The view from above

I flew back to Austria yesterday to spend a few days with my mother. It was mostly an uneventful journey, which is kind of what you want when flying, but when we descended to land, something pretty amazing to me personally happened.

I always like looking out the window at that point to see all the little houses and trees, and to slowly watch them get bigger, but I'm bad at orientating myself, so I usually can't tell what exactly I'm seeing. However, this time the plane approached the airport in a straight line from northwest to southeast, on a beautiful day with blue skies, and just as the sun was starting to set.

Everything was casting stark shadows and for the first time ever, I could clearly see all of Vienna from the sky, recognising what I was looking at and spotting landmarks everywhere. It was like seeing a perfect 3D map of the place. I didn't know what to look at first, I just kept staring as the plane passed by and before the city itself disappeared from view. It may sound silly, but it was just such a beautiful and awe-inspiring experience, it almost made me cry. I wonder if this is what astronauts feel like from space.