The title says it all. 4:45pm Saturday afternoon (airport announcement this very moment, so that's chronologically unchallengable). I'm sitting on a toilet at Miami airport. There is a handicapped guy in the stall next to me that sounds like a combination of Hodor and crunk. I'm on the brink of collapse from fatigue. I'm sore. I'm tired. My insides are only barely that. My throat hurts. How did this happen?
Rewind 24 hours.....
So I've begun the journey back to Miami. But all is not well.... there is slight tickle in the background of my throat and a slightly rumble in my stomach. Or perhaps further down. Then the first painful spasm hits me. Oh gawd, what on earth? It can't be the food, surely? I ate everything offered to me for ten days, why now? Suddenly I realize, I've been eating festival food. And all the festival food stalls had been instructed to only use bottled water in cooking processes. That restriction didn't apply to the last three days. And I've been eating street vendor food. Oh... Dear. The gravity (sic) of the situation hits me. Stuck on an eight hour flight with food poisoning and an increasingly sore throat? It's every bit as horrific as you're imagining. Oh and the cabin is too cold, but the stewardess refuses to find me a second blanket despite the first barely covering my legs, and won't turn the aircon down. Not sure which was worse. At least I kept my bodily eruptions below the belt. Small mercy, but I had enough willpower and the thought of throwing up on the plane.... Yeah.. No. Somehow I sweat, shit, cough and micro-nap my way to Miami. 5pm or so touchdown.
A hurried exit and another trip to el banos, and I was ready for customs. Turns out however that Customs wasn't ready for me.
Or for the other 3000 backed up travellers. This is not an exaggeration. We were put into a line and forced to stand in it with barely an explanation for 3 hours. Three fucking hours. What made it even more unbearable was the there were two queues, one for citizens and one for visitors, and the citizens line progressed at a rate of knots, while we were at a standstill. . 25 counters... 14 dedicated to locals. 5 to visitors. Even though there were more of us. I passed the time conversing with a girl called Nadja, who was on her way to Barbados to continue her biological science degree. We coped by planning various ways we could pretend to be crippled to jump the queue like so many wheelchair-bound slackers who had been passing us. She even offered to break my leg and be my wheelchair escort. Eventually we settled on stapling ourselves together and pretending to be conjoined twins. The American Airlines staff kept announcing nothing except to tell us to get out of the way of citizens, and calling everyone "my friends". That hurt. As if to punctuate the futility, the speaker announcement would sound off every 15 minutes.
"Welcome to Miami. The time is now 8:45pm. You have been stationary for no reason for 3 hours and 45 minutes. You will lose the will to live in 15 minutes. Staff will be happy to replace this with the urge to kill."
We finally (in every sense) made it through customs. I wanted to continue the dialogue with my new friend, but was ushered into the clusterfuck that was the baggage collection area before she was cleared, and I never saw her again.
Clusterfuck is appropriate... 8 baggage rotisseries, each with roughly 1/8 of 6000 items of luggage waiting for their owners. It was like baggage graveyard, and no indication of what carriage had carried what flight's stuff. 30 minutes exploring that, but I found my luggage, and mercifully the last few remaining braincells belonging to AA staff banded together and ushered everyone through without the usual scanning routine. Small mercy though.
Step 1. Exchange my currency. Oh look, the currency exchange is closed. Ok. Be sensible, find the information desk and ask. Ah there it is. Oh look... also closed. Hmm. Ok. Oh, an info phone, pick it up for help! Except that's a lie, it's "pick it up until you get sick of being on hold (approx 15 minutes) "Ok, don't panic. Find a security guard and ask. Ah, all the open stuff is upstairs in departures, just where all these lost souls need it. Ugh.
Ok, I have local currency. Now I need a hotel. I have a smartphone, surely all this tech can help me? For once I'm right. But free Internet at an airport? Au. contraire. Oh well, fuck it. 4 bucks for 30 minutes. 28 minutes later I'm booked into a hotel for the night, 20 minutes from the airport with a free shuttle. My years of being a geek pulled me through on this one. Of course we got spat out at concourse e because of the bullshit, and the shuttle was waiting at concourse d. Not a small walk if you know Miami airport, and the pedestrian path is closed, so I have 10 minutes to navigate a path worthy of Escher.
So it's ten thirty, and I'm on my way to the hotel. The connecting flight leaves at 7:25, so I have to be at the airport at 5ish. Fine. Means a taxi since the shuttle doesn't start until 6am, but honestly I don't give a fuck. Check in, get to the room, and I get 4 hours sleep. I also leave too early for my complimentary breakfast, but I can barely drink water without hitting bathroom with stomach cramps 10 minutes later, so it's no great loss. 88 bucks for 4 hours in my first bed sleep in 10 days? Bargain.
No drama getting to the 'port. No, my dear readers. The trouble comes inside the airport.
A little back story. American Airlines is currently under bankruptcy protection. So what little staff are left really don't seem to give a flying rat's left testicle about the customers.
The queues for check in are horrendous. Only 4 staff checking in the entire domestic department of AA. I get directed to wait in a line. 45 minutes. At the end of this line is get told I am in the wrong queue. The nasty bitch at the desk made it seem like it was my fault. Great. Directed to the correct queue. Chatting with everyone for the 2 hours that I was in that line. General concensus is that none of us have been treated so badly by an airline before. I arrived at the check in counter. "I'm sorry sir, luggage check in for this flight closed ten minutes ago." In a tone that of course implied heavily that it was my fault for not being there at 3. You could hear my muscles twitching. My options? Waiting list for the 3pm flight. Great. Off goes my luggage, and off I go to find a breakfast that I might be able to hold down, and ponder how to spend the next 8 hours.
The airport hotel restaurant seemed a likely place for inoffensive food, plus on the seventh floor, offering a perfectly timed arrival to take photos of the sunrise over the airport. Might as well make the best of it. The eggs Benedict stayed down, and the fresh orange juice was like mana from the gods. I had three glasses of that. But the food was salty on an epic level. Including the egg yolk - are they genetically inserting the sodium gene into chickens these days? Sure seems like it. Still, it didn't cause cramps, and stayed down. Still forcibly ejecting, but the pain is gone. The coughing remains. Luckily I'd had the foresight to get some lozenges at Salvador airport before I left.
So, what to make of my day? I'd spent much of my down time at the festival reading and finishing A Game Of Thrones, so I might as well take advantage of the USA economy and find the next book. Shopping time. Walked the length of the airport looking for the Borders that was referenced on the map.... until I realized that they'd closed down in airports. Silly me. The replacement store had even kept the old fixtures and colour schemes. So I wandered and found my book. Wait, 9 bucks each? Wow, the gst really fucked the Australian book industry over. Bought all four paperbacks. Couldn't resist.
Next is decided to enjoy some of the wonderfully unfree Internet that was on offer. 8 bucks for 24 hours. Good enough for me.
I get to catch up on all the video game news, movie news, other news. Bitch about my experiences on facebook. Check the bank. Work out how to get to the hotel when I finally reach Vegas. All worthy pursuits, and it kills time until the airport bar opens. At this point it's 11am, and I'm past exhausted. So I break my fast and have coffee, despite my self imposed ban. Ah well. Two won't hurt.
I do some more browsing, and before I know it, it's 12:30, leaving me with the 90 minutes I allowed myself to clear the security check and get to the gate. Surprisingly it took half an hour, no more, and so I arrive at the gate one hour ahead of schedule......yay? No.
Stay Tuned - Part two follows almost immediately.
Rewind 24 hours.....
So I've begun the journey back to Miami. But all is not well.... there is slight tickle in the background of my throat and a slightly rumble in my stomach. Or perhaps further down. Then the first painful spasm hits me. Oh gawd, what on earth? It can't be the food, surely? I ate everything offered to me for ten days, why now? Suddenly I realize, I've been eating festival food. And all the festival food stalls had been instructed to only use bottled water in cooking processes. That restriction didn't apply to the last three days. And I've been eating street vendor food. Oh... Dear. The gravity (sic) of the situation hits me. Stuck on an eight hour flight with food poisoning and an increasingly sore throat? It's every bit as horrific as you're imagining. Oh and the cabin is too cold, but the stewardess refuses to find me a second blanket despite the first barely covering my legs, and won't turn the aircon down. Not sure which was worse. At least I kept my bodily eruptions below the belt. Small mercy, but I had enough willpower and the thought of throwing up on the plane.... Yeah.. No. Somehow I sweat, shit, cough and micro-nap my way to Miami. 5pm or so touchdown.
A hurried exit and another trip to el banos, and I was ready for customs. Turns out however that Customs wasn't ready for me.
Or for the other 3000 backed up travellers. This is not an exaggeration. We were put into a line and forced to stand in it with barely an explanation for 3 hours. Three fucking hours. What made it even more unbearable was the there were two queues, one for citizens and one for visitors, and the citizens line progressed at a rate of knots, while we were at a standstill. . 25 counters... 14 dedicated to locals. 5 to visitors. Even though there were more of us. I passed the time conversing with a girl called Nadja, who was on her way to Barbados to continue her biological science degree. We coped by planning various ways we could pretend to be crippled to jump the queue like so many wheelchair-bound slackers who had been passing us. She even offered to break my leg and be my wheelchair escort. Eventually we settled on stapling ourselves together and pretending to be conjoined twins. The American Airlines staff kept announcing nothing except to tell us to get out of the way of citizens, and calling everyone "my friends". That hurt. As if to punctuate the futility, the speaker announcement would sound off every 15 minutes.
"Welcome to Miami. The time is now 8:45pm. You have been stationary for no reason for 3 hours and 45 minutes. You will lose the will to live in 15 minutes. Staff will be happy to replace this with the urge to kill."
We finally (in every sense) made it through customs. I wanted to continue the dialogue with my new friend, but was ushered into the clusterfuck that was the baggage collection area before she was cleared, and I never saw her again.
Clusterfuck is appropriate... 8 baggage rotisseries, each with roughly 1/8 of 6000 items of luggage waiting for their owners. It was like baggage graveyard, and no indication of what carriage had carried what flight's stuff. 30 minutes exploring that, but I found my luggage, and mercifully the last few remaining braincells belonging to AA staff banded together and ushered everyone through without the usual scanning routine. Small mercy though.
Step 1. Exchange my currency. Oh look, the currency exchange is closed. Ok. Be sensible, find the information desk and ask. Ah there it is. Oh look... also closed. Hmm. Ok. Oh, an info phone, pick it up for help! Except that's a lie, it's "pick it up until you get sick of being on hold (approx 15 minutes) "Ok, don't panic. Find a security guard and ask. Ah, all the open stuff is upstairs in departures, just where all these lost souls need it. Ugh.
Ok, I have local currency. Now I need a hotel. I have a smartphone, surely all this tech can help me? For once I'm right. But free Internet at an airport? Au. contraire. Oh well, fuck it. 4 bucks for 30 minutes. 28 minutes later I'm booked into a hotel for the night, 20 minutes from the airport with a free shuttle. My years of being a geek pulled me through on this one. Of course we got spat out at concourse e because of the bullshit, and the shuttle was waiting at concourse d. Not a small walk if you know Miami airport, and the pedestrian path is closed, so I have 10 minutes to navigate a path worthy of Escher.
So it's ten thirty, and I'm on my way to the hotel. The connecting flight leaves at 7:25, so I have to be at the airport at 5ish. Fine. Means a taxi since the shuttle doesn't start until 6am, but honestly I don't give a fuck. Check in, get to the room, and I get 4 hours sleep. I also leave too early for my complimentary breakfast, but I can barely drink water without hitting bathroom with stomach cramps 10 minutes later, so it's no great loss. 88 bucks for 4 hours in my first bed sleep in 10 days? Bargain.
No drama getting to the 'port. No, my dear readers. The trouble comes inside the airport.
A little back story. American Airlines is currently under bankruptcy protection. So what little staff are left really don't seem to give a flying rat's left testicle about the customers.
The queues for check in are horrendous. Only 4 staff checking in the entire domestic department of AA. I get directed to wait in a line. 45 minutes. At the end of this line is get told I am in the wrong queue. The nasty bitch at the desk made it seem like it was my fault. Great. Directed to the correct queue. Chatting with everyone for the 2 hours that I was in that line. General concensus is that none of us have been treated so badly by an airline before. I arrived at the check in counter. "I'm sorry sir, luggage check in for this flight closed ten minutes ago." In a tone that of course implied heavily that it was my fault for not being there at 3. You could hear my muscles twitching. My options? Waiting list for the 3pm flight. Great. Off goes my luggage, and off I go to find a breakfast that I might be able to hold down, and ponder how to spend the next 8 hours.
The airport hotel restaurant seemed a likely place for inoffensive food, plus on the seventh floor, offering a perfectly timed arrival to take photos of the sunrise over the airport. Might as well make the best of it. The eggs Benedict stayed down, and the fresh orange juice was like mana from the gods. I had three glasses of that. But the food was salty on an epic level. Including the egg yolk - are they genetically inserting the sodium gene into chickens these days? Sure seems like it. Still, it didn't cause cramps, and stayed down. Still forcibly ejecting, but the pain is gone. The coughing remains. Luckily I'd had the foresight to get some lozenges at Salvador airport before I left.
So, what to make of my day? I'd spent much of my down time at the festival reading and finishing A Game Of Thrones, so I might as well take advantage of the USA economy and find the next book. Shopping time. Walked the length of the airport looking for the Borders that was referenced on the map.... until I realized that they'd closed down in airports. Silly me. The replacement store had even kept the old fixtures and colour schemes. So I wandered and found my book. Wait, 9 bucks each? Wow, the gst really fucked the Australian book industry over. Bought all four paperbacks. Couldn't resist.
Next is decided to enjoy some of the wonderfully unfree Internet that was on offer. 8 bucks for 24 hours. Good enough for me.
I get to catch up on all the video game news, movie news, other news. Bitch about my experiences on facebook. Check the bank. Work out how to get to the hotel when I finally reach Vegas. All worthy pursuits, and it kills time until the airport bar opens. At this point it's 11am, and I'm past exhausted. So I break my fast and have coffee, despite my self imposed ban. Ah well. Two won't hurt.
I do some more browsing, and before I know it, it's 12:30, leaving me with the 90 minutes I allowed myself to clear the security check and get to the gate. Surprisingly it took half an hour, no more, and so I arrive at the gate one hour ahead of schedule......yay? No.
Stay Tuned - Part two follows almost immediately.
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