Friday, March 09, 2007

Globe Trotting

By: Ben Tiernan

Jill and I went to Croatia in September. Here is a posting I apparently wrote but never posted. It mostly concerns the experience of flying with airline Buddy Passes arranged by a far extended Hungarian family member named Gabor.

















Our flight to NYC was fine – early, cramped, etc. – but we arrived with relatively few hurtles to overcome and the flight was not hijacked.

I met Gabor for the first time face to face when we checked in at the gate. He was there checking people in with the same questionable customer service that he had employed when arranging my ticket for Budapest – a sort of purposeful nonchalance with a heaping helping of apathy.

Gabor seemed to know who I was before I introduced myself and also seemed not to care. I offered my hand and he shook it reluctantly and didn’t really ever look directly at me. He told me immediately, “You’re fine, you can board.”
“Great, thanks so much…do we need a boarding pass?”
“Not really”
“But how will we get on the plane?”
“Just get on”
“But doesn’t everyone else have a boarding pass?”
“Fine. I can print you a boarding pass if you really want one.”
“It’s not that I really want one, it’s just…”
“Here is your boarding pass. Have a nice flight.”

When Jill and I noticed that our seats were not next to each other I tentatively returned to the gate to ask Gabor what to do about it. When he offered that we should, “Just sit next to each other,” I didn’t raise any objections to the problems that might arise if we did. In stead, we just sat next to each other and it worked.

Gabor was not all curt indifference. Well he was, but he also put us in business class which I can heartily declare is better than economy class – or whatever it is I usually fly.

The plane was on the runway for two hours before lift off - because that is what airlines are want to do – and up in business class it was all steamed washcloths and mimosas. In the back I was whips and cattle prods as usual. At one point they came by with a cart of magazines and newspapers and being an international traveler of the business class capacity, I asked for the London Financial Times by name, “Could I have the FT.”

When it was time for wine we choose a nice clarot that the attendant who was boundless in his obsequiousness spilled all over Jill’s lap. This posed an ethical dilemma and we began to feel a bit like frauds because of the proportion and business-class earnestness of the response. The attendant was devastated by his blunder, and all the manpower of the flight staff sprung into action pouring mineral water on napkins, dabbing at Jill’s damp thigh and apologizing for the insult to us and our families. Jill was not happy that she had to cross the Atlantic in damp chinos, but when they offered to sacrifice an economy class passenger to appease our anger, we felt it was too much.

When we arrived in Budapest on Saturday morning, we found Kitty after a small search and we all drove together to her apartment in the Castle district. Budapest was beautiful as usual. We crossed the Danube on a beautiful suspended bridge and admired the parliament on the Pest side and the Citadel on the other. It was warm and bright, and when we commented on how pleasant it was Kitty told us that summer had been very nice but plagued by freak storms. A week earlier, a ferocious windstorm had started very suddenly felling trees and power lines and killing six people in the city. Just as quickly it died down and the weather returned to normal.

I had seen “An Inconvenient Truth” on the plane to New York, so I attributed the storm to global warming. In the past 650,000 years, which include a number of ice ages and hot periods, carbon dioxide levels have never been as high as they are right now by far, and global temperatures are directly related to carbon dioxide levels. Moreover, warmer sea levels mean stronger more sporadic weather. Cite melting glaciers; cite longer more devastating hurricane seasons. But I digress.