Tuesday, June 25
It's been such a long day i'm not even sure i can remember it all. It's only 5:00pm, but since we woke up at 6:00am, that means we've been up for 18 hours. Wait, really? Is that right? I'm not even tired.
Woke up in Budapest, took a shower, got some breakfast, then shuttle to the airport. Checked in without problems, saw a guy bringing in two plastic-wrapped bicycles as his checked luggage. They gave us our boarding passes for our connecting flight right away also, so that would make things much easier when we got to Warsaw.
The first flight was just a little bit late getting into Warsaw. We still had almost 45 minutes to get through a minimal amount of security, since we were going from gate to gate, but the size of the line started to worry Amanda a little. She needn't have; we were through with plenty of time to spare.
Then the delays started coming in. First of all, we thought the plane was leaving Warsaw at 11:45; that turned out to be when boarding started, to leave at noon. As we sat at the gate, we kept not getting on the plane, and the departure time crawled up by five minutes, every five minutes. 12:10, 12:15, 12:20, 12:25, as each threshold was crossed, each deadline missed.
In the meantime, i went looking for a bathroom, some booze, and sandwiches. The nearest bathroom that i could find was halfway back through the terminal and down a flight of stairs, conveniently next to the duty-free shop.
I asked the shopkeep what kind of liquor best represents Poland. I mean, Russia has vodka, Germany has beer, America has weaker beer, Ireland has whiskey...i don't know what Poland drinks. He consulted with his cohort briefly, and then led me to a shelf where he pulled a bottle of Frederic Chopin Vodka. Hey, i was at that guy's grave recently! I bought two.
Returning to the gate, i informed Amanda of the less than ideal proximity of the bathroom, and then presented her with two sandwiches, a ham and cheese (which i expected her to choose) and a salmon. I predicted correctly, but she opted not to eat until we were on the plane. At this point, we were still waiting for the original boarding time to come through, and it was getting close; she thought she should just wait for the bathroom, also, until we were aboard.
As time ticked by, she began lamenting that she hadn't chosen to go for the bathroom yet. Eventually, she said fuck it, going, and got up to do it. At that exact moment, they started letting people into the plane. It was almost 12:30.
She decided to go anyway; after all, there were so many people to load, she'd surely have time to take a quick pee before everybody had embarked. I continued to sit in our chairs, rather than lining up; no real point if we were already resigned to being last in line. As the herd thinned, i gathered up our things and casually meandered in, holding Amanda's backpack in a free hand. She came back moments later, and informed me that she had not actually used the restroom.
Her story goes like this: after finally finding the ill-marked head, she entered to find only two stalls, both occupied by shitting women. They obviously knew each other, and were chatting back and forth between turd splashes.
There was no way she was waiting around for that.
It was at this exact moment that i noticed a restroom practically next to where we were standing, at the end of the line, right there by our very gate. Of course. So she handed her stuff back to me and went for it, and ended up being very glad she did.
And then we sat in the plane for over an hour without taking off. Information on exactly what the holdup was didn't come, but it was mentioned at one point that the entertainment system was down, and they were expecting twenty minutes to fix it. Annoying, as we'd like to get going, but we also wanted that entertainment system, especially since our original flight from Chicago to Dublin was having the same woe. We'd loved the system on our New Zealand flights five years ago, and this was the exact same system.
It was just before 2:00 when we finally lifted off, but the pilots were confident that we'd still make our 3:20pm arrival in Chicago.
They did get the system fixed. I whiled away the ten hours of our flight first by playing their simple little video games; Tetris until the controller's occasional crapping out and frequent interruptions for important flight announcements irritated me too much to continue; then Battleship until i had figured out the computer's strategy and was able to beat it without it sinking a single one of my ships...five games in a row; then a casino simulator, which i won before even reaching the final casino. Then i checked out their selection of television shows. Only one episode each of about a dozen shows, most of which were uninteresting crap, but i finally viewed the pilots for both 2 Broke Girls and New Girl, which i've been hearing a lot about lately. New Girl is absolutely hilarious; 2 Broke Girls is alright. Then the movies: Crazy Stupid Love (or some such, can't remember the exact title...Steve Carrell, Emma Stone, Julianne Moore, and Ryan Gosling...and funny as hell), and was working on The Informant! before the system shut down as we neared Chicago, thus ending the most boring paragraph of my whole vacation log, because in five years even i'm not going to care what i watched on the plane and you probably don't now.
The customs line for US Passport holders had easily 300 people ahead of us in line. We waited in it for a while, and then got to cut out of line to use a new, experimental customs practice: self-check-ins. Seriously! There was a woman who, every time enough terminals would clear, would come up to the line and shout, “Does anybody want to give these a try?” They're clearly brand-new. So we gave them a try. I mostly wanted to just so that one day i can say that i used them before they were an actual thing, because i'm a technology hipster.
So you just stick your passport in, it imports the data off of a scan it takes from it, then it takes your picture, you use the touch screen to answer the same questions that have always been on the page you have to fill out before landing in the US, and then it prints you a receipt with that information and your new mugshot on it, which you take to the next station. They check it out, ask you some simple questions, stamp it, and you move on to the next, where they just take it and you go free. So efficient! And i don't feel like i'm being looked at like a criminal by every anal-probing border patrol agent that lays eyes on me.
Well, that's it. Alyssa picked us up at the airport and we're on I-90 someplace in Illinois right at the moment. The vacation is over, and now it's time to move back into real life and get back to our daily schedules, until we can afford to retire fat and happy at 30 and globetrot as a profession.
So i guess i'm done waxing loquacious about all of this now. Unless i decide to write an epilogue.
No comments:
Post a Comment