Ode to airplanes

In my pre-Peace Corps life, I was guilty of seriously under-appreciating airplanes. Those big metal birds were just a means to an end; an airborne capsule that, if I spent five hours sitting in it, would get me where I needed to go. But 16 months as a Peace Corps volunteer has inspired in me a new and sincere love for planes.

I now fully appreciate airplanes for what they are not: buses. A one-hour airplane ride can take the place of a 15-hour overnight bus trip. Airplanes always have armrests that draw a de facto line between you and your fellow passengers, so that you never have to put on your fierce face and explain to the Peruvian man sitting next to you the concept of a personal space. The sentence, "I paid 10 soles for this seat, so your stretching your knees and elbows into one third of it is not going to work for me," will likely never need to be uttered on an airplane. Planes have assigned seat numbers that are always respected, and it would be considered inappropriate to attempt to pack several live chickens, cuys, and children between the ages of zero and seven all into one seat with you. Airplanes that claim they are climate-controlled (i.e., all of them) do indeed maintain one comfortable temperature throughout the journey. Almost all Peruvian buses claim to have air conditioning, and almost none of them actually do. The climates-on-wheels that do possess functioning air vents seem to not understand that we passengers would prefer to travel in a comfortably cool environment, rather than a slightly sticky block of stale air, so they often turn off said AC for long periods of time. If an airplane unexpectedly delays three hours past its departure time, you get a free dinner voucher. If a bus is five hours late, or even if it decides not to leave at all, you get the character-building experience of scrambling to find another means of transportation. Airplanes enable passengers to maintain their freedom of choice by allowing those who wish to watch the in-flight movie to plug headphones into the sound system. Buses play outdated and/or overly action-filled movies at obscene volumes, so that even if you'd rather listen to your iPod, you can't hear the music from your earbuds over all the noise emanating from the bus speakers. Airplanes always have functioning bathrooms.

The above paragraph is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of the beautiful benefits of airplanes, but I think you get the idea. And I'm sure it's easy to see why, after uncountable hours spent on Peruvian buses, an airplane now seems like a positively blissful place.