure he was going to a different gate than mine. Seriously, if you are going to an airport, why dress like a suicide bomber? Didn't his wife/partner say something like, "Hugo, better pack your suicide bombing vest in your checked luggage. You don't want to call attention to yourself."

Anyway, the flight was pleasant. I sat next to a beautiful German exchange student who spoke English effortlessly without any trace of an accent. I would have probably thought she was American, had she not told me she was German. This 17-year-old girl spoke several European languages and had seen many more countries on the globe than I had. The plane hadn't even touched ground in Europe yet, and I was already feeling like a stupid American.