I would like to share the experience from getting up in our hostel (student´s are not rich
) to arriving in Brussels.Oeiras, Portugal (a small town not to far from Lisbon) . A picture of our hostel.
I got up at 6am, quickly washed and put all my stuff in my bag, at around 6:25 I was ready. 6:25 was the time we had arranged to leave the hostel since the train station was about a 15-20min walk and since our train would leave at 6:46. Anyway we left our hostel only at 6:30 since one friend had overslept. Since it is a 20min walk and the train would leave in 16 minutes you can imagine that we had to hurry.
Fortunately we arrived at 6:45 at the station, I told the others to hold the train while I would buy our 7 train tickets. Trust me ... those vending machines are f***ing slow when you want to buy 7 tickets. Luckily for me the others held the train long enough and at 6:47 the doors of the train closed behind me (sorry for the 1 min delay portugeuse railways
)Below picture of one of the local Portuguese trains (this picture was ofcourse taken a couple of days earlier)
About 30 min later we arrived in Lisbon "Cais de Sodre" railway station. At this station we would need to take the bus to the airport. At this time the sun had risen and since we hadn´t missed our train the trip would be from now on pretty relaxed.
At 8:15 the bus dropped us off at Lisbon Portela International airport. The check in hall was literally crowded with people. Apparantely all TAP europe flights check in at only about 6-7 check in desks
. Luckily the 2 Virgin check in desks were reasonable efficient to handle what would appear a full flight.A little later our bags were labeled and we received our boarding cards. Check in time read 9:20am, my seat was 23A (24 rows in the VEX 733) and our gate was A15.
The walk to the gate was in hindsight pretty far, however since it was very crowded and because in my opinion the airport had rather small aisles with lots of "turns" and shops and bars where you need to navigate through the walk seemed somewhat less far than the long straight tunnel in Brussels which you have to walk to go from the terminal to the A pier.
Either way, at around 8:50 we had arrived at our gate A15. Just in time to see the plane pulling up to the gate.
Aircraft: OO-VEH Virgin Express Boeing 737-300
Flight: TV503 Lisbon-Brussels
Seat: 23A
Loadfactor: 99%
gate: A15
Boarding commenced at 9:20am and about 9:45 everyone had boarded, but since they were still loading all the bags we only pushed back at 9:50. Which is exactly the planned departure time.
I still took this picture of an Iberia A320 EC-FLG from my seat just before we commenced push back.We took off at 9:59 from runway 3, since I sat on the left side of the plane I didn´t have a view of the airport. But I did take these pictures:
As you know Virgin Express does not offer a free lunch or breakfast. So I had brought my own food (ok it´s far from healthy .. bread with chocolate and water) but good enough for one time
We were flying rather high at FL390 from North Spain and on we only had broken clouds and overcast so except these contrails there wasn´t much to see.
About 2.5hours later we started our descend.
Sorry for the dirty windows.
Brussels Tower can be seen in this picture.
And at 13:47 we touched down. Below a picture I took seconds before touchdown on runway 25R.
We taxxied to gate A48 and before leaving the plane I still took a picture of the cockpit.
I hope you enjoyed one of my first flight reports,
, I love the Classic Boeing 737 . You bought yourself a very unique combination of food, haven't seen this on a aircraft yet 
