a trip to dublin airport

fancy new terminal two 

set down only

My friend Ilsa is coming to visit tomorrow. There was a slight mix-up about the dates--my bad--so I thought it was today. I even went to the airport looking for her and the only flight from New York had been cancelled. I thought she was gone forever! Thankfully, I figured out the following:

(a) Delta flights have the same flight number every single day. Example, the flight from New York is flight 164 and it arrives each day at 8:55am. It is always the same flight number. You would think Delta might vary this flight's identification number for identification purposes but instead they keep it uniform AKA dumb. Every day it's the same number. Makes for exciting trips to the airport like mine.

(b) When I check a flight status for a Delta flight, their website only gives me the information for the next day's flight--not the one that is currently in progress...the one which I might be most interested in. This is because they have made the decision to give all flights the same number. See section (a) for more detail.

(c) On flight itineraries sent by email, they list only the date of the flight's departure. To symbolize that a flight is overnight and the arrival time does not coincide with the departure, they put a teeny tiny symbol like this: #. Then, throughout the email they use the # symbol in place of the word 'number' like Flight #, Ticket #, Baggage #, etc. Finally, waaay down at the bottom of the email amidst the junk you would never dream of looking at, there is a key explaining various symbols, including '# = arrival different than departure date'.

In similar news, this morning I did a self-guided tour of the new terminal at Dublin Airport. It is a spacious, empty, clean thing. I like the flat surfaces on the exterior being used to create a curved surface. So far only Delta is using Terminal 2. I also learned some new vocab during my trip:

"set down" = drop off

"half nine" = 9.30am, NOT half 'till nine

# is called a 'hash sign', NOT a pound sign

times are written with periods not colons: 8.55 or 17.30