Drang Nak Osten, or the Escape from Paris
I don’t know whether Hefest consulted with Hermes about planning the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on April 15, 2010, or whether the departments did not coordinate the work and Hermes then sent angry messages by office mail. I know that the clouds of the steam moved by the southeastern wind to Europe. In the first hours, the white horses found an increased content of glass particles, and the glass dust immediately put all flights at risk. The advancement of dust from the eruption could be seen in the hourly closure of airports: Reykjavik, Glasgow, Dublin, and London announced the upcoming closure.
And then my phone ringed. A woman called, who just flew from America to Paris for an aerospace exhibition. She immediately advised me to keep silent and gave a resume: Paris airport is closing in the morning; flights on two-engine planes flying past Iceland have already been cancelled. There are no tickets – thousands of visitors to the exhibition, people living on airplanes – with gold, diamonds, and other precious air status – spent hours on the phone, and most of them received no tickets. The consensus reached during the group lunch for 30 people was this: airspace will be closed for at least a week, and flights will be delayed for 10-15 days afterwards. Everyone went to the hotels to plan the next steps, which looked different. Numerous Americans were desperately looking for rooms in overcrowded hotels, trying to get prescriptions for insulin and other medications for the next month, and a few lucky people boarded any aircraft - to Africa, South America, and some to Hong Kong: anywhere where there was no shutdown of flights. Those who lived in Europe bought train tickets and watched the show for a cup of coffee. Since my favorite did not have a precious status with the airline, she expressed the idea that she would not try to get a ticket in the European branch, and with the idea of living on cruises for another month, she quickly accepted. However, taking into account two children at home — one year old — she agreed to give me a chance to find a ticket before morning, and then go to bed. I had six hours left to tell her where to go and where to fly. Being in light thought, I put the phone in place.
The case went to midnight. The prospects were not the best, but we had to act. First, I thought where to call. As I have already been told, Lufthansa’s office in Europe fell, but it remained an illogical and consequently less busy office in the United States. I decided to call and predictably hit the car respondent. While he sincerely promised me to connect me with a man, I sat down and shaken my brains. In front of me was a notebook in a cage and a pencil, and on the computer was a map of Europe. Suddenly, I realized that I urgently needed to solve a problem from vector algebra. Given: glass dust moves south-east with a speed of x kilometers per hour. To understand when which airport will be closed is not difficult - it is already something. How to get there? At what speed does the vehicle have to travel to get to the still open airports, and when do you have to leave there to get the last flight? For each airport, the task had its own solution, which was further limited to flight schedules to America. Under the warning of an optimist respondent, and limiting the list to the airports of Lufthansa, I suddenly found that you should only travel by high-speed train, and at the same time only to Orleans, Munich, or Zurich. While I was thinking about it all, a tired female operator suddenly joined. Hearing about Paris, she pro-formed, with a tortured voice, told me that there were no tickets for the last couple of flights and she could not help me, but I immediately broke her and crushingly, second-handedly, tried to put out my tabs. “This is an idea!” The woman was terribly surprised by this approach to tourism, but understood the meaning of the raid. A miracle happened - from all three cities there was a pair of three tickets: the people have not yet understood. However, Orléans fell away: for some reason there were no train tickets there (!). Why, I found out a little later. To Munich and Zurich, however, tickets were; in the case of Zurich, even for two trains, with a difference of one hour. This was resolved. I only have to let my wife know. And then I remembered that she told me a chain of hotels, but not a specific one. The call of each hotel took another hour; she was in the first of them, but the operator wanted to sleep very much and the first time he just lied to me that she did not stop there. As the owner of a train ticket to Zurich and a plane to Boston, I completed my little role in this story and went to bed with a clear conscience. And then began the true Odyssey of the wife. Further in her name.
When I went down to the lobby with my suitcase at six in the morning, I was terribly surprised by the concierge’s request to call a taxi. Just when he was going out, I miraculously extended my hotel for a week, and he knew I was here for a long time. He reminded me that the airport was closed, and was surprised that I went to the station, and to Zurich through Gar du Nord, from where the trains to Zurich do not go! The husband, however, knew neither French nor Paris, and could only buy a ticket that the computer issued to him, without any distinction. The concierge, a nice guy, shrugged his shoulders and said he would not cancel my reservation until noon, as he was confident I would be back soon, and called my car. As a result of the early days, the car turned out to be an elite limousine for a hundred euros, but I didn’t care. As I sat in the rear seat, I was fiercely trying to figure out the tickets and schedules; the driver, meanwhile, was talking to someone on the phone, slowly switching to screaming. Finally, my attention was attracted by the selective French mat, the content of which was reduced to the fact that the limousine is not a taxi, it does not take from hotels, and now it drops this American b*** on the first bus setting. Time is not money, you can’t earn it anymore. In the middle of the tirade, I extended 50 euros and asked in French to bring B*** to the station. The driver stumbled and almost entered the pillar. All he thought was to ask why I was dressed as an American if I spoke freely in French. It is good to know languages.
Overcoming the first barrier, I landed at the station at 7. To simplify the logistics, my husband sent me to the machine, where it was all I needed to put my credit card in to get a ticket. It wasn’t here: the machine spit out my U.S. visa without a chip. Well, then in the box, where I arrived at 7:20.
The box was visible from a distance: the line curved throughout the hall and consisted of no less than 100 people. The line consisted mostly of the same “refugees” as I was, almost all of them being late on their train. I had to stand – and when I got to the box office, my eight-hour train left. The reason was immediately revealed: the strike of communication channels. Fortunately, Zurich was chosen because there was a ten-hour express. I was given a ticket for it and at 8:30 I was in the lobby. Tickets were only for the first class, where food was included in the price of the ticket, so there was a lot of time, and there was no need to buy anything, and I decided to walk around the station. My legs on the machine took me into the multi-story lobby, to the bridge between the buildings of the station; there was no crowd, from somewhere the music of the march was delivered in live performance. Stop it is what? On the bridge, in front of me, an orchestra appeared, followed by demonstrators with posters. There was an unpleasant premise, based on the experience of life in Paris: an illegal demonstration often ends in a fight with the police, and a strike not on that day - that is. In Paris it is legal to strike only on certain days of the week, depending on the type of activity. By the way, but the police - at the other end of the bridge appeared and began to consolidate a group of gendarmes with shields, helmets, and rubber "democratizers". In the middle of the bridge there were stairs down where I ran without looking. There was a toilet on the first floor where I tried to dive. However, the toilet was paid, and I only had money in large denominations. Demonstrators and gendarmes also began to appear on my floor, and I had to grab the first sandwich in the bakery next to the toilet to exchange money. Dive into the institution, I spent there for half an hour, until the music and screams ceased, and the bullet jumped through the perron.
Surprisingly, at 9:20 on my platform was already a train, and, judging by the board, my own. However, the signs on the first wagon clearly indicated: a train to Munich. This, of course, was clear: just to Munich from Gar du Nord trains and went. But I was not driving there. A small demonstration was formed near the second wagon: a group of people circumnavigated the conductor. The situation became clear: strike breakers were enough for a limited number of trains, and to the German border trains to Munich and Zurich went in one composition. Okay sit down. Next to me stood a couple of Swiss businessmen who were also stuck somewhere and had to get on the train. In Paris they were in transit, and they had been on the road since yesterday: their one-day flight there and there was somewhat delayed. One, younger, tried to order something to eat, but it turned out that the restaurant wagon did not fit in the mixed composition on Munich-Zurich, and was disconnected. The conductor gave him a chocolate and a smile, and it evaporated. “I’d eat it,” the guy said in French. “I didn’t eat for a day.” I remembered a random sandwich. When I’m nervous, I typically eat little, and I wasn’t hungry at all. The prospect of a road with two men dying of hunger and cuddling on the subject did not impress me, so I just got my sandwich and forcibly wrapped it to businessmen. We talked, and my situation somewhat distracted them. Half an hour from Zurich, the younger one offered to look at the situation on the roads, as I was going to take a taxi, and between arrival and departure I had an hour for everything. There was a sandwich and paid off because my phone didn’t work in Europe. It turned out that a huge accident had just happened and the road to the airport was closed. The only chance was in the electric car, which left 10 minutes after we arrived at the station. I don’t speak German, I wasn’t in Zurich, and the air smelled burning. The guy thought for a few seconds and proposed to put me on the right electric car. In practice, it looked like this: he bought me a ticket (my card was not accepted by the machine again), ran to the train with my suitcase, and then just threw it behind me in the train into the closing doors.
I arrived at the airport 35 minutes before departure. As it turned out, the Zurich airport was closed in an hour (according to the calculations of the husband, it should be in three, but the Swiss decided not to risk). It was not easy to find a working box, but at least there was no line because of the absence of other passengers. The treasurer was upset from my appearance with a strange print; the barcode was not scanned at all, and the flight number did not match. Well, it quickly became clear that all the information on the ticket was in the U.S. Lufthansa code system (ah, they made the reservation). I was thrown into the electric card with the same suitcase and transported to the point with the windshield, right into the hands of the stewards - they had already knocked the door of the plane when they were told that the last passenger was suddenly shrinking at the box office. Fifteen minutes before the airport closure, I was in the air on a direct flight Zürich-Boston. and Victoria! I turned the screen built in the back of the seat onto the camera looking down and prepared to breathe out.
It was not there. From the chair on the left came a stone. In the chair was a young woman, rather a girl, as it later turned out, 18 years old, and very pregnant, at the beginning of the ninth month, who, as it turned out, was panically afraid to fly. With a squeezed voice, she told her to call the stewardess, because she seemed to be afraid of fighting. No is no! Sit back now? for nothing! I looked into the girl’s eyes and said, “Dear, you have a Braxton-Hicks. It doesn’t matter what it is, but I won’t give you birth. Look at me and breathe like this.”
The last episode of this story took place in Boston. Leaving the customs, I was met by the whole family - husband and children stood as nothing happened at the exit, and also with a bouquet of roses, as if they were expecting that I would have time for the flight: I could not call them in the absence of the phone and time, and my husband knew. Asked what kind of fear he was so confident to get to the airport, he simply replied, "I have all calculated, with a two-hour stock - how could you not have time?" At my observation that it could not be easy, and at all happened by chance, he noticed that it was time. Who is right?