Already two months have passed since I first
arrived to my temporary Slovak home, where I will live and work as an English
teacher until July 2014. Every day of these past two months I have woken
up announcing to myself, "TODAY is the day I begin my blog!" As
is often the case with me, procrastination mixed with a dread of starting
something for fear of failing took control and the blog was never--until this
day!-- started. After lying to myself consecutively for 52 days, I am
finally in the right frame of mind to begin. And, as is often the case
with anything new, doing it the first time is the hardest part.
I have Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to
Arms to thank for this sudden burst of motivation, as it was while
reading the following quote this morning that I was overwhelmingly inspired to
start this project.
"It was a long time since I had written to the States and I knew I should write but I had let it go so long that it was almost impossible to write now. There was nothing to write about."
Panic struck when I read this, realizing that if I
didn't just do it-- write something, anything-- I would
let this procrastination game continue all year until there was essentially no
reason to begin at all. At this point, despite having experienced two
months of newness in this country, it is a struggle to know where to begin and
what to write about.
I suppose I will just begin at the very beginning—a
very good place to start, non?
The following was written on September 1, 2013 in
collaboration with Lauren Brown, my darling friend who was kind enough to
accompany me to Slovakia in August. It describes the multi-day saga that
transpired in our attempt to get here from the U.S.
Saturday, August 24th
An adventurous day of travel awaits! Our game plan
is to get to San Francisco, then take the direct flight to Paris, where we will
stay with Anaïs's uncle and take a cheap, direct flight the Bratislava from
there. We happily make our respective ways from Denver and Seattle to our
rendezvous in San Fran. Anais spends a lovely afternoon layover with
Brandon in the city and everything really does seem well and good until we are
completely denied seats on the flight to Paris. This is were we begin to get a
taste for the icky-ness of checked luggage combined with flying stand-by
internationally. The bags are left at the airport to fend for themselves
overnight and Brandon swifts us away from SFO to his father's house in
Livermore. Anais and Brandon attend a large 50th-birthday fiesta where she is
introduced to his family for the first time. They dance and eat while Lauren
sleeps like a dead thing for a while and then later steals a can of tuna, which
she eats from the can.
Sunday, August 25th
Early morning start for the three of us, though it
will later prove to be not quite early enough… Back to SFO to attempt a new
strategy: San Fran to Newark to Paris. Our luggage is found, checked to Newark
because checking all the way through to Paris is a no-no, an expensive airport
breakfast is eaten, and we are promptly bumped off the flight to Newark. This
little upset is quickly overturned by our triumphant seat assignments on the
next flight to Jersey. We feel ecstatic, giddy, hopeful, like things are going
more or less according to plan. Flying stand-by, small successes are amplified
due to the frustration that clouds proper emotional reaction.
We arrive in Newark in time for the last flight to
Paris and lo and behold, there are a ton of seats left a few hours before take
off! But wait, now the number is shrinking. And look! There is only ONE open
seat left after the plane is boarded. The ticket agent informs us that there
was plenty of room on the flight to Paris earlier that day, but we had not
arrived in NJ in time to catch it. If we had gotten our butts out of bed a bit
earlier we would have made it. Ugh. Out of nowhere a United employee steps up
to the gate and puts himself on the standby list a head of us. I glare. Some
passengers are late for the flight and it looks as if they won't make it...
until they come sauntering up to the gate at the very last second. Our emotions
are being played with.
In the end there is no space for two tired young
ladies or that other guy ahead of us on the list, and we face (with fatigued
horror) 24 hours in the kinda nasty Newark airport. And this is where
that United employee turns out to be our Jersey guardian angel. Seeing how
distraught we are about our situation, he invites us to spend the night at his
place. Or, more specifically, to "go the city and have a good time".
He is gay. And he has braces. So this isn't at all creepy. After some weighing
of our options we decide to take this beautiful boy up on his offer.
Monday, August 26th
His name is Sami, age 22, from Morocco, and he
loves being a flight attendant because it has always been his dream job. We
ride the employee shuttle to the parking lot twice because the first time we go
he forgets to bring his car keys. He lives only a hop, skip, and a jump away
from the airport, so we are back at his apartment in no time. We decide to stay
in and get some good sleep in his roommate's comfy bed. We take hot showers in
the morning and then take Sami out to lunch at a cute little lunch spot in
downtown Newark. He graciously drives us to the airport and we say our
good-byes to Angel Sami.
Back in the airport-hell, we lounge about for a
good three hours until the first Paris flight. We are jaw-drop shocked when the
flight fills up AGAIN and we are left at the gate to watch the plane take off
without us. Fortunately, there is a very helpful ticket agent present with a
sunny yellow tie who explains the situation to us and advises us to avoid the
next flight to Paris because "it doesn't look good". It is clear now
that we really just need to get to Europe and our Paris plan may have to be
abandoned.
Here's the problem: we can decide to give it a go
and see what happens on the next Paris flight which "doesn't look
good", we CANNOT try the Frankfurt flight which is wide open because it is
too close to departure time and the airline is not allowed to transfer baggage
from one plane to another if they are destined for different countries (so says
the helpful, friendly ticket agent who we trust at this moment). So it seems
the best thing to do is fly to Edinburgh for two reasons: 1. we have time to go
pick up our luggage and check it back through to the Edinburgh flight and 2.
there are cheap-ish flights from Edinburgh to Bratislava. So we do it. We go to
Baggage Claim and request our bags, which, as we have been told before, can
take up to 3 hours to receive.
The lady as the baggage center is cranky. She
doesn't understand what we are saying. She asks about the "Brown
bags" referring to Lauren's bags and questions whether the "Brown
bags are black" which leads Lauren to describe the bags in question as
being brown although they are actually black and everyone gets quite confused.
Anais saves the situation with her teacher voice, sternly (and with a tinge of
sass that rivals that of the woman at the counter) re-explaining the situation
from the beginning, gaining some respect from the United Worker and reaffirming
ourselves as apt travelers rather than two idiot twenty-something girls who
don't know the difference between black and brown. We are told to wait at Carousel
#9. We wait for over two hours, by which time we should be checking back in for
our Edinburgh flight.
Anais decides that it is best to go bug the baggage
claim costumer service in order to avoid missing yet another flight. As it
turns out, the bags were waiting for us in the baggage claim consumer service
office for a good portion of that two-hour wait. And on top of the frustration
of this new miscommunication, one of her bags has been lost. And on top
of THAT frustration, when asking the cranky worker if the lost bag can just be
re-routed to Edinburgh, she asks, "Why didn't you just tell me that you
were going there in the first place?" That way, she could have
simply re-routed all four bags two hours ago and we wouldn't have had to wait
for them (not to mention that the bag surely would NOT have been lost).
We decide it is not worth explaining to her that a previous employee had
told us that re-routing bags internationally is not possible and that we were
required to re-claim them. We have no patience left for trying to understand
the obscure and inconsistent workings of the airport. Anais runs as best she
can with two backpacks and a roller suitcase back to Carrousel #9 and retrieves
Lauren. We race back upstairs to the Edinburgh check in, check our
remaining bags to the flight (which we will kick ourselves for later), go
through security for the fifth time in two days, and make our way to the gate.
Here's where things get really interesting.
As we trudge up to the Edinburgh gate, which
naturally has to be at the very end of the terminal, we experience a small
success--something we haven't tasted in quite some time-- seats on a plane!!!
The woman at the counter hands us our boarding passes for the flight and
we shriek with delight. Everything seems to be going okay now. This
was our last chance to get out of the country today and we made it!
Lauren goes to get a quick bite to eat to celebrate this victory and
Anais sits down with momentarily relief at the gate. Upon checking her
text messages, she notices that her mother wished her a bon voyage just moments
before we received our tickets. She's momentarily impressed with her
mother's ability to check the flight status and view the stand-by list online.
She quickly reassesses the situation and remembers her mother's sheer
lack of computer skills. Anais proceeds to call her mother, who explains
that the computer system is showing both Lauren and Anais as having confirmed
seats on the Paris flight, which is currently boarding just across from the
Edinburgh gate. Confusion, panic, then a suitcase-weighed sprint
ensues.
We pull up to the Paris gate as they say, "Last call for Brown, party of two" on the loudspeaker. We
announce our presence with winded affirmation, the ticketing agent hands us
two seats to Paris, and we stare at each other blankly as our bodies pause and
our brains process which emotion is appropriate to express at this moment.
After that moment passes we desperately explain to the ticket agent (the
same one who saw us miss the flight the night before) that we (at the
recommendation of his colleague with the sunny yellow tie) completely abandoned
going to Paris and went for Edinburgh. As the other passengers continue
to board, he tells us that in this case he has to give our tickets to the next
stand-by passengers. We are deflated. We stand at the counter in
exasperated silence that this man must feel. A moment later, he tells us to
wait near the desk. He may be able to do something. We are elated!
Next, he asks about our luggage. We tell him that
we checked it for Edinburgh. That blows our chances, and he tells us it
won't work after all. "You should have just brought your bags
carry-on", he says. We are deflated again. We don't even have the
energy to defend ourselves for our seeming stupidity to explain that it isn't
feasible to bring only carry-on luggage when moving to Europe for a year.
He explains the situation to his yellow-tied colleague who, perhaps out of
guilt for having told us this morning that we had no chance of getting on this
Paris flight, gets on his walkie-talkie to speak to the luggage workers on the
Edinburgh flight. He announces (bless his heart), "I'm going to do
this!" We are elated again as he confirms with the worker at the end of
the walkie-talkie that they have located our bags and are putting them on the
flight to Paris.
He peeks over his colleague's shoulder with a sense of momentary success
until he looks at the computer screen and gasps, "Wait--where are
they?" "I took them off the list already," the other replies.
"WHY?" Oh God-we have been denied. We are deflated again. And left
deflated. Solemnly, we shuffle back to the Edinburgh gate with heads bowed in
defeat. But the gloom passes quickly as we realize that we are not in such a
bad position. Neither of us has been to Scotland before and either way, we will
make it to Slovakia eventually!
