It’s summer break – and the first time I am on the other side of the big pond that separates Europe from it’s former colonies in North America.

Our flight went from Berlin Tegel, the airport which was supposed to be closed since 2012 when the new “BER” airport was supposed to be opened – now, in 2016, it is still not expected to be opened before 2018, and the hope of it ever being opened is vanishing.

We then landed at Frankfurt, one of the world’s busiest airports, to change to the flight that would carry us across the Atlantic. We only had bout 40 minutes time to change planes.

We took off, ready for the longest part of our journey: the approximately six-hour Atlantic crossing. A while after we had left mainland Europe over the Dutch coast, we were served some food. I must say that, even though it still tasted let’s say “interesting”, it was better than the food that I had gotten on my Hainan airlines flight to China.

There wasn’t much to see outside the window for the entire flight, because the entire North Atlantic seems to have been covered by low stratiform clouds, resulting in an endless, gleaming white plane below us. The only interesting this was a plane that took the same route as we did and we flew very close to for several minutes.

Finally, the clouds broke away and I was able to see Canada for the first time:

Soon after, we started approaching the Montreal airport. On the way down, we experienced quite some turbulence from some North American-style convection…

On the taxi ride to the hotel, I was surprised to see how old and broken a lot of the infrastructure seemed – especially the bridges, which looked like they were simply put together from random bits and pieces.

We went to the underground city of Montreal, and finally settled down in the hotel for good – after all, the jet lag started kicking in and there is a lot planned for tomorrow.