Traveling Travails

After much hassle and many hours we have all arrived safely in Japan. Sunday night there was a serious doubt whether I would make it. My flight from Pittsburgh to Newark was scheduled to leave at 6:18 Monday morning, which meant (since it was an international flight) that I needed to be there two hours early. The airport is about an hour and 20 minutes from my house, so I was going to need to leave about 2am. Well, about 10:30 that night, as I was about to begin packing, it hit me that while United Airlines told me my flight was still confirmed, Continental was possibly the airline actually running my flight. I checked their website and it informed me that my flight had been cancelled due to hurricane Irene. I called United, and a nice Indian man with a thick accent informed me that he had no record of my flight being cancelled, but that I should call Continental. I called Continental and their nice automated person told me they were too busy to take my call, but that I should call this other Continental number. I called that Continental number and their nice automated person said they also were too busy to take my call, so I should try calling the same number. At that I gave up and tried getting hold of our travel agent, who refused to answer her cell phone, office phone, or home phone number. Finally I tried United again and this time they had a record of my flight being cancelled. The nice lady with no accent gave me a flight out of Pittsburgh two hours later than my original flight, and put me in the last available seat on the same flight from San Francisco that two other teammates were on—Steve and Jen. 

Relieved, I began packing, went to bed at 2, and got up at 5.

My brother and I had an uneventful drive to the airport, where I proceeded to make life difficult for myself by refusing to go through the backscatter scanner. Two weeks ago when I was flying out of El Paso the creepy old men agents pulled me out of the normal scanner line to go through the backscatter. I’d asked why I had to and they informed me in no uncertain terms that I had to because they said so. I was weak-minded at that moment, and did what they told me to, though unwillingly. It was a horrible experience. I really did feel bullied and violated and ended up crying for 15 minutes on the plane and worrying the hostess. As it turns out, though, it was a slightly good thing I didn’t fight about it then, because as it was, I was the last person to board and they closed the doors as soon as I was on.

This time, though, for my own peace of mind, I was determined to stand my ground if they tried to make me go through that machine again. Sure enough, they pulled me out of line and pointed me to the backscatter. I told them I didn’t want to go through it, and that it was optional (which it is). They said if I opted out of that, I had to get a pat down. I said that would be fine with me. While I was waiting for a female TSA agent, the amused male TSA agent told me next time not to make eye contact with anybody and I’d be fine.

So I got led over to another machine and a weary but kind girl a few years older than me proceeded to pat me down. We chatted and she wiped down her gloves and stuck them in the machine that grumbled to itself for a minute and then shrieked that it had detected explosive materials. The female TSA agent muttered something inaudible and threw her gloves against the machine. “I hate technology,” she said. So then she pulled a male guard over and he sighed, cleaned off the machine, and then told me that it was standard procedure, but I’d have to get a private screening. He was very nice about it, and since they’d already been kind to me, I was not worried about this.

So then they led me to another room where the first girl filled out paperwork while we waited for another female TSA agent to come. She came in, called me “honey,” and was also incredibly polite. We three had a nice little time together and I told them about my last TSA experience, which they were incensed about. They confirmed that the backscatters are indeed optional and I was perfectly within my rights to not expect to be forced to go through it. They then proceeded to tell me other funny and awkward stories they’d heard about clashes between citizens and TSA guards.

We parted as friends and I made it to my gate with plenty of time to spare.

The flight was boring and it wasn’t until I got to San Francisco that I met anybody else of any interest. I ended up at a café table with two German ladies who had lived the past seven years in England, but one had spent time in South Africa, and the other in Ireland. It was no wonder their accents confused me for a while. They’d spent the last four weeks “on holiday” taking a self-guided tour of California, and were on their way home. We bonded over biscuits and eavesdropping on the older man at the table next to us who was chattering away loudly on the phone about martyrdom in China, relationships, and kissing.

My German-British-South African-Irish friends left me and a well-to-do man took their place and informed me that he wouldn’t be quite as sociable as the women who had just left, but then proceeded to tell me, after hearing about my crazy night figuring out flights that I must have had people praying for me (which was true), and that prayer is a powerful thing, because he’s definitely noticed a lack since his mother died. I gathered she must have been fervent in praying for him. He agreed that this was so, but he brought it on himself.

Once we were all boarded and about to take off, I witnessed a couple interesting sociological interactions. The captain had turned on the seatbelt signs, but there was one older Japanese woman who was wandering through the aisles, obviously confused and unaware. A frustrated flight attendant kept trying to get her attention and seemed to think that if he kept repeating what he was saying in English, eventually the lady should be able to understood what he was telling her, which was to sit down. Unfortunately for him and her, this was not the case. He was getting impatient and rather rude, and she went into defense mode and pretended he didn’t exist. Here was the interesting part—we were on a flight to Japan, and fully half the people there were Japanese, but no-one who was watching got up to help. I know enough Japanese that I could have explained to the lady the basics of the flight attendant’s instructions, but I’ve always been insecure about my grasp of the language, particularly for conversational purposes. Also, in situations like these often somebody else Not In Charge getting up and butting in makes things that much more difficult for everybody, so I worried that my help wouldn’t be worth the trouble I might cause. Finally a teenager the lady appeared to be traveling with got up and figured things out—he might not have known what was going on earlier. On consideration, I should have gotten up to help. But there were surely people much more qualified and bilingual than I am who could also have done something, and better than I.

At this point, actually, the man next to me turned and said he would have gotten up to help, except he is Taiwanese and doesn’t know Japanese. I had, of course, assumed that he was Japanese and hadn’t tried to make conversation because my Japanese professor had told me it makes Japanese people uncomfortable when people do that. I suppose people from Taiwan have no such issue. It turned out that he was a phD student working on ways to make solar power more economically feasible. He’d just left one conference and was going to be presenting a paper on the topic at another one in a few months. We sat next to each other and chatted on and off for the next eleven hours, and neither of us thought to ask the other’s name until we had arrived in Tokyo. He gave me his card and asked for my email address. I felt like a bum because I didn't have a card to offer him in return; Americans are so behind on the times. How many grad students in America do you know who have cards, much less any food beyond Ramen noodles?

We arrived in Tokyo, met up with our group, exchanged our money (Japanese coins are much more lovely than ours are), got our rental vans, and spent a surreal six hours driving to our cabins. I have little memory of that time except that it consisted of Japanese rest stops and the vagueness that partial consciousness brings.

Our cabins overlook the ocean (which is still washing up semi-truck trailers and bits of people’s houses) and are lovely; more on those later.