Tag: airports

Smugglers

I prefer that term to the one actually used, traffickers, as the term used makes me think painfully of human and child versions of it. Super sore subject for me, which only increases the pain of the actual topic at hand.

Anyway, we crossed a National Geographic show that was a documentary-esque suspense-injected show following federal police at airports in Peru and Italy who track and aim to prevent drug trafficking. At first, it was really cool to see the police work and to work so well. But it eventually just became increasingly sad – all the people involved in the trafficking have miserably sad problems that led them to make the smuggling attempt in the first place. Most of them were convinced by some outside source that it would work and that they would receive enough money from that someone afterward that would solve some major problem in their lives. In a way, advantage was taken of them, and some even were conned into doing it.

These people’s lives are then directed to years in prison, the single instance of drug transfer is stopped, and the origins of the drugs in the first place are left practically untouched. So, it may make things a bit tougher for the drug organizations to distribute their drugs around the globe, but what do they truly care about a small amount stopped at an airport? It cost them only that small amount, and the people imprisoned were no skin off their backs. They likely will find more sad and desperate people to take the risk the next day, again and again.

The cycle is not stopped, only disturbed with a small ripple.

The one consolation I had – that they may at least have a place to live with food and water once imprisoned, keeping them off the streets and from utter poverty – was dashed at the mention of the high likelihood that they might be “removed permanently” by the drug folks and their connections within prisons.

How utterly sad… all of it is immensely sad.

Though it is a new way for me to look at the world, I can see very easily how this very much is the work of the devil. (Yes, that still sounds weird to me, but I believe it nonetheless.)

Dear God, please, help us to heal the broken people. Help the most broken ones to return to you and your guidance. Help us all to repent and to turn fully to you and your will, at all levels and in all places and at all times. We are all in such need of you – help us to hear your call and to respond lovingly to it and with the immediately due haste. Help us, please, to love and to be filled with your love. Help us to embrace your love such that we can always and powerfully reject the devil and his ways. Help us to start to heal your people and this beautiful world you created and in which we still are blessed to live. In your name, I pray. Amen.

Post-a-day 2023

Airport hotels

Yeah… going forward, I want just to go ahead and go home on the late-night flight, instead of having to stay a single night at a hotel near the airport. I’m not a fan of this whole unpacking and repacking for a single night thing, especially at the somewhat overpriced mediocre hotels near the airports. I dislike getting home after midnight and all, but, if I don’t have to be anywhere early the next day anyway, I’d rather be at home in my own bed already.

God, grant us safe travels, especially tomorrow, please. Thank you for such a positive and beneficial trip for us all. In your name, I pray. Amen.

Post-a-day 2022

I’ve never landed on snow…*

Well, here we go!

Ich freue mich so sehr.

Ich habe aber doch ein bisschen Angst.

Ich gehe trotzdem, und vielleicht weil ich diesen Angst habe.

I guess I’m still reasonably tired right now – German was all I had to express myself right there…

It has been fun visiting Montréal these past hours.

It seems like a lovely place – not by the sights so much as by the lifestyle and the people I have crossed and noticed.

I’ve used almost no English while here, had not even considered that it was French-speaking Canada – mostly because my friend who lives here is from Houston and is not someone I would consider “French-speaking”, so it didn’t even occur to me that it would be in this part of Canada, wherever he happened to live – and have loved every bit.

I always wonder when I go to the Mexican parts of our Houston culture – the tamale places, the panaderías, Fiesta – how the workers know which language to use, Spanish or English.

Do they judge people by their covers, as we were always told not to do?

And yet, I think they must.

And I think that is exactly what is great about a successful business like that (cross-cultural business, I mean): their being able to identify appropriately the customers’ culture, and then interact accordingly with the customers.

When I entered the plane yesterday, to go from Houston to Montréal on Air Canada, I knew they would be operating in bother French and in English.

I also considered briefly how any American airline likely would not do such a thing, and would use exclusively English, just about always, no matter the destination…

(When I interviewed with an airline once as a multilingual flight attendant, they made it sound terrible: the multilingual flight attendants are only ever one individual on any given plane, used to act as translator, and only when needed… it wasn’t about greeting people’s home cultures at all, or serving… it was just about putting out fires, essentially…)

And I wondered how the airline workers would judge.

At baggage check-in, the man greeted me easily and mid-conversation style in English, and I thought nothing of it.

But, at boarding time, as I was surrounded by passengers speaking a mix of French and English, I wondered how the flight attendants would handle it.

Sure enough, as we were stepping into the plane, the greeting post was using one language or the other, depending on how she judged each individual.

And she always had a happy passenger, so she was judging correctly.

My mother and I have discussed how I am rather European, at least for an American – I have many contrasting aspects of the two cultures that kind of go back and forth for me (I’ll give an example in a moment.).

As I took my own steps onto the plane, the greeter gave me the direct-look evaluation, considered, and then said, “Bonjour.”

I automatically respond in kind.

And I was elated.

I was taken for a French speaker, likely due to the European style of my outfit for the day – fitted half-collar long-sleeved black shirt, scarf, snug – but not tight – jeans, and fashionable winter boots.

People from Texas just don’t dress like that. 😛

Today, in contrast, I am very American in my dress: oversized purple long-sleeved t-shirt, same boots and jeans and scarf, and a beret… an odd combination of the two cultures.

But I don’t have to worry about what language people will use with me today – everyone uses both automatically at the airport.

‘Bonjour, Hello,’ they always say.

And the response determines the language used.

But they always say the French first…, and so I automatically am responding before they are finished with the English greeting…, and so they end up using French with me…, which I like very much.

I don’t often have such an opportunity, and I am grateful that I am embracing it.

Anywho… Montréal is nice, is really, really cold, and is beautiful with the snow everywhere (and gives a new experience for me with everyone acting like the snow is normal and nothing big deal [because it is normal here]).

Snow:

*This first was the airport last night, when we had landed on a boatload of snow… snow was everywhere, including where the planes were driving…(!!!)

Including when I picked up my bags at baggage claim:

Now I am off to Japan.

See you on the other side (literally)!

P.S. This flight is to Japan, now, so they will be using all three languages, and I am delighted. 🙂

Post-a-day 2019

Opera, Veterans, and Travel

I have two things on my mind right now: opera and emotions.

Tonight, due to the gracious encouragement of a new acquaintance, I found myself attending a unique performance, called “Glory Denied” and put on by Houston Grand Opera and HGOco.  The main character is a man in the Vietnam War, who becomes a prisoner of war for nine years, and then eventually returns to the USA.  The story, essentially, is how his life falls apart throughout it all.  It is sad and tragic, and the music only makes it more so.  The setting of the performance being an old airplane hangar that has turned into a museum added to the show itself.  The comedic and especially unique bit of the night was the fact that directions to the bathrooms included going “around the helicopter tail.”

Now, this opera was sad.  Period.  And I knew it was sad beforehand, so I made an effort to stay detached from it.  I have a history of becoming too engulfed by something to be able to separate myself from it fully.  When I read books, it is so easy for me to fall into the narrator’s experiences, that I find myself being agitated in life, if the narrator was agitated wherever I left off in my reading, or giddy and joyful, if that was his/her mood.  I even take on phrases and mannerisms of the characters, and ask myself questions that I am accustomed to reading (or hearing, if it is an audiobook) from them.  I’m not sure that I’ve been ever as on-edge, frown-y, tense, and distrusting as I was while listening to the Hunger Games audiobooks.  Life was intense during that one.  That is why I wanted to keep my distance tonight, because I know people have very intense experiences when it comes to war.

As I watched the opera, I found myself wondering if these people, the performers, ever have to deal with such a thing as I do.  Do they have repercussions in their daily lives, due to the effect playing that particular character had on their mental state?  Do they find themselves questioning their sanity, when they have been playing a character whose scale leans too far toward the insane?  I wonder.

And I almost succeeded in staying separate from the emotions of the characters.  I made it through most of the show safely, but then a surprising part hit me hard.  As the main character begins pouring out the shattering sorrows of adjusting to a changed world, back in the USA after nine years of imprisonment, I was dragged into his experience.  Tears rolled slowly down my face, unbidden.  No, I have never been a POW nor even been in a war, but I have been in my own version of that same homecoming.  No parades, no parties, no photos nor celebrations.  Life around me is unchanged by my silent arrival to the country I call home.  Did they even notice my return?  The characters sang of the expectations a returning veteran might have of his family and friends, – that they be as loving and excited about him as they were when he left, and that they were missing and thinking of him as much as he was of them during his absence – and of the unstable feeling of returning to a physical world – one in which he had always felt stability – that has altered dramatically, and even unrecognizably in places.

I know this experience.  Again, not the whole war and POW stuff.  Certainly not that.  Living abroad several times, I have been in my own version of this veteran’s experience after the war.  I have learned and improved each time, and I have done my best in more recent years to prepare myself for how people will have changed by the time I return to Houston.  No matter what I do, though, there is always a sort of anticipation, a hopeful expectation of how they will be.  They will be the best versions of themselves with me, and their love will fill me constantly.  They will be patient with me, and gentle.  They will be interested in my experience since I have been gone.  All of this, because they have missed me and thought longingly of me as I have of them, throughout all of my new struggles in this new life I was living temporarily.  And then, when I arrive, finding that this is not the case, they are not as I had unconsciously expected, it is confusing.  I recognize the place and the people, but they are both different from what I left, and I cannot quite see how or why.  They have not been through what I have.  They have not had my struggles.  So why do they not comfort me and love me as I have so needed during my absence, as I so need now?  They are different from how I remember them, from how they have existed in my mind while we have been apart.  But so am I, and I see that they have mistaken who I am now, for an image they have built of me inside their own minds.  They can see that I have changed, and I can see that they have changed, but we don’t understand one another’s change, and it is difficult to cope, to fathom, even.  And there is always that extra edge of my experiences having been good reason for me to have changed, but theirs were not.

I have not been in the military nor in a war, but I know this small, unsettling, and somewhat worldview-shattering experience of coming home to a now-foreign home.  As the lead character raged about his home being so not like the home he once knew, I was dragged into the pain, feeling my own current struggles of readjustment coming forth from deep inside.  I am still living in his pain today, though I have been back for a few months.  And it hurt even more still, as I saw that my own experience of struggle has lasted so long, although I was only gone for a year this time.  How terribly long this period of struggle must have been for this man, must still be for veterans returning today.  I went from peaceful times to peaceful times, and my pain still lingers.  They likely did not and still do not have such peace on both ends.

I am forever grateful that veterans have made that sacrifice of ease, in order to do what they believed best to help the world at large.  I am concerned that we do not do enough to help them with the latter end of their tours, with their returns and readjustments.  It is difficult enough altering a regular lifestyle in one culture to a regular one in another culture, like what I have done so often.  It is practically unfathomable to go from comfort to a war zone lifestyle, and then back to a house in a safe, city life lifestyle – is the brain ever ready to cope with a change so drastic and so quick?  I found myself wanting to hug and hold the characters in the show all tightly to my chest, and to fill them all with love and acceptance of whoever they are and in whatever place they are mentally/emotionally/psychologically.  ‘You are safe here, you are important here, and you are perfect as you are.’  I know it was only a show, but it exists only because the story itself is real, and all too common, I believe.

Post-a-day 2017

 

 

Making conversation at customs

Tonight, at the airport’s immigration and customs check, I was chatting casually with the girl working my counter.  When my passport scanned, and my picture appeared on the screen, she commented that I had had short hair back then, and, after a comment from me, she asked about the reasoning behind the short hair.

I told her that I had shaved it as part of a fundraiser for pediatric cancer, and we both marveled at the idea of having no hair at all.  She asked about people’s reactions to it, and I shared of the regular misconceptions people had – first, when it was very short, that I had cancer, then, as it grew longer a bit, that I was either making a political statement or was a homosexual or gender fluid individual.  At her request, I told of the oddities that come with growing one’s hair long again, after having it be short for so long (it takes a long while to grow out long hair from a bald scalp), and how I regularly am surprised still today when my hair whacks a guy in the face while dancing, or gets stuck as I roll up the window in the car.

She told me of a time that she had complimented a woman’s hair style, which happened to be quite short but super flattering on the woman.  The woman had replied that she had only just recently been free of her cancer, and so this was her first hair growing back in, and she was utterly flattered and touched at the simple compliment from this sweet immigration and customs worker, who, in turn, complimented me on my fundraising efforts, my confidence, and my general desire to do good in the works.

As we parted, I had tears in my eyes.  I think that might be the best airport staff conversation I’ve ever had and ever will have. 

❤

Post-a-day 2017