The Trip Home

Originally posted July 28th, 2005

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: Kaiser Chiefs - Oh My God

I finally got my butt home to Norway. Parents were pleased, boyfriend was pleased to be home again, dog was pleased…I am pleasssssget me back to NYC! No seriously, its nice to be home…but I miss New York.

The trip home was kinda stressful. We ordered an airport shuttle to come pick us up at the apartment in Queens. He was supposed to arrive 1:40pm, he showed up around 2:50…not even an apology…then the ASS (pardon my French) takes a HUGE detour all the way to the Bronx instead of taking the Queensboro Bridge over to Manhattan… When we kindly pointed out the detour he got upset and started arguing with us...telling us that he had to pay a dollar and fifty at the bridge. We then told him that the bridge is in fact free… His response was the following: “Well, yes the bridge is free, but that means it will be full of cars and long queues.” Since our apartment was located at Queens blv (which ends at the bridge), we could tell him that it was in fact not “full of cars and queues”, it was actually pretty empty that day….Geez what an asshole that man was. He picked up a couple of more passengers before he took us to the airport. Fortunately we always schedule more travelling time than we need, so we managed to get to the airport in time, but some of the other passengers he picked up were in a serious hurry…

The flight itself was very comfortable. SAS has comfortable airplanes between the US and Europe. Each passenger gets their own TV screen with movies, computer games and a radio, and they feed you at constant intervals, so the trip flew by in no time (pun intended). (I should get a free plane ticket for that kind of commercial).

When we finally reached Sweden, we were told that our next flight from Sweden to Oslo was delayed, so we were suddenly in a BIG hurry when we arrived in Oslo. Since Oslo was the first time we touched Norwegian ground after having been abroad, we were required to pick up our luggage and take it through customs, and then check it in again…Now imagine doing all this in 7 minutes….The luggage had to be checked in at least 20 minutes before our next flight was supposed to leave…and we had about 27 minutes. Impossible you say? We got our bags last but still surprisingly quick, basically ran through customs (you should have seen the looks on the faces of the Customs Agents…), fortunately we were not stopped…They probably saw our filled-to-the-point-of-exploding suitcases and decided it was too much work and no glory. From the customs area we ran around like confused rats in a maze at the main floor before we realized that the check-in area was upstairs. Once we got upstairs we came to the check-in area only to notice that the line was a mile long. What to do, what to do? 30 seconds to go and about 10-15 minutes of queue…We did the only thing we could do; play German tourists (no offence to Germans out there) and run to the front of the line. I was batting my eyelashes as hard as I could and my boyfriend was playing as desperate as he could and it worked! Our bags however were each at least 20-30 pounds overweight…He weighed one of my suitcases which was about 80 pounds heavy…almost 40 pounds too heavy. I gave him my Im-just-a-poor-very-broke-student look, and he let it pass. Phew!

Ok, so now we have checked in our bags…again, and we have about 20 minutes until our next flight is about to leave. So we hurry through security and out to the gate only to get the following message when we get there: “Flight number [thisandthat] from Oslo to Bergen is unfortunately delayed an hour due to some complications with the crew” Aka ‘we don’t have a damn crew for you ‘cause they are still in the air on their way from another part of the country.’ (!!) I just wanted to cry…

But a bottle of Fanta and a few book chapters later, we were on our way to Bergen. Finally!

It was a real treat to sleep in my own bed that night, after having been a year away from home…