Ahh, School Spring Break. I never thought I’d experience one of those again, but our school took a holiday from April 11th-15th. We didn’t have any random holidays, half-days, or days off during March, so we had worked straight from the 2nd week of February to April 8th. It was time for a vacation, time for an extended leave away from school and those darling little wonder-children.
Maddy decided to venture off to Crete for the week and meet up with her mother, who was flying in from New York. Jen, she had a friend from college who lived and worked in Dubai (a former Currier House resident!), so that’s where she went for the week. Maddy left Friday afternoon (but not before forgetting her wallet and having to come all the way back home across the city from the bus station). Jen left Friday night, and I didn’t leave on my trip until Sunday morning because I mixed up the days and thought I was buying a ticket for Saturday when it was actually Sunday.
I didn’t want to go somewhere alone- I wanted at least to be able to meet up with someone I knew for at least a part of the trip. Wary of repeating the mistakes I made on my Athens/Greek isle trip of a few years ago, I brainstormed all the places I could go when I realized I only knew one person in Europe that I could visit, and she lived in Belgium.
Sofia, who I worked with at the Cyprus Mail for the summer in 2003, had gotten a trainee-ship at the UN Headquarters in Brussels, so I thought, hey, let’s go to Belgium for the week! I emailed her a month in advance and told her I wanted to come during that week and hang out for at least a day, maybe two. I did some research on Belgium, and found that it wasn’t very exciting and there wasn’t a whole lot to see beyond a day in Brussels and a day in Bruges. Reconsidering, I decided to spend the rest of my time in Amsterdam, which seemed to offer more than enough to do for a weeklong holiday. I had spent a night there when I got stuck on my 52 hour journey home back in January. It seemed like a cool place for the hour or two I had a chance to walk around the downtown area that night, so I figured my itinerary had the makings of a quality spring break.
I stayed at school late on Friday doing some last-minute travel planning- booking hostel rooms, and figuring out more or less what to see and how to get around once I was there. I had wanted to get my hair trimmed on Saturday, since it was getting pretty long and generally unmanageable, but with all the last-minute errands I had to do, I didn’t have time to walk around during business hours and find a barbershop. That evening, I decided to cut my own hair, which is never a brilliant idea, but I thought I could trim a little off the back and clean it up a little.
I start cutting it in the bathroom using 2 mirrors, and of course it’s more difficult than I thought it would be. I only ended up making three cuts in the back, but holding the hair in my hand while trying to guide the scissors around the hair while looking in the mirror proved to be a serious challenge. You see it one way and you have to tell your brain and your hand to move in the opposite direction and, and while you’re concentrating on that you almost go Van Gogh and cut your ear off.
So while I’m doing this, I work up a terrible sweat, and I have giant beads of sweat rolling over my sweat-saturated eyebrows into my eyes and all over my glasses. I go to take my glasses off with my right hand while holding my hair in place with the left when the right arm on my glasses snaps off. My frames tumble to the floor and I’m left holding the skinny black arm with a broken hinge at one end.
Wonderful time for my glasses to break- at 1am when I have an international flight taking off in 10 hours. Fortunately, I brought my backup pair with me and they served me well on the trip, but having my glasses randomly break like that (I wasn’t rough with them) seemed like a foreboding sign. ***Note- I took them to an eyeglass shop here in izmir after the break. They told me they couldn’t fix them without a new arm, so I’m just going to have to make due with my spare pair for the rest of my time here and hope nothing freakish happens to them. Otherwise, I’ll have to bust out the black duct tape as a last resort.
I took forever to pack, as I stressed over what clothes I’d need. It was quite colder there and it rains off and on a lot, so I didn’t want to be caught shorthanded. First time through, I packed WAY too much. Ever so slowly I whittled it down so it could all fit into a small suitcase and my backpack. After some Ipod updating and more essential putzinfraffin, I got to bed around 5am.
I got up at 8:25 to catch the airport shuttle bus that picks people up at the mall nearby my apartment. Jen and Maddy had left some dirty dishes in the kitchen which I had done the night before because I didn’t want them strinking up the place or growing mold while we were gone all wee, but as I was walking out the door (literally, at least half my body crossed the threshold and made it into the hallway) I noticed that nobody had emptied out two garbage cans in a while. The one under our sink had lots of food and vegetables in it and it stunk to high heaven. I couldn’t leave them there for to fester for another 8 days, so I emptied them both. Stuff had seeped through the bags into the barrels, so I had to wash them out as well. By the time I finished all the housekeeping, it was 9am, so I ran downstairs to the Shuttle pickup spot.
The last time I took the bus to the airport, it came at a really strange time in the middle of the hour, so I wasn’t nervous when it wasn’t there. 9:15 rolled by, no problem. Suddenly it was 9:30 and I started to get nervous. I resigned myself to stay there and wait for the bus because last time I lost my nerve and when I started walking to the main road to catch a cab or a city bus, the shuttle came. Plus, I didn’t want to take a cab because I knew the airport was far away and it would have cost a fair amount of money as opposed to the shuttle, which was $6.50.
Well, the shuttle gets there at 9:45 and I was the first to hop on, but it waited around, not pulling out onto the road until 10am. By now, I was really nervous, thinking I was going to miss my flight. It was a long trip, but I knew it wouldn’t take an hour, and Izmir is such a small airport that you can walk inside and the check-in desk is right in front of you. Unfortunately, the trip was very slow. We had plenty of time, but we made a pick up at the main tourist office downtown and ended up waiting around parked on the side of the road for a good 10 minutes. Meanwhile, I’m sitting in the front row, my heart pounding, trying my best to will the bus to pull away from the curb and get to the airport so I wouldn’t miss my flight.
We pulled into the terminal at 10:53. I flew off the bus, grabbed my bag hastily from the porter and dashed into the airport. Just my luck, a giant tour bus pulled in right before us, so there’s a gigantic line of travelers waiting to screen their luggage before they can enter the terminal. At this point, I finally accepted the truth- I was too late, and I was definitely missing my plane as my vacation time was fizzling away in front of my eyes.
I walked up to the desk and explained to them that I missed my flight. They tried getting me on another Turkish Airlines flight and even other competitors’ flights so I could get to Istanbul on time to make my connection to Amsterdam, but there weren’t any flights to Istanbul for at least another 2 hours. So, yup, connection was missed. I feared they were going to charge me an arm and a leg to re-book my ticket, but hallelujah, they didn’t charge me a cent! I was astounded and relieved. I thought they could get me on a flight later that day, but they didn’t have any more flight from Istanbul to Amsterdam that day, so they booked me on a 5am flight the next day.
I wasn’t happy, but what else was I gonna do? I had no alternative. That’s what I got for missing the 9am bus because I felt compelled to empty and clean up the stinky garbage. I won’t make that mistake ever again. And that’s what I get for trying to save money by not taking a taxi. If they ended up charging me to rebook the ticket, and that price were higher than what the cab fee would have been, mad, I would have really been angry at myself (not that I wasn’t already, mind you).
I left the airport in a dejected state as I realized I just lost the first day of my spring break in Holland. I ended up taking the same shuttle bus back to Mavisehir at noon, and when I got home I emailed my family, emailed my Amsterdam hostel, and proceeded to pass out on my bed for a good 5 hours. My nerved has been so worked up, and I had gotten little to no sleep the night before, so I was exhausted.
You’re darn straight I made sure I was outside waiting for that 3am shuttle bus a good 20 minutes early.
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