My Long-Overdue Geneva Report!
I’ve been back from Geneva for a month now, but I’ve been busy and generally in a funk, and… oh, let’s not make excuses, shall we? I went, I saw, and I returned, almost without incident. Read on…
I took a cab to airport early on the morning of Tuesday, February 6. I was waiting there alone for some time, but I was eventually joined by four other Wizards folks, all rather bigger wigs than I. I had met three of them before. After a brief layover in Dulles Airport (DC), we made the long haul across to Zürich. I, as usual, had stayed up way too late packing the night before and gotten less than 4 hours of sleep, so napping on the plane came easily.
In Zürich the next morning (local time; around midnight body time), Coverage Manager Greg C. and I got a little lost trying to get through passport control. It turns out that you don’t have to retrieve and recheck your baggage (as you do on the way back), and getting through customs and passport control is easier than getting back into the U.S. I suppose these are among the benefits of being notoriously neutral. Who bombs Switzerland?
I had brought $80 with me in cash, which I turned into something like 90 Swiss francs. Not having to think too much about conversions is always nice, although of course ultimately it all just costs what it costs. At first I was surprised the Swiss weren’t on the euro, then I thought about it for half a second and felt stupid. Neutral!
Zürich was great, though--clean and efficient like Germany, but with French food. I was surprised at how bilingual it was, not in German and French but in German and English. There was hardly any French to be found, although the superb breakfast menu at the café we stopped in read like one of the ones from Paris. I could even mostly understand people, despite the horror stories I’d heard about Schwitzerdeutsch. Of course, once they heard my accent they switched to flawless English immediately. Damn.
The airport is also just beautifully designed, functional and attractive, with real shops and cafes and restaurants instead of the cheap shopping mall crap you get in American airports. You could buy nice shoes, fine chocolates, designer clothing, all in the best of taste. All in all it was the most pleasant airport experience I have ever had.
And a damn good chocolate-filled croissant, too. I’m telling you, I could get used to this Switzerland thing.
***
Geneva, of course, is totally different, and a glance at a map (which I hadn’t bothered to do beforehand) quickly revealed why. Go on, take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sz-map.gif. Find Zürich, over in the middle North. Now find Geneva… on a tiny tongue of Switzerland that isn’t France only through some historical accident. In fact, it turns out that the Geneva airport actually has a concourse in France.
So where Zürich was like Germany with French food, Geneva is more like France with German efficiency. Although France and Germany can both be a little stifling, I soon discover that there’s also an undercurrent of Italian-style relaxedness running through the whole affair. The combination is quite pleasant, in fact, the nearly Parisian attitude of our hotel staff notwithstanding.
I touched base with various friends and acquaintances from previous coverage gigs, then spent over 30 francs (!!!) to get 24 hours of Internet access so I could work. Europe is not so much with the free (or even cheap) Internet. Of course, one hour was 15 francs, so I got a bargain! Kind of.
Several of us tried to go downtown for dinner, but it was raining and we couldn’t find the bus stop, so in the end one of our number soldiered on while the rest of us went back to the hotel restaurant to eat.
I was rooming with British coverage hound Tim W., a charismatic fellow with whom I’d worked in Paris. With nothing pressing going on the next morning, we stayed up into the night talking.
Tim left early the next morning to go on a ski trip with many of the players and coverage staff. I’d been tempted to go on the ski trip, but that was really my only day to explore Geneva. There are many places in the world to go skiing, but I can only see Geneva in Geneva. Before I left the office, some of us had discussed the odds on visible injuries from the ski trip, putting them somewhere above 50%. And in fact, there was one busted lip--on Tim’s pretty face. He was a sport about it, though.
I did some work in the morning, had lunch with other coverage guys, took a few pictures of the crowd of gamers milling around outside the glass doors of the venue zombie-style, and then caught the bus into downtown Geneva. Unlike Internet access, all public transit in Geneva is, thanks to recent public ordinance, absolutely free. All residents are issued bus passes; the hotel handed out temporary passes to guests. We were told that there was some sort of penalty if we were caught on a bus or tram without one of these free objects (I guess that’s to keep vagrants from riding), but I never saw tickets being checked or anything.
I wandered around on the waterfront for a bit but soon gravitated toward the old city (which I insisted on thinking of as the “Altstadt” because it seemed so German). Old Geneva was a densely built-up little town on a hill, with steep inclines and the narrow alleys that all old little European towns have. It’s a lovely city.
The weather was pretty miserable, almost exactly like it had been in Renton when I left--gray, 40ish, and drizzly. Ah, well. It made the Old Town look even more austere and imposing.
I have never seen a city with so much statuary. It seemed like every other corner had a fountain or a monument or the bust of some important figure in Genevan (Genevese?) history. Most of them were inscribed in French with indications of their historical significance that I half-followed, although one fountain was labeled simply “Erige en Memoire du 12 Decembre 1602,” which I took a picture of so I’d remember to look it up later. It turned out to be the date of probably the biggest event in the city’s history, L’Escalade--the defeat of the Duke of Savoy’s troops as they tried to scale the walls of Geneva on the longest night of the year. In this country that would be either a tiny plaque somewhere or a huge commemorative park, but in Europe the history is just… part of the landscape.
I wandered aimlessly, taking photographs and marveling at how differently from the Parisians the Genevans seemed to have approached their historical buildings. Parts of Paris feel like they’re in a museum, facades unchanged for two hundred years. In Geneva, the buildings are still there, but many of them have been hollowed out and given renovated, very modern interiors. Very weird.
I found a strange little cannon park where two girls were trying to take their own picture by balancing their camera on a ledge. They couldn’t get the timer to work, and their camera was in a precarious position anyway, so I offered to snap the picture for them. There are worse things to do on a rainy afternoon in Geneva.
I then wandered into a much larger park where people were playing chess on boards ten feet square. I’m impressed the pieces don’t just up and vanish; even I would be tempted to steal a foot-tall chess piece. Past the chess boards, I ran up against a wall.
No, really. I found a wall. And not just any wall, but a wall with LUTHER chiseled at one end and ZWINGLI at the other, with statues and inscriptions along its length. I got chills up my spine just looking at it. I started at one end and worked my way down, quickly realizing that it was a monument to the Reformation (the “LUTHER” inscription tipped me off). There were inscriptions in archaic German (a declaration by one of the Fredericks), French (something about religious French something something), and English (the Lord’s Prayer, minus that “deliver us from evil” bit they added later). The archaic German was fascinating--I’ve seen pre-modern English before and could barely register the difference in the French, but old German was new to me. There were also statues set into the wall, mostly people whose names I didn’t recognize--but John Calvin and especially Oliver Cromwell gave me pause. Kind of creepy, as were the four huge statues in the center with three Greek letters inscribed over them. Along the top of the wall was the inscription “POST TENEBRAS LUX,” Latin for (say it with me now) “After darkness, light.” How cool is that?
I looked it up later and discovered that it’s called the Reformation Wall. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation_Wall
I walked a bit down by the waterfront as well (Lake Geneva being the water in question) and saw swans, boats, the Alps in the distance, and a clock made out of flowers. No joke.
I got back in time for dinner with the guys, then stayed up too late again. That’s coverage for you.
Friday and Saturday were pretty much par for the course, with dinner out on the town Friday night. I did get to meet one of my writers, which means that now there are only two people who write for me who I haven’t met. On Saturday, we played Magic, and I beat a noted pro, Craig J. (okay, he’s noted for being mediocre in this format, but still) and an intimidating former pro on the staff (Randy B., who was my boss but was promoted away), so that was pretty exciting.
Sunday night was the staff dinner, when several of my co-workers heard the story of my extended stay in Paris for the first time (and not from me… awkward). Greg and I arrived late after finishing up the coverage and waiting for the videos to load properly.
Our waiter was a delightful little man, possibly the Swissiest man I can imagine ever meeting. He was short, with a round face, short blond hair, a little vest, and an impish smile. He was polite, efficient, proper, and friendly. German coverage writer Hanno T. and I insisted on posing for a picture with him, but that was on someone else’s camera. Frowntown.
We late arrivals didn’t yet have wine glasses but had poured ourselves wine anyway, Greg in his water glass and I in my soda glass. When the waiter came around with a new bottle of wine, Greg (who knows better) held up his water glass. The waiter gave the funniest little smile, shook his head, held up one finger, and left. He returned swiftly with a wine glass and poured the wine with impeccable technique. I then held up my soda glass, and the whole sequence happened again, with no trace of annoyance or impatience.
I discovered, to my horror, that wine really does taste better in a wine glass. Much better. Blast! Now I will feel compelled to care about such things, which I had always dismissed as wine snobbery. (I completed my descent in Dulles Airport on the trip back, when one of the other Wizards guys took me to a wine bar.)
The dinner was delightful. I learned from a Scottish woman at our table that my birthday is a national holiday in Scotland (because it is also poet Robert Burns’s birthday, which I did not know). Apparently the celebrations consist chiefly of eating haggis. Man, just thinking of that is going to make my next birthday ten times better.
After dinner we headed back to the hotel bar, where I played two-player team Magic with Scott J., who manages the web site. He went to bed after a particularly brutal loss to a pair of German judges, so I cast about desperately for a teammate. I spotted Kenji Tsumura, an 85-pound Japanese guy who’s cute as a button and, oh yeah, happens to be a former Player of the Year and one of the top minds in Magic today. I had met him briefly earlier in the weekend.
“Kenji,” I said. “Be on my team?” He shook his head vigorously and made sleeping motions, but I begged and he acquiesced. I was teaming up with Kenji Tsumura! Even for somebody on the inside, that’s pretty exciting. I was afraid that language would be a barrier, but his English is better than people say. With clear communications established and one of the best players in the world as co-pilot, I was confident and excited.
We got demolished, through no fault of Kenji’s. But it was fun!
I got very little sleep (a tradition!), and, after triple-checking my ticket and setting both an alarm and a wake-up call, made it to the airport with everyone else. So far, so good. I declined to buy fine Swiss chocolate, having absolutely zero confidence in my ability to convey chocolate safely home.
Getting out of Geneva was a snap. Frankfurt? That was a little trying.
Here’s a tip: When German security tells you to take everything out of your pockets, they don’t mean everything metal. They mean everything. Because they are not going to have you step through a metal detector, they are going to have a guy pat you down, undo your belt buckle, and check every pocket. It was, uh, intimate. I only took the metal stuff out of my pockets, and the guy patting me down said something disgusted in German and told the lady working the belt to give me another bowl to put things in. I took everything else out, but he still managed to find a scrap of paper in one of my cargo pockets, which he gingerly placed in the bowl, tutting all the while.
Then they found a mysterious piece of metal in my computer bag, which they ransacked it trying to find until they gave up and asked me. It turned out to be (as I knew as soon as I saw the screen) an object of some sentimental value that I’d forgotten was in there. The lady motioned over several hulking German military men to confiscate it. I was told that I could not take it on the plane and given a long explanation, in German, as to why not. I almost followed it, and under better circumstances I might have, but seeing my uncomprehending expression, the lady said, “In English.”
At which point the lengthy explanation was neatly summarized: “You cannot take zat on ze plane.” And so, indeed, I couldn’t. Arrrgh!
The rest of my group was long gone by that time, and I didn’t know where our gate was, but I figured it out, at length. I arrived in time to hear the desk clerk on the intercom snidely abusing people who attempted to get on the plane before their row was called. “Okay. I will say it one more time. Perhaps you did not understand…”
Easily the least pleasant time I have ever spent in an airport doing routine things. Yeesh. After the laid-back, Italian-flavored Swiss version of Germanic institutionalism, a return to the real thing was shocking.
The flight, when I did get on, was long, as ever, the saving grace being that the intercom in our section was broken. Apparently the desk clerk actually got on the plane intercom and sort-of-but-not-really apologized to everyone.
It occurred to me at some point how much trouble Wizards’ web presence and organized play department would be in if that plane went down. There were half a dozen key personnel on that flight. Even dismissing unlikely scenarios where we all die, maybe having that many of us subject to the same delays is bad, too. Speaking of which…
We arrived some 8 hours later in Dulles, where we learned that our flight to Seattle was canceled. I then had a massive nosebleed right as I was stepping up to the security line, but I managed to squirm out of my bags and jackets. The lady at security was very understanding about it--old-fashioned American hospitality is good sometimes.
We ended up splitting into two groups, one group flying back via Denver and arriving two hours late (in theory; three hours late in practice), the other going via San Francisco and arriving four hours late (half past midnight).
I needed to know where my knew flight was, so I went to a little help kiosk on rollers. I stepped up just in time to overhear the guy at the desk say, “My name is Ben. Ben Hur. This is my chariot. When the Christians give me trouble, I run ‘em over. Only the Christians, though. There aren’t enough Jews in the world.”
Yes, this was the guy who would see me safely to my plane… But he did, no problem. I ended up in coach, front and center, with no leg room and the screen right in my face. Not my best flight ever.
Scott and I shared excellent sushi and stories in the San Francisco airport (he still hadn’t heard about Paris), and finally arrived home at half past midnight. The trip back was a little trying, but we made it.
Pictures coming soon!
I took a cab to airport early on the morning of Tuesday, February 6. I was waiting there alone for some time, but I was eventually joined by four other Wizards folks, all rather bigger wigs than I. I had met three of them before. After a brief layover in Dulles Airport (DC), we made the long haul across to Zürich. I, as usual, had stayed up way too late packing the night before and gotten less than 4 hours of sleep, so napping on the plane came easily.
In Zürich the next morning (local time; around midnight body time), Coverage Manager Greg C. and I got a little lost trying to get through passport control. It turns out that you don’t have to retrieve and recheck your baggage (as you do on the way back), and getting through customs and passport control is easier than getting back into the U.S. I suppose these are among the benefits of being notoriously neutral. Who bombs Switzerland?
I had brought $80 with me in cash, which I turned into something like 90 Swiss francs. Not having to think too much about conversions is always nice, although of course ultimately it all just costs what it costs. At first I was surprised the Swiss weren’t on the euro, then I thought about it for half a second and felt stupid. Neutral!
Zürich was great, though--clean and efficient like Germany, but with French food. I was surprised at how bilingual it was, not in German and French but in German and English. There was hardly any French to be found, although the superb breakfast menu at the café we stopped in read like one of the ones from Paris. I could even mostly understand people, despite the horror stories I’d heard about Schwitzerdeutsch. Of course, once they heard my accent they switched to flawless English immediately. Damn.
The airport is also just beautifully designed, functional and attractive, with real shops and cafes and restaurants instead of the cheap shopping mall crap you get in American airports. You could buy nice shoes, fine chocolates, designer clothing, all in the best of taste. All in all it was the most pleasant airport experience I have ever had.
And a damn good chocolate-filled croissant, too. I’m telling you, I could get used to this Switzerland thing.
***
Geneva, of course, is totally different, and a glance at a map (which I hadn’t bothered to do beforehand) quickly revealed why. Go on, take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sz-map.gif. Find Zürich, over in the middle North. Now find Geneva… on a tiny tongue of Switzerland that isn’t France only through some historical accident. In fact, it turns out that the Geneva airport actually has a concourse in France.
So where Zürich was like Germany with French food, Geneva is more like France with German efficiency. Although France and Germany can both be a little stifling, I soon discover that there’s also an undercurrent of Italian-style relaxedness running through the whole affair. The combination is quite pleasant, in fact, the nearly Parisian attitude of our hotel staff notwithstanding.
I touched base with various friends and acquaintances from previous coverage gigs, then spent over 30 francs (!!!) to get 24 hours of Internet access so I could work. Europe is not so much with the free (or even cheap) Internet. Of course, one hour was 15 francs, so I got a bargain! Kind of.
Several of us tried to go downtown for dinner, but it was raining and we couldn’t find the bus stop, so in the end one of our number soldiered on while the rest of us went back to the hotel restaurant to eat.
I was rooming with British coverage hound Tim W., a charismatic fellow with whom I’d worked in Paris. With nothing pressing going on the next morning, we stayed up into the night talking.
Tim left early the next morning to go on a ski trip with many of the players and coverage staff. I’d been tempted to go on the ski trip, but that was really my only day to explore Geneva. There are many places in the world to go skiing, but I can only see Geneva in Geneva. Before I left the office, some of us had discussed the odds on visible injuries from the ski trip, putting them somewhere above 50%. And in fact, there was one busted lip--on Tim’s pretty face. He was a sport about it, though.
I did some work in the morning, had lunch with other coverage guys, took a few pictures of the crowd of gamers milling around outside the glass doors of the venue zombie-style, and then caught the bus into downtown Geneva. Unlike Internet access, all public transit in Geneva is, thanks to recent public ordinance, absolutely free. All residents are issued bus passes; the hotel handed out temporary passes to guests. We were told that there was some sort of penalty if we were caught on a bus or tram without one of these free objects (I guess that’s to keep vagrants from riding), but I never saw tickets being checked or anything.
I wandered around on the waterfront for a bit but soon gravitated toward the old city (which I insisted on thinking of as the “Altstadt” because it seemed so German). Old Geneva was a densely built-up little town on a hill, with steep inclines and the narrow alleys that all old little European towns have. It’s a lovely city.
The weather was pretty miserable, almost exactly like it had been in Renton when I left--gray, 40ish, and drizzly. Ah, well. It made the Old Town look even more austere and imposing.
I have never seen a city with so much statuary. It seemed like every other corner had a fountain or a monument or the bust of some important figure in Genevan (Genevese?) history. Most of them were inscribed in French with indications of their historical significance that I half-followed, although one fountain was labeled simply “Erige en Memoire du 12 Decembre 1602,” which I took a picture of so I’d remember to look it up later. It turned out to be the date of probably the biggest event in the city’s history, L’Escalade--the defeat of the Duke of Savoy’s troops as they tried to scale the walls of Geneva on the longest night of the year. In this country that would be either a tiny plaque somewhere or a huge commemorative park, but in Europe the history is just… part of the landscape.
I wandered aimlessly, taking photographs and marveling at how differently from the Parisians the Genevans seemed to have approached their historical buildings. Parts of Paris feel like they’re in a museum, facades unchanged for two hundred years. In Geneva, the buildings are still there, but many of them have been hollowed out and given renovated, very modern interiors. Very weird.
I found a strange little cannon park where two girls were trying to take their own picture by balancing their camera on a ledge. They couldn’t get the timer to work, and their camera was in a precarious position anyway, so I offered to snap the picture for them. There are worse things to do on a rainy afternoon in Geneva.
I then wandered into a much larger park where people were playing chess on boards ten feet square. I’m impressed the pieces don’t just up and vanish; even I would be tempted to steal a foot-tall chess piece. Past the chess boards, I ran up against a wall.
No, really. I found a wall. And not just any wall, but a wall with LUTHER chiseled at one end and ZWINGLI at the other, with statues and inscriptions along its length. I got chills up my spine just looking at it. I started at one end and worked my way down, quickly realizing that it was a monument to the Reformation (the “LUTHER” inscription tipped me off). There were inscriptions in archaic German (a declaration by one of the Fredericks), French (something about religious French something something), and English (the Lord’s Prayer, minus that “deliver us from evil” bit they added later). The archaic German was fascinating--I’ve seen pre-modern English before and could barely register the difference in the French, but old German was new to me. There were also statues set into the wall, mostly people whose names I didn’t recognize--but John Calvin and especially Oliver Cromwell gave me pause. Kind of creepy, as were the four huge statues in the center with three Greek letters inscribed over them. Along the top of the wall was the inscription “POST TENEBRAS LUX,” Latin for (say it with me now) “After darkness, light.” How cool is that?
I looked it up later and discovered that it’s called the Reformation Wall. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation_Wall
I walked a bit down by the waterfront as well (Lake Geneva being the water in question) and saw swans, boats, the Alps in the distance, and a clock made out of flowers. No joke.
I got back in time for dinner with the guys, then stayed up too late again. That’s coverage for you.
Friday and Saturday were pretty much par for the course, with dinner out on the town Friday night. I did get to meet one of my writers, which means that now there are only two people who write for me who I haven’t met. On Saturday, we played Magic, and I beat a noted pro, Craig J. (okay, he’s noted for being mediocre in this format, but still) and an intimidating former pro on the staff (Randy B., who was my boss but was promoted away), so that was pretty exciting.
Sunday night was the staff dinner, when several of my co-workers heard the story of my extended stay in Paris for the first time (and not from me… awkward). Greg and I arrived late after finishing up the coverage and waiting for the videos to load properly.
Our waiter was a delightful little man, possibly the Swissiest man I can imagine ever meeting. He was short, with a round face, short blond hair, a little vest, and an impish smile. He was polite, efficient, proper, and friendly. German coverage writer Hanno T. and I insisted on posing for a picture with him, but that was on someone else’s camera. Frowntown.
We late arrivals didn’t yet have wine glasses but had poured ourselves wine anyway, Greg in his water glass and I in my soda glass. When the waiter came around with a new bottle of wine, Greg (who knows better) held up his water glass. The waiter gave the funniest little smile, shook his head, held up one finger, and left. He returned swiftly with a wine glass and poured the wine with impeccable technique. I then held up my soda glass, and the whole sequence happened again, with no trace of annoyance or impatience.
I discovered, to my horror, that wine really does taste better in a wine glass. Much better. Blast! Now I will feel compelled to care about such things, which I had always dismissed as wine snobbery. (I completed my descent in Dulles Airport on the trip back, when one of the other Wizards guys took me to a wine bar.)
The dinner was delightful. I learned from a Scottish woman at our table that my birthday is a national holiday in Scotland (because it is also poet Robert Burns’s birthday, which I did not know). Apparently the celebrations consist chiefly of eating haggis. Man, just thinking of that is going to make my next birthday ten times better.
After dinner we headed back to the hotel bar, where I played two-player team Magic with Scott J., who manages the web site. He went to bed after a particularly brutal loss to a pair of German judges, so I cast about desperately for a teammate. I spotted Kenji Tsumura, an 85-pound Japanese guy who’s cute as a button and, oh yeah, happens to be a former Player of the Year and one of the top minds in Magic today. I had met him briefly earlier in the weekend.
“Kenji,” I said. “Be on my team?” He shook his head vigorously and made sleeping motions, but I begged and he acquiesced. I was teaming up with Kenji Tsumura! Even for somebody on the inside, that’s pretty exciting. I was afraid that language would be a barrier, but his English is better than people say. With clear communications established and one of the best players in the world as co-pilot, I was confident and excited.
We got demolished, through no fault of Kenji’s. But it was fun!
I got very little sleep (a tradition!), and, after triple-checking my ticket and setting both an alarm and a wake-up call, made it to the airport with everyone else. So far, so good. I declined to buy fine Swiss chocolate, having absolutely zero confidence in my ability to convey chocolate safely home.
Getting out of Geneva was a snap. Frankfurt? That was a little trying.
Here’s a tip: When German security tells you to take everything out of your pockets, they don’t mean everything metal. They mean everything. Because they are not going to have you step through a metal detector, they are going to have a guy pat you down, undo your belt buckle, and check every pocket. It was, uh, intimate. I only took the metal stuff out of my pockets, and the guy patting me down said something disgusted in German and told the lady working the belt to give me another bowl to put things in. I took everything else out, but he still managed to find a scrap of paper in one of my cargo pockets, which he gingerly placed in the bowl, tutting all the while.
Then they found a mysterious piece of metal in my computer bag, which they ransacked it trying to find until they gave up and asked me. It turned out to be (as I knew as soon as I saw the screen) an object of some sentimental value that I’d forgotten was in there. The lady motioned over several hulking German military men to confiscate it. I was told that I could not take it on the plane and given a long explanation, in German, as to why not. I almost followed it, and under better circumstances I might have, but seeing my uncomprehending expression, the lady said, “In English.”
At which point the lengthy explanation was neatly summarized: “You cannot take zat on ze plane.” And so, indeed, I couldn’t. Arrrgh!
The rest of my group was long gone by that time, and I didn’t know where our gate was, but I figured it out, at length. I arrived in time to hear the desk clerk on the intercom snidely abusing people who attempted to get on the plane before their row was called. “Okay. I will say it one more time. Perhaps you did not understand…”
Easily the least pleasant time I have ever spent in an airport doing routine things. Yeesh. After the laid-back, Italian-flavored Swiss version of Germanic institutionalism, a return to the real thing was shocking.
The flight, when I did get on, was long, as ever, the saving grace being that the intercom in our section was broken. Apparently the desk clerk actually got on the plane intercom and sort-of-but-not-really apologized to everyone.
It occurred to me at some point how much trouble Wizards’ web presence and organized play department would be in if that plane went down. There were half a dozen key personnel on that flight. Even dismissing unlikely scenarios where we all die, maybe having that many of us subject to the same delays is bad, too. Speaking of which…
We arrived some 8 hours later in Dulles, where we learned that our flight to Seattle was canceled. I then had a massive nosebleed right as I was stepping up to the security line, but I managed to squirm out of my bags and jackets. The lady at security was very understanding about it--old-fashioned American hospitality is good sometimes.
We ended up splitting into two groups, one group flying back via Denver and arriving two hours late (in theory; three hours late in practice), the other going via San Francisco and arriving four hours late (half past midnight).
I needed to know where my knew flight was, so I went to a little help kiosk on rollers. I stepped up just in time to overhear the guy at the desk say, “My name is Ben. Ben Hur. This is my chariot. When the Christians give me trouble, I run ‘em over. Only the Christians, though. There aren’t enough Jews in the world.”
Yes, this was the guy who would see me safely to my plane… But he did, no problem. I ended up in coach, front and center, with no leg room and the screen right in my face. Not my best flight ever.
Scott and I shared excellent sushi and stories in the San Francisco airport (he still hadn’t heard about Paris), and finally arrived home at half past midnight. The trip back was a little trying, but we made it.
Pictures coming soon!