From Here to There
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We arrived in Madinah, Saudi Arabia late yesterday; I’ll tell you all about that another day—it’s a whole saga. In the meantime, I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, when we landed in Dubai.
From Here to There
Flying into a new place (or even a place we’ve been before, but don’t know well) is always a bit of an event. I hope air travel never loses its wonder for me—get on a plane in humid, tropical Bangkok, watch a couple of movies, and the next thing you know, you’re descending over the flat, sandy desert-scape of the Arabian peninsula. It’s pretty much magic, to my mind.
And then we’re disgorged from the plane, into the airport. Even the worst airports—the most crowded, dysfunctional, or dirtiest—have some level of predictability. You know what an airport is, how it works, and what it’s trying to accomplish. Put people on airplanes, get the planes in the air. Get people off airplanes, send them away. There’s always a bathroom. There’s almost always someone with whom we can communicate. There are usually beverages, and a way to get cash. Chairs of some sort. Sometimes there’s even a small quiet corner in which we can gather ourselves and our luggage, and brace up for the whatever new challenges we’re about to encounter. Airports are a place of literal transition, where we move from the generic experience of flying-from-point-A-to-point-B, into the particular experience of a specific geographic location.
But leaving the airport is when the challenge begins.
Public transport can be somewhat easier to figure out, because at least there are usually signs pointing to the train or bus or metro. And sometimes public transport is the easiest, fastest option. But sometimes it can turn a thirty minute journey into a ninety minute ordeal of changing from one hot, crowded train to another, dragging bags, trying to keep them out of the way of all these people who just want to get to work, and struggling to keep my jet-lagged brain awake. Then there’s the last half mile, which is usually on foot. Many times, we’ve dragged our suitcases, clickety-clack, through the middle of a sidewalk cafe full of diners. Once we actually stumbled through a wedding dinner in a restaurant, as we were trying to find our way through the back entrance of a hotel. Clickety-clack: the music of the tourists.
Normal taxi service usually works just fine, especially if there’s a coordinator who writes our destination on a slip of paper, and tells us which car to get into. But sometimes we walk out of the airport into a scrum of drivers shouting in our faces and trying to ‘help’ with our bags, and that’s when I have to put on my big-girl panties and not freak out. Somewhere in India (I can’t remember where), we could see the taxi stand, surrounded by clamoring drivers, and as we approached to tell the coordinator where we wanted to go, a police officer came through swinging a huge stick, beating back the crowd of drivers. That’ll make you (me!) jump quickly out of the way.
The best is when we pre-arrange pick-up with our hotel, or a car service, and there’s someone standing at the exit holding a sign with our name on it, but that’s a rare treat. Even that isn’t always friction-free, though. Once we pre-booked a London-style cab from some fancy service, and then spent half an hour dragging our bags through a gigantic parking lot, dodging crazy drivers and trying to find the pick-up point.
A ride share service—Uber, or the local equivalent, is the solution that enables us to input our destination on the app, and ensure that we’re going to the hotel we actually booked, instead of the other one with the same name on the other side of town.
I don’t believe we have ever—not once—seen airport signage that actually told us (correctly) where we need to go to be picked up by an Uber.
Whatever signage we do find definitely doesn’t sync up with whatever the driver’s app says.
And then … the driver calls. Invariably, I’m grumpy and tired and hungry and thirsty and desperately searching for some indication of what terminal we’re in, or which pick-up zone, or whether that exit over there is A,B,C, or D, and then Lee is handing me his phone with no warning, and I’m trying to communicate with a driver who probably doesn’t speak English and definitely has a strong accent, and he’s trying to ask me where I’m standing in this airport I’ve never been to before, and that’s when I start snapping at Lee. I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth.
Shit happens. Sometimes I am graceless and cranky. Sometimes we find ourselves spending way more money than necessary, just to be done with it and get out of the heat. Sometimes we find ourselves flagging down the last taxi in sight for a two-hour drive, and I have to expend every last drop of mental energy keeping him awake in a language I don’t speak (yes, that happened, and I wrote about it here).
But you know what has never happened? We’ve never found ourselves stuck in the airport indefinitely. No one wants us living there—one way or another, we always get where we meant to go.
Take care,
Lisa
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