edensgarden's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cancellations and tickets and lines! Oh my! So much to say, so little time� I had an interview today. It was just a screening interview, so it was more obligatory than elective. It went well, the principal seemed impressed. I guess I play the chameleon well. I hope that she recommends me to work at the new High School, this would be my ideal job. New is good. ============================================== Montreal � March 17th Your flight has been cancelled. You will need to exit through Canadian Customs, claim your luggage, go up to the flight departure counter and rebook a flight. Of course this also meant that I would have to go through US Customs as well as security again. What an ordeal. Most of the time I take announcements like this with a grain of salt and move on. This day I was not in an adventurous mood, I just wanted to get home to Bethlehem and see my sister and the babies one more time before going home. At the Dorval airport in Montreal, you must jump through a series of hoops and dance a series of dances before you are allowed to board your flight. First hoop, is the standard check in. �Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry any thing? Has your luggage been in your possession since the time you packed it?� Simple enough, �No, yes.� Next it was a goodbye that was fast and forced. I had to go to the gate right away. I was sad to say goodbye to Denise, I know she wanted me to stick around and stay, but I�ve never been one for long farewells so it was good for me, but bad for her. Once behind the ticket counter I found myself in a line � hey everyone was in the line, I figured that I couldn�t go wrong. At the end of the line was a cashier. Apparently you have to pay to get out of Canada � I know what a racket! The girl was snotty and I was so confused. Why was I paying her? Would she take American money? What was all of this for? Next I found myself going through a turnstile. There was another �courteous� airport employee checking my receipt from the snotty cashier girl. I was then shuffled through a gauntlet of green-clad (Happy St. Patrick�s Day) sales people in the Duty Free shop. How convenient for some one. Make all of the people leaving the country walk through the Duty Free shop. It was 7:30 on a Sunday morning; I was not interested in any of it. All of my energy was being used to stay awake and to fend off the impending storm clouds of nausea I felt forming in my stomach. When safely through the Duty Free shop I came up to the US customs line. It was like a line at Disneyland � it just kept going and going. Just when I thought I was going to get ahead in the line, there was another friendly airport employee changing the direction of the line and screaming at everyone in French. Upon answering a bevy of questions: �Where have you been, did you go to Cuba, how much do you have to declare?�; I had to go through security. Of course I couldn�t find my cell phone, so I had to stop and put all of my stuff on the ground so I could search through my purse. I guess this was suspicious, because a guard came up to me and started asking me questions in French. Here is a tip for traveling, when you are in a foreign country, if you greet people in their native tongue they�ll assume that you actually speak their language and commence to speak to you in said language. All I could say after �Bon jour� was �Je ne parlez Fran�ois!� and grin sheepishly. Finally, I�d jumped through all of the hoops and danced all of the dances required to get to my gate. I thought I was home free. Oh how wrong I was. Yes, the flight I was on was cancelled. Good: because it was one of the tiny 3-seats across planes I�d come on and I didn�t want to get on one of those again. Bad: because now my fate was in the hands of the mighty airline gods, and who knew how benevolent they were feeling on this day. Back up in the ticket line, I was surreptitiously working my way to the front of the line, passing the people filling out their new customs forms. This is one of my best talents, cutting in the line so that no one knows that I�ve cut. It�s just one of the many survival skills I picked up in Eastern Europe. During this whole ordeal, I kept reminding my self that the only was I was going to get what I wanted in a timely manner was to kill them with kindness. This is exactly what I did. I spread it on thick and deep. I was so good, and actually felt tears welling up in my eyes! Dang, I need the Oscar for best actress! I was eventually re-routed through Detroit and then home to Bethlehem. Honestly though, I wasn�t too excited to go through Detroit. I had layovers there on my Boston trip last year, and I was not impressed. To my delight and surprise, I landed in the international terminal, which was nice, shiny and new. After a 4 hour layover I was first class bound for Bethlehem. Later I found out that my sister couldn�t find me at the airport when I was supposed to come in. (I guess she didn�t check her messages). She eventually had to call Mother, who called the airline and played the Mom card to find out where in the world I was. My BIL met me at the airport. When he saw me all he said was, �The package has arrived.� Thank goodness, I was home, tres bon -- fin! 4:13 p.m. - April 02, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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