L drove me to the airport and waited while I discovered that my flight from Chicago to New York was cancelled. The desk people said I wouldn't make my flight from JFK to Tel Aviv and they waited until the El Al people in New York woke up in order to call them and try to put me on a later flight. They said the later flight had room only in higher class seats so they wouldn't confirm me on it, but the El Al lady said if I could make it to JFK in time, they'd put me on that flight. So they tried to route me from Wichita to Chicago, Chicago to Raleigh, Raleigh to JFK, and all in time to get there over an hour before the flight from JFK to Tel Aviv. Of course that's not enough time to clear El Al's security so they said they were able to check my bag only as far as New York, so I'd have to take it out and check in again, which would have been impossible in that short a time frame. What they did is mark the bag "priority" and seat me in row 3 on a bulkhead seat so I'd be the first to exit the plane and sprint to get my back. Then they apologized for not being able to do any more. By this time I'd said my goodbyes to L, so nobody knew where I was going, not even me.
Of course New York was snowed in so that flight was cancelled as well, which I discovered only when I landed in Raleigh. I spent two hours in Chicago waiting for my flight to Raleigh and playing on my computer while it recharged. Lucky there was no time difference or I might not have noticed. The flights within the US were tiny, cramped little buses. I hit my head on the ceiling of the first one and the second was packed to capacity. In Raleigh I had to go to a desk there too, which was set up at one of the gates, and ask them what to do now that my backup flight was also cancelled. It was all very ad-hoc; I'm surprised that they never plan for anything to do with the passengers of these cancelled flights until they show up and demand to get somewhere. I told them I don't care about going through New York, I just wanted to get to Israel. So they tried to get me on a plane to London Heathrow and from there to Tel Aviv with their partner British Airways, and went over to another desk to check my bags before the cutoff time, checking them all the way to Tel Aviv this time. There was a large Transport Security Administration presence just hanging around in Raleigh. I asked one if they were there to keep the peace with all the people upset that their flights to the East Coast were cancelled and they didn't seem to understand what I was talking about.
In the line waiting to board the flight to London I also spoke to a girl who had just finished pre-medicine in college and was going to visit her father in Qatar. She'd never been outside the US before. When they called my group to board I rushed to do that and forgot to even say goodbye or "have a nice flight." It reminded me of something in the book "Fight Club" where he talks about the single-serve packets of nuts on airplanes, single-use toothbrushes and razors, single-use packets of soap and shampoo, and single-serve friends that you speak to for a few minutes or sit next to for the length of a flight and never see or speak to again. I texted L that they would send me through London, and I don't know if she got it because that drained the last electron from my phone battery, and I couldn't turn it on again.
They put me in row 42 on the flight to London Heathrow and I asked if I could move up to a seat closer to the front, so I could get off the plane in time to possibly catch my connection. It was to be an hour after landing. The seat I took was in row 13 or so in the cabin right behind business class, against a bulkhead, and as an American Airlines plane that meant the seat did not go back so I had to sit upright for the whole ten hours. I don't think I got any sleep on any of the flights, but I might have drifted off a little. The plane wasn't very full so many people took up rows of three seats by themselves to sleep, but I sat in a row with a gentleman from Oxford and we shared the middle seat for our belongings. They played crappy movies on little TV screens at the front of the cabin, so I watched those. I think it was "Fame" and "Night at the Museum 2." This sort of thing isn't exclusive to American Airlines: every airline that is American is utter crap, which is why none of them really come out ahead. I think we landed on time and I pushed to the front to be the very first person to exit the plane. Then I waited what seemed like several minutes for them to open the door and let us out.
London Heathrow is widely considered the very worst airport in the entire world. (The other contenders include JFK in New York, CDG in Paris, LAX in Los Angeles, and several airports in the Eastern world.) I ran through the very large and horribly organized airport and someone had to open a door for me at the end of the tunnel when I ran up since they weren't ready yet. It was far to get to the center of the terminal and see that I was supposed to be in distant Terminal 5 for British Airways flights to "less important" destination countries. I went down to baggage claim to ask someone if my bag was supposed to be picked up, and they said according to my baggage claim tag it would be transferred to Tel Aviv on my flight. Then I asked someone else if my flight was at Terminal 5 and not there, after waiting a long while for him to finish dealing with a large Indian family who needed to check in again. Service people were unhelpful there compared to the US. I ran to find the buses to the other terminals, and asked somebody at a desk there to confirm for me that my bag would be sent with me. The bus ride was 10 minutes long, and I began to get concerned that I wouldn't make my connection. When I got off the bus I got into long lines with a mob of people to get through security and passport control, and up an escalator that physically and very dangerously shoved people into the packed crowd at the top who had no room to stand or move. I snuck forward in the never-ending line a few times while waiting for security - over half an hour. Near the start I asked someone guarding the lines if I would have time to reach my connection, and they said, "oh sure, no problem." I did not.
There is a sign saying not to take your shoes off unless asked, and they don't tell you to take your shoes off until you're at the X-ray scanner, so you can waste everybody a few more seconds. I stepped through the metal detector and was told to wait and step back because they were busy scanning and patting down two people who had just stepped in before me. When they were ready, they let me pass without a pat-down and I waited to get my things back. Before I could even tie my shoelaces, I looked up at the departures list (there had not been any visible for the whole hour of rushing through the airport before that) to see that boarding for my flight was closing: boarding began at 0800 and ended at 0805. And I heard the announcement system calling, "Passengers Ganani, [and two other names] please go to gate 10." I sprinted and dodged around people to get there, but gate 10 is actually five or six gates. I rushed to one at random to ask which was for Tel Aviv and the check-in person was annoyed that I was rushing and at the wrong gate. She gave me vague directions - "further that way", and soon I ran up to someone who saw me running and said, "Tel Aviv? Right there!" I sprinted to present my boarding card and got on the last bus (there was more than one in those 5 minutes?) to get to the airplane. It was hot in there and I was sweating from all the running, and I had to listen to really boring snooty rich people loudly chat about their kids and travel plans.
On entering the plane they insisted on seeing my boarding pass again, and it's a good thing they did because just before me they turned away an old woman who was trying to get to Moscow. The seat I got was in the middle of the plane, in the middle of a row, against a bulkhead again. But this was British Airways so at least the seat went back all the way. I asked a flight attendant if I could move to an aisle once everyone was aboard, and he was impressed that I had been travelling all day and night without rest all the way from Kansas. There was nobody else in the row, so I decided to keep it. I played on my computer and after they fixed the entertainment system I watched a mediocre comedy "The Invention of Lying" on the tiny flickery screen in the chair in front of me. One of the flight attendants asked me if I spoke English and wouldn't mind filling out a survey so I did that and made sure to note how much I hate London Heathrow airport (though there may not be much they can do about it.) When the movie ended we were close to beginning our descent so I lay down across my row and napped for only 10 or 15 minutes before I had to get up again.
I moved briskly through Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, and there was no line to the passport control so I went there instead of using the biometric fast-track. The window was still slower than if I'd gone and cleared myself in on the hand machine. I waited around for about an hour for my luggage, until they turned off the carousel. My bag did not show up. I was standing near the Lost & Found desk (the carousel was the furthest one, right there) and just when I was making the decision to go and ask them what was up, I heard the announcement system say, "[G] Ganani, please report to the Lost & Found desk..." I was there anyway so I walked up and they said, "Oh, here is G, he was standing here all the time, happy as could be! We did a whole song & dance routine for you and even used the announcement." Maybe I hadn't heard if they tried before, because I had my headphones in to listen to music while I munched the last of my cookies, waiting far too patiently for my bag. Well, they said my bags were in London, and that I have two of them, probably because they never cancelled the original baggage check when they made a new one in Raleigh. I described my duffel bag and filled out their forms, and went to get the appropriate form signed by customs and bring it back to them. By then I suppose well over an hour must have passed since I landed.
This presented me with a series of serious problems. My house keys were in my bag, as well as my cell phone charger - which only works in Israel anyway. Nobody at any Lost & Found desk had the charger I needed. I couldn't connect to any wireless network; perhaps they were down. I couldn't even find any pay phone and was completely isolated from the world. And nobody knew where I was. I went to the train to take that home, and discovered that it was locked shut, dark, and none of the ticket machines worked. I asked a security guard what was up with the trains and he said, "It's Sabbath." I forgot a) that I'd be landing near the Sabbath, and b) that this stupid country dies on the weekends and nothing works. Incredulously I said, "It's Saturday? (How long have I been in the air?)" I could have sworn I left on a Thursday, in the morning. The guard chuckled, "Did you just land?" He said there might still be buses, so I went to see if there were any buses to Haifa. Of course, there were no signs indicating anything like a route or timetable, and no Internet meant I couldn't know. I met a girl from Holland in the same predicament, trying to get to Jerusalem. I'd asked her if she'd seen a public phone or had one I could borrow, and she said she didn't speak Hebrew. She didn't know when the buses were, and the people at the SIM card rental said a SIM card wouldn't work with her phone because it was too old, which seemed unreasonable to both of us. She had a tinge of desperation to her, which I understood. I came back later to see her gone and a bus there, so I guess she did get on one. Hopefully she made it to her destination all right.
I spent what may have been the better part of another hour running around the terminal begging people for phone chargers. The taxi people directed me to the Pelephone people who directed me to the Cellcom booth, which was closed up. I came back and begged to make a phone call. They let me make a call on their landline phone. I called my parents' home and my mom said that my dad had already gone to the airport to pick me up, had figured I wasn't in the country yet, and drove home. I asked for his cell number (I never remember any but my own; it was a 4 instead of 5) and caught him on the toll highway almost all the way back home. He said he'd be back in 40 minutes. That's when I went to check on the Dutch girl, and it was getting dark. I asked in English to borrow an empty chair from a big circle of people and they were rude to me in Hebrew when they said they were all taken. In any case, I found a power outlet in a wall and I sat down on the dirty floor by it to charge up my laptop (and my mp3 player through it) and pass the time. My father found me there. He drove me back to their place so I could take a shower and change my clothes, though I did not have any well-fitting clothes there. And I had a bowl of vegetable soup and played with my beloved cat. She was real sweet and well-behaved, and only tried to claw me once as I was eating dinner. Maybe she missed me too. I went to the roof to look for a book, and she jumped into a nearly-empty box of books with a spider and hid in there. Then she hid somewhere deeper in the roof and I closed the door and forgot her in there until I left a few minutes later, but she didn't seem angry, just pleased to be let out, and she let me pet her again.
When I got home I got a spare key from my grandmother and only went online for a short time to tell L I had made it all the way safely, then went right to bed. I had even already brushed my teeth at my parents'.
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