The Long Goodbye - By Eric D'Angelo
I have always enjoyed airports. They embody the physical representation of passage between two places. The feeling of the impending conclusion of one journey and the beginning of another is the appeal of an airport, because in an airport you are neither here nor there. It’s a nowhere. You don’t truly feel like you are located in a country while in an airport. It is more of a vague in-between that allows travel through countries, cultures, and societies. And as an in-between, I don’t think that being in an airport means that you visited that country, but that is just my personal opinion.
Aside from all of that aforementioned nonsense, airports can also be a great place to watch strangers as they struggle through their difficult transitions between destinations, hurrying from place and place, all with different intentions, backgrounds, goals, and varying levels of frustration. And sometimes they look weird too.
I have not traveled very much in my life, so my experiences in airports usually consist of flying to cities across the United States. My strangest airport stories came not from large, bustling airports in cities (the ones with delays and pushing and many people who haven’t seen a shower in days), but from small, local airports in foreign countries. This experience was so different. So very different. We expected to leave Russia on August 6. It was our last day, and what a crazy ride we had! How many things we saw, and people we met, and strange foods we ate! But I was ready to leave, because I was burnt out, and home called.
It begins. I will now switch into present tense. Our flight is scheduled for 12:50 a.m., and we leave the dormitory early in the morning. I think it was 7:00, but I don’t remember for sure. We arrived at the airport (Domodedovo) not long after, and begin moving the luggage through the main lobby. We wait for a little while until we are able to check in our luggage. Luckily, I have only one flight to catch. Others are not as lucky, and must get their luggage passed through United Airlines to their connecting flight in the U.S. For those without a connecting flight on United, the airline refuses to transfer their luggage, which means they must pick up their bags in DC and check in on to another flight. More money. More time. More hassle. But not for me! So a friend and I start to leave the check in area when we see that another of our friends appears to be suffering greatly. I’ll call him/her “Jones.” So I pick up Jones’s bag and we continue on.
We get to the gate and Jones is continuing to struggle, and eventually we have to call our program director and speak to the doctors at the airport. The first “doctor” we speak to takes his/her temperature and determines that it is too high for Jones to get on the plane. Meanwhile I am talking to Jones’s parent, and updating this strange turn of events. Doctor number two arrives and decides that as long as Jones can take some pills and say that he/she wants to ride the plane, then he/she can ride the plane. Jones says he/she is barely conscious at this point, but agrees to ride on the plane. So we wait while they get the plane ready for boarding. Eventually word comes out that the pilot himself has decided that Jones cannot ride the airplane. We continue to talk to the doctors and our director about getting Jones to a European hospital, and finally he/she is whisked (not whisked) away for the healthcare staffers.
My friend and I continue to sit in a holding area while the plane is supposedly being readied. By now the flight has been delayed by two hours and will leave at 2:50. We are told to leave the room and wait with the rest of the passengers. After waiting for another hour we are told the flight has been cancelled. The plane is missing a part. Confusion takes over. The group gathers itself and we head back to a room in which they slowly renew our visas so that we can stay in Russia for anther day. THANK GOD. Once we get our visas renewed we go back to the lobby together and sit around for at least 3 hours while we get tickets for confirmation for our flight tomorrow, tags for our baggage return, and passes to get to a hotel nearby. But as we are about to leave, another friend reveals that he cannot find his stow-away bag (a.k.a. the big one with most of the important stuff inside). While he and two other people talk to the police I casually watch their bags and dream of kittens and fresh air. Then we take a bus to our hotel, which is less than 100 yards from the airport, and the food is average at best.
The process is much the same as before, and the flight is the same time as well. This time the line for baggage check-in lasts at least 3 hours because supposedly the printer that prints the tickets is malfunctioning. After the line we go through customs and security again and scurry up to the gate. Apparently the gate listed on our ticket is not the one from which the plane leaves, so as we get ready to walk to the new gate group members that were already at the gate run up to us to say that the flight has been delayed again and will most likely not depart. Now I am slightly the angriest I have even been almost but seriously. After arguing with the flight attendants for a little while we give up to go back and get our passports renewed again. At this point I hear the as of yet unconfirmed rumor that the still-missing piece of the plane that cannot get through customs was held up because the officials want a bribe. Classy AND believable. The best. We also find out that the plane is not even close to the gate, so we were passed through baggage check, customs and security, and sent to the gate for a plane that had virtually no chance of making it to the gate.
Again we spend the next few hours trying to claim baggage and get flights on a new airline. Many of us go to sleep on the floor and are told to move. Then we fall asleep a few feet from where we were before, and then we dance. And it’s caught on video, and subsequently loaded to facebook! Huzzah!
We get a flight on British Airways to Heathrow airport in London, and from there on Virgin Atlantic to DC. I’m fairly jacked, except for the fact that the flight is at 5:45 a.m. So there’s that. But our second night at the hotel is fun, and by fun I mean that it is pretty awful. So we eat their “food” and I talk with my roommates and get two hours of sleep before we get up.
I have airport pizza at four in the morning, which is something I can say with confidence I didn’t think I would ever accomplish. Check one off the ol’ bucket list. So I sit behind a potted plant in a corner and listen to my music until we board the plane. Wait…WE BOARD THE PLANE. So this is one of the greatest moments of my life after my wedding day and the birth of my children. And I watch the Avengers on the plane until I fall asleep on the tray table and wake-up to the plane landing in London.
It turns out that Heathrow is kind of lame, and we don’t get to see any Olympic athletes despite being in London during the Olympics. Also, the airport does not have free wifi, and the security and customs people break one of the souvenirs I bought because they were suspicious of my multiple matroshka dolls. And I eat at a place called “Eat.” Humor? Irony? England?
Our flight is seven and a half hours long, and I watch four movies. I can’t remember which movies though…The flight was nice, and eight fellow group members were given tickets in first class, which is pretty awesome.
I again arrive in DC to great fanfare and hooplah-ing. We pass through customs and say goodbye. It is sad, truly, because I don’t know when, if ever, I will see some of these people again. And some of them have really become great friends.
The ride back to Cleveland was anticlimactic. There were so many emotions and I kept them all in, but they were certainly churning in my head. I could go on for pages describing what it was like to leave some of these people, but I won’t subject you, or myself to that. Hopefully you caught some of that feeling in the previous posts. This trip meant a great deal to me, and it changed a lot of perceptions I had of the outside world and of myself. To leave all those experiences behind was quite the whirlwind, and a study in personal psychology. But all things must end, and, good or bad, my study abroad to Russia taught me the most about myself. I learned that I nothing is for certain, and that the chance to change your path always exists. But it’s the path I take right now that means the most, and I go forth to find it
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