Brandie and I had quite a couple of days of travelling. We were supposed to fly out of Cincinnati Wednesday morning, getting to Miami around noon, giving us time to relax, maybe go to the beach, etc. Then we would be up early in the morning for our flight from Miami to Manaus, and there to Belem by 6ish Thursday evening.
Things didn’t start off well from the beginning. First thing at the airport, one of Brandie’s suitcases attacked her and she got a huge gash on the back of her leg. We had to perform some emergency first aide in the midst of the line to check in! :-P (I will have you know that Brandie’s cut is healing nicely, in case you were concerned.)
Then came struggle #2 for the day. I had called Delta a couple of days before leaving to talk to them about their baggage limits. On domestic flights, they charge for any checked bag, but not on international flights. When Brandie and I got our tickets through the travel agency, they couldn’t book our domestic flights to get to Miami for us, for some reason, so I did that separately. So I called Delta with the slight hope that we could get the baggage fee waived since we were actually going abroad. Lo and behold, the Delta representative that I talked to said that they have some kind of agreement with TAM airlines, which was what we were flying into Brazil, and so they could check our bags all the way through and TAM baggage guidelines would apply, not Delta’s. When we got to the ticket agent, she first told us that they couldn’t check them b/c there was too long of a layover in Miami, but she called her supervisor to double check. Then she told us that yes they could check them all the way through, but that the domestic fee would apply. Now, $25 for each bag not might seem like a lot of money for some of you, but for a student travelling on a budget, it is! Besides, it was more of the principle of the thing. So I called Delta, while standing in line, and explained the situation. The representative told me that the earlier person had told me that wrong thing and that they couldn’t waive the domestic fee for the luggage. I explained it once again and she put me on hold. When she came back, she told me that if the layover was less than 12 hours that they could have waived the fee, but b/c it is too long she can’t. That was possibly one of the most ludicrous explanations I had ever heard, plus she was now contradicting her earlier statement. And I told her as much. I said that Delta obviously can’t get its story straight from one moment to the next and that I would never fly Delta again. Of course, I don’t fly that much, so it’s not a huge loss for them. Now, I did raise my voice, but I did not swear at this person, but guess what? She hung up on me! Luckily, however, this story has a happy ending. The Delta representative at the ticket counter, whom I was very pleasant with and apologized for being a trouble customer, waived our fees for us on our luggage! She understood that I had taken the time to check up on this and that I was upset. She said she couldn’t control the way back, but she would waive it for the way down. We might have to pay on the way back, but I still count it as a victory! My dad would be so proud!
Have you heard the saying that bad things come in threes? Now you have. Our flight to Miami was delayed for a couple of hours…and then it was cancelled. I laughed. Out loud. Literally. We got a flight to Detroit and from there to Miami, but we had quite a few hours to kill. We went to a restaurant and wasted a few hours watching some soccer (we saw the incredible end to the US-Algeria game!) and then some tennis, and more soccer. By the time we left Cincinnati, we had been in the airport for close to 9 hours! We got into Miami a little b/f midnight, got to our crappy motel in time to get almost 4 hours of sleep. We were on the shuttle to go back to the airport by 5am, and by 7:30am, on an almost empty flight to Manaus.
Ah Manaus! It is a small airport, and I have to assume that most tourists don’t go that way, but fly directly to Rio or Sao Paulo, b/c they didn’t announce anything in English. All the workers at the airport spoke English, so we could ask them questions, but everything was only announced in Portuguese. My Portuguese consists of being able to say “Thank you,” but I used it quite often. After we went through customs and rechecked our bags, Brandie decided she wanted to look for food. So we pulled out our pocket dictionary (thanks, Marie!) and attempted to decipher what was what. A nice guy saw us stand there for quite a few minutes and also helped us. We had figured out what we might want to get, but we hadn’t exchanged any money yet. I tried to ask the workers if they took either credit card or American money, but seeing as how they didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Portuguese, we had little success, although we did find out that they take debit cards. I had a package of trail mix in my bag, so we decided to try again another day. I think it’s going to be quite entertaining when we are finally on our own in Rio in a couple of weeks to see how we manage ordering food, or really doing anything for that matter.
So we get on the plane to Belem and it backs away from the gate, and guess what? It pulls back in. These flights were also obviously for mainly Brazilians, b/c very little was ever repeated in English. The flight attendants only used Portuguese. The captain occasionally repeated his messages in English. Brandie says that it’s good for us to feel like the other, to feel out of place. Luckily for us, however, there were a couple of women near us on the plane who also spoke English, so they translated some of what was being said. Turns out both of the computers on board were not working. The pilots were going to go ahead and fly anyways, but they weren’t permitted to or something. So an hour+ later, we were finally on our way to Belem, the last stage of our journey, at least for a few days.
Belem is also a tiny airport, but we didn’t have to wait long for our luggage. Alanna, one of our guides here in Belem, picked us up and took us to Tulio’s dad’s apartment where we will be staying for these few days in Belem.
So Brandie and I are here, after quite a long two days. Tomorrow we are on our own in the morning, so we might venture to a place Alanna pointed out down the street, and then who knows what she will take us to do in the afternoon. Anything more insightful on my experiences so far will have to wait until another time b/c I am exhausted from travelling. More to come…
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