spent the morning doing various necessary things. charging both computer batteries because, with the cord purchased from Apple Centar Yugoslavia, who knows when i'll be able to acquire the necessary inversion of the adaptor i've been using all these months (need two round to two narrow rectangular, this time around) and, thus, plug into US outlets. taping the backpack that had started, rather dramatically, to unravel in the airport yesterday (what do you expect, though, from something gotten free-of-charge with the purchase of 6 kilos of laundry detergent?), the result of its being completely filled with (and only with) books.
had decided at far too late a point in the game to wash certain key articles of my meagre wardrobe, so found myself frantically trying to dry socks and underwear. resulting strategy amazes even me, really, with its sheer innovation and efficacy. with the only heating vent in the room located at the highest point of the wall, it looked that nothing could be hung in front of it—or so i though, upon first resource assessment. however, managed to tape (with the now severely depleted roll) a hanger to the ceiling and, from it, drape the soggy items directly in the flow of warm air. the success of dorks is, by far, the sweetest kind.
leaving countries and lives in a matter of minutes—and i'm talking about hand laundering the garments that obviously do not cover my navel from being peered at....
after the planes full of people from Sarajevo descending upon Vienna had met up in, well, the Austrian Airlines Vienna transfer area, a man had approached (in that nearly beseeching manner) me in regards one friend of his, also on the flight, also delayed until the next day. citing her "communication difficulties" and, apparently, hearing my speaking That Language, he then proceeded to introduce me to the very woman whose mobile i had, yesterday, asked to borrow in the Sarajevo airport so as to make the first of the mandatory phonecalls-of-hindrance-and-ire. certainly, i said that i would try to meet her in the morning before we each found our gates, etcetera (she was to leave 30 minutes before me). found her—and, of course, found her much more capable of reading the monitors (for which no "language" but that of Important Numbers is necessary) than regarded by her friend.
with that accomplished, hiked to the far end of the A terminal to discover that my own flight to Frankfurt was to be, from the outset (subtle foreshadowing technique), 30 minutes late in leaving. though this meant a bit more plugged-in time, i was less than enthused—given that i had exactly one hour between scheduled landing and departure for Philadelphia.
when the flight was (of course, delays published in the terminal can only be the beginning of the bad news) 50 minutes in even getting to the runway, i hurled myself irrevocably into a flight during which i was engaging in all sorts of nail-biting substitute (because mine are, already, far too clipped) activities. to make matters worse, though everyone else with connecting flights in the entire cabin was busily receiving feedback about gates and rebookings, i had, apparently, lapsed into the maddening sort of physical and audible invisibility to which i am, at times, prone and which, despite what my father has to say about the matter, is often not remedied by my "just speaking louder." by the time the call button had been ignored 3409581 times, along with my request for the waters to be parted so i could run (lope, with now-taped backpacks) through their aisle en route to the flight whose catching had now been whittled down to a matter of 10 minutes. after surfacing from the plane, i went straight to the nearest Lufthansa woman, implored her to call the gate, inform them that i was on my way in a big hurry, and, thus, to not do anything rash. like close the doors 10 minutes early. which they had already done.
not happy. very not happy. again: the principle of the matter. moreover (and i must comment on this—another principle), i hate the Frankfurt airport. i have spent summer days here in which i could neither get nor remain warm, for all the clothing i carried accessibly; its layout is atrocious; something about hamsters, elderberries and, above all, the permeating cigarette smoke of those who anxiously await immutable events: all of these fuel my detestation.
nonetheless and because of a new reality, which involved acquiring a substitute ticket on a different airline (albeit rampant overlap in the sector these days) for the flight i did not miss (and whose first reality i will, no doubt, reiterate ad infinitum in the course of the following paragraphs, purely for your ad nauseum), i was forced to exit the Frankfurt airport security. after being shuffled around by people at both Lufthansa and United who seemed not to understand what was "necessary," i finally managed to squeak out in possession of boarding passes with handwritten additions—and a few little SSSSSSs on the bottom of one, which would, later, become very crucial—and, somewhere along the way, a small green sticker on the back of my passport whose meaning was defin-itely inscrutable, but possibly unmistakable.
it was, at this point in the story, highly admirable that i decided, despite my still smoldering anticipation of departing the airport (any airport), to head through security and back into the inner chamber. guarded though it was by ramrodded-stern sentries, i had, nonetheless, nothing to fear (unlike during the past few months, with my papers in states of disarray, never knowing whether border crossings would result in stilting or penalty). i had, however, seemed to have drawn (with a few active discards and exchanges) a remarkably winning hand: the aforementioned scrawled-out boarding pass plus sibilants, the Sticker of Emerald—and, certainly not leasts, a pair of rather mismatched and dense ("how stupid a population is") backpacks: one, as mentioned, taped-together within an inch of its life/zipper, the other containing both a laptop and, as though matters could be made worse by thoughtful gifts, a clay jar whose body had been carefully cast in the finest bomb-shaped molds of all BiH.
such was the state of affairs being x-rayed and subject to the most anal (and i do reference Herr Sigmund—or at least his faithful and common-parlanced followers—on this and other subjects within easy reach of the rolling cylinders on the belt, the plastic bins for stray items) wand-search in which i have ever lowered my outstretched arms too soon, by which i mean before being barked at to do so. following such, was ordered to open my bag. the taped one. and then to empty it of every last bit of content, whose every last page (this was the bookish one) was then leafed through—before instructed to, hurry up, and replace it all while the other was being, similarly, gutted. following the sniffing of the contents of shampoo bottles (which i nearly offered to drink if, by doing so, i would have sooner proved my (own and by extension) innocuity and had halted the unpacking before the dregs), the same extremely stereotypically German (hear the voice of Joseph in that word, all you who wish to read further) inspector did not only allow me to use the Official Tape of the Frankfurt Flughafen, but also assisted in its careful winding around the insulted article, thereby sealing up the new tears that had resulted from the rough treatment. adjusting the luggages anew, i trudged further down the corridor.
because (and only because) my intended gate, C8, fell between C7 and C9, i soon discovered another, special security checkpoint for this slim interval of Cs, and no others. believing (ah, the errors of innocence we commit—and are both worse and worst for doing so) that my new taping job would indicate, beyond even my crazy gesticulation and same-cognate-new-accent Deutsch, the undeniable fact that i had already been through such indecencies by colleagues not far away, i had, however, not taken into mind the ideological (or, at least, in matters of perfunctorarity) closeness of the involved employees: these who promptly ordered me to strip off the newest taping job (and probably would have asked for the clothes off my back, had not the backpack distracted them mid-wand-motion). by this point, i was both perfecting the unstoppability of compact packing, and shooting it to hell. not to mention the fact that, in the course of the newest un- and re-wrapping, the entire zipper (point of weakness of weakest point) had fallen to toothless pieces and been lost. furthermore, no special tape (or other forms of reluctant sponsorship) was offered; not to be deterred, i unlooped the nearly finished roll, and proceeded to screech it around the contents and with unminded messy loops.
the gate was in sight. however, so was a United borderpatrol henchwoman who, upon my stepping up to her checkpoint, called out for Reinforcements—in the form of a glow-in-the-dark vested man who ushered me over to the side, telling me (at long last, some sort of rational for the methodological madness) that my boarding pass in some way ssssssshowed that i was jussssstifiably sssssusssssst and sssssubject to these ssssstrictesssst of measssssures, the current one being a swabbing for prints (or other little dusts and invisible hobgoblins) from the surfaces (praise be! not the innards!) of myself and my canvas associates.
with 20 minutes remaining out of the original, additional, unnecessary, unmissed-flight-ish 3.5 hours in the Frankfurt Den of Punctiliousity—i collapsed into the smoking "section" of the waiting area and, figuring that the accumulation in the coat and ciliae from the previous five months of grey (in sight and essence) Beograd living would not be much improved by my deciding to get all lung-conscious, i stayed put until the Washington DC-bound flight commenced its boarding.
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