Getting to Durban

In my white plastic bag there were
two boxes of salt water taffy,
three specialty bars of scented soap,
and two maple leaf-shaped 1.7 fluid once glass containers of Vermont maple syrup:
these are the items I have been carrying with me at all times for the last five days as I have tried to get from Boston, Massachusetts to Durban, South Africa—a more challenging journey than I had anticipated.

A week and a half ago I was in Hong Kong. After a rich and even magical experience in Asia, we flew from Hong Kong to Boston, where it was my delightful obligation to attend my brother’s wedding. The wedding was beautiful. It was simple and short, in the company of loved ones, and even more exciting than the wedding is the marriage—the promise of a lifetime of married days to come: ordinary days, made special because they are shared. After the reception the bride and groom escaped, and the next day, Sunday, I departed for South Africa to join an SIT (School for International Training) program studying the educational system there. This is when things started to go wrong for me.

There were several times I felt like swearing this past week:

The first was when I got off the plane from Boston to Atlanta only to be told that I could not board the connecting flight to Johannesburg because I did not have a sufficiently blank visa page in my passport. In a panic I ran to the business office on the other side of the airport, which offered to get extra pages added to my passport –but it would cost me 700 USD. I forwent that option, in favor of going back to Boston where I could go to the U.S. Passport Agency in person (there wasn’t one in Atlanta) and have them add the pages for a mere 60 USD. (Who knew how long that would take though.)

The second time I felt like swearing was at the hotel in Atlanta where Delta put me up for the night because there were no more flights to Boston. I was tired, stressed, and hungry, and the only thing to eat was vastly over-priced food at the hotel restaurant.

The next time was the following morning, now back in Logan International Airport. After a long time on hold, the woman on the phone at the U.S. Passport Agency told me I could only come in if I had an appointment, and that the next available appointment wouldn’t be until Friday. Did I mention that because of Peter’s wedding I was already late for my South Africa program to begin with? And a Friday appointment would have translated roughly into missing a third of the entire program.

I went to the Passport Agency anyway, for lack of any other option. By 1:00 PM I finally got to the front of a very slow moving line, where they told me the only way I could get an appointment was if I could show an itinerary proving I was leaving the country the next day, but that they stopped allowing appointments after 1:30. Sort of a catch-22 if you ask me, as I wasn’t exceptionally keen on booking a flight out of the country if I wasn’t sure I could leave the country. Nevertheless, with no other option I called Delta on my cell phone to get a new ticket while running down the street looking for somewhere that would let me on the internet to print out the itinerary Delta would hopefully e-mail me. Somehow, through luck and miracle, things fell into place within the half hour and I made it back to the Passport Agency just in time. And after much more standing in line, and waiting, and standing in line, and waiting, I finally had the extra pages in my passport. It was Monday afternoon by this time. It was actually not much more than 24 hours since I had left Boston for the first time, but it felt like an eternity had passed. That is how it feels when every minute seems urgent.

I took the T out to Belmont, where my sister and her husband have been living in a condo. They were out of town, but I found the spare key and slept there that night.

The next morning I tried to do the trip all over again. There are certain perks to going back and forth as much as I did, such as getting to know the airports really well. I can tell you, for instance, exactly where to find The Economist—they don’t sell it at the Newslink in Boston, but they do sell it at the CNN store in Terminal E in Atlanta. They also sell it in the Borders just after the security check in the Boston airport, but it’s sort of hidden away beneath the cash register area.

Our flight from Boston to Atlanta took longer than scheduled on account of bad weather along the east coast, but the flight to Johannesburg was delayed by two hours as well, so I didn’t miss it. I did however miss my flight to Durban when I finally arrived in South Africa. They had to put me up at a hotel in Joburg because the next flight out wasn’t until the morning, but by this point I had become so used to missed connections that I didn’t feel like swearing anymore. (I never actually did swear anyway.) The next morning—Thursday by now—I flew to Durban (on the second flight out instead of the first because no one ever gave me the wake-up call I had requested). There in Durban, finally, I joined my fellow students and began my South African adventure in earnest.

...of course, I do not yet have my checked baggage. It is now Friday night, and I may or may not get them tomorrow. They have been sitting in Atlanta since last Sunday, and all that’s with me are my carry-ons: a backpack filled with books and a laptop, and a plastic bag with a few gifts for my home stay families that I purchased Sunday in the Boston airport gift shop. It is an odd selection of items to have clung to so tightly throughout this whole adventure, from airport to airport, from one random hotel room to another, and across the Atlantic—simple mementos from New England: some soap, some taffy, and some maple syrup.