Filed under: travels | Tags: air sickness, blizzard, LOT Polish Airlines, NYC, Toronto, Warsaw
We’ve already learned that Berlin doesn’t really like it when I leave, and tends to throw childish tantrums. This time, mad blizzard action in NYC meant my Christmastime homeward flight was canceled. What to do? How about paying twice as much to fly last minute with LOT Polish Airlines via Warsaw? Oh boy, buckle your seatbelts kids.
Where to begin? I should probably start by noting that I was running on 3 hrs of sleep and a Red Bull going in. So there’s that.
I had the foresight to arrive at Tegel 1.5 hrs early, this gave me just enough time to locate more caffeine, then find an electrical outlet where an auto-check-in machine was once plugged in, huddle next to it, and watch the entirety of natural born killers on my laptop. Which turned out to be a great choice, because it’s physically impossible to fall asleep while watching this movie.
When you’re living fast, you might wake up one morning and find that you don’t exactly recall the details of your journey home the night before. It happens. On Tuesday I learned that this feeling is considerably weirder when, instead of being in your bed, you’re in Warsaw. So apparently I made it there somehow.
My contribution to the Polish economy was 5 EUR; for this I received a bottle of water and a duty free mini bottle of Belvedere (a souvenir! and, in a pinch, first aid kit).
LOT flight 41 to Toronto, scheduled to take off at 12:20, did not take off at 12:20.
They did finally let us on the plane, but they weren’t happy about it, and it was like an hour late. At the front of the line, my passport disappeared for 5 minutes without explanation before they grudgingly decided there was absolutely no reason that I shouldn’t be allowed to walk down that gangplank.
Congratulations, LOT, on operating your very first flight! Boarding was only kind of a clusterfuck.
Don’t worry, it gets better. The interior of the plane had been haphazardly salvaged from 1980s Lufthansa machines. We were going into the stratosphere in a trash can.
The flight attendants were not even trying to be cheerful, they were so over it. How about some optimism, I thought, your life is OK if you compare it with the slave-model-robots of the 50s…
I KNOW! HAHA!
At some point an Asian girl moved past me. I noticed only because a) even though she said excuse me like a polite person, she got this death glare from the girl across the aisle, b) there were no seats back there; I was, as I may have mentioned, in the last row. But I was super busy trying to get less uncomfortable so I totally forgot about her and her life.
Until, 20 minutes later — still sitting on the tarmac of course — the scary kind of police clomped officially toward the back of the plane. They were strapped in, they were locked and loaded. They were all in black, bristling with guns and electronics, thudding down the aisle in tight-laced skull stompers.
This is not good news when you are wedged into the back row of some Polish airplane. The Tourette’s-sufferer inside your head has already lost it, is already screeching something about terrorists and different kinds of violent death. Meanwhile your body sits very very still.
They breezed right past me, opened the toilet door on somebody whimpering with rising panic. She really said this, I wrote it down: “No! I don’t have family here…my flight was canceled. I will die!” Whether she really was going to die isn’t clear; she was having some kind of panic attack. But her voice was pure, desperate, frantic terror. She was crying and I had the kind of cold heavy feeling in my gut like you get when something really bad is happening. She was actually afraid for her life.
Her English was also really bad, which made the whole thing extra tragic.
After like 5 minutes of this they must have just been like fuck it, we’re like, death squad troopers, bitch. #1 grabs her feet, #2 grabs her arms, they hoist. (At this point I saw her face and realized it was definitely the Asian girl who had disappeared into the back of the plane about 20 mins before.) And they dragged her, literally kicking AND screaming, all the way back up the aisle and off the plane. She totally lost her shit, in the sense that she was out of control flailing, also in the sense that she dropped her backpack and a flurry of papers: “Oh my GOD! My documents!” But I think someone picked it all up for her.
What in tarnation? Whowhatwherewhenwhyhow the fuck?
So what did we learn from this, campers?
Alls I know is, next time I’m defs taking the G-IV.
PS I knowwww this post was mad long; I felt like I needed to spread some of the suffering around. Anyways, Merry Christmas lol!
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