#covidflight

It still feels like yesterday when l landed at Toronto Pearson Airport. The flight I took to come to Canada was my life’s first flight which made it all hectic, scary, and one of the unforgettable days of my life.

I never thought that I was this brave to handle such big things in life, like living alone in a hotel room, managing everything on my own, and most importantly, living in a country where I didn’t know anyone.

So, you guys can imagine what a rollercoaster ride, oh. Sorry, rollercoaster flight it was!

I was supposed to come to Canada in April 2020 and booked the flight in March, and everything was planned, but before I could even take off, Covid19 landed, and everything changed. I deferred my application to September 2020, hoping that everything will get normal by then. However, nothing went as planned; I boarded my first flight wearing a mask. It was challenging to wear a mask on a non-stop approx..14 hours flight.

In that time span, I watched several YouTube videos and read many blogs on what things to take on the flight, which documents are essential to carry in hand, and lots more. It somewhere prepared me but not completely. As some things you get to know by experience, the same was there in my case.

I reached New Delhi Airport around 8:00 PM, four hours before my boarding time. When I saw the airport for the first time, it felt like a different world where many people were rushing from here to there. But everyone was very cooperative, which made it easy for me to cover all the tasks. In-plane I got a window seat, but we had no access to open the blinds, so the window seat didn’t help much. Thankfully, the person sitting next to me was a nice lady who was going to Canada for the fourth time. She helped me a lot and told me many important things about when you will get the food in flight, how you can seek help, and where you will need to go after landing. When the flight took off, I wore cotton in my ears (told by my friends and relatives to do); it helped avoid the loud noise.

But it was the first wave of the pandemic, so everyone, including me, was scared of what would be our Covid19 result when we landed and had so many questions and what-ifs in our heads that made my fourteen hours flight a hectic one. There were a lot of difficulties like the food was not as good as I hoped for. One person in our flight fainted, making it difficult to process what would happen now. I watched the world map on the screen to see how much distance was left.