Monday, September 18, 2006

Around the world in 48 hours

The CA trip was on the rocks. It was. Now it's the Rockies. Dinosaurs work with many strings that does wonders. I didn't exactly travel around the world, but well, I crossed the GMT, didn't I?

I did the craziest thing of travelling without any document except the little red book and just one string of 6 characters in this heightened security climate. Problems were expected, I knew it, I just didn't think it would be quite an adventure. Packed in under 2 hours zipped to the airport with no currency, and travelled 4 cities in under 48 hours. By the end of 14 days, I had touched 6 cities.

The carrier served me well with its smooth journey and efficient logistics (isn't it expected considering the flight cost me my salary?), less the crew, which always never fail not to impress. Hey, it takes less than 3 hours to get to SFO! You wish right? But anyhow, I did get there in 3 hours. Middle of the night long transits are the worst. So I waited for about 10 hours to get onto the next flight. Thats where the adventure begins.

I forgot coocoos in an ang moh country are very confused. After taking eons to reach the front of the queue and failing to use the self serve terminal and trying very hard to tell them that I had a problem which needed attention, I was forced to queue again. They couldn't find my name in the system and sent me to an interline in the ADJACENT terminal who proclaimed that I was not on either! The result? A missed flight.

I returned with a black face, after a long transit, sleepless night, growling stomach and a missed flight. They managed to put me on a direct flight instead of a transit, that's good news, right? Right, the missed flight set me back by an hour on a direct flight. Wrong. The agent had mistakened 7pm for 7am. What I really needed was the NEXT available flight, not another 12 hours waiting time! Our flights were changed but I wasn't convinced she managed to make the correction for the checked in baggage. I asked and I checked, but there's really nothing I couldn't have done to prevent the 3 baggages which did not arrive when I did.

Anyhow, all is not lost for I received news of my belongings 24 hours later. But hey I tell you, you don't want to ever lose your luggage. Trust me.

Posted by LiTTle-FooT at 1:46 AM with 0 comments