Last night, I flew from Hungary to Finland.
The flight in itself was utterly uneventful, and I can’t help laughing at how utterly Finnish it was. The food served was mediocre factory-made meatballs with mashed potatoes that probably hadn’t seen a potato for a long time. What I mean to say is, the food was perfectly edible, better than usual, but for all its pleasantness, nothing compared to home cooking. They served dark dark rye bread, which I eagerly sank my teeth into, and a Fazer’s Blue chocolate candy for dessert.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The long taxi drive to the airport was alright. It was the same taxi driver that I have had two times before already and been horrified at his driving as he drives at a constant speed of 120 km, no matter what the speed limit. This means that he passes all the cars he possibly can when he is NOT meant to be passing cars.
I had a nice fellow passenger - a cute guy who smiled every now and then, offered gum, but didn’t speak at all… at least, not until I attempted to communicate that I needed a pause.
You see, I drank half a liter of water - which is never a good idea when you have a 3 hour car trip ahead of you. But I was thirsty! And Eyal had packed it for me along with some nice pastries and a sandwich for the trip, and it made me feel a little less lonely to drink it.
The driver speaks nothing but Hungarian and a few random words of German… and I on the other hand speak nothing but all kinds of other languages and a few random words of German.
I tried to say, “Excuse me.. can we have a PAUSE?”
The passenger and driver looked at each other, confused. Clearly the international word of ‘pause’ did not apply in Hungarian.
“Could we have a little STOP?” I tried again. This time the taxi driver understood, and I added, “harom percs”, which I think means “three minutes” in Hungarian to make it clear what kind of pause it was I needed.
He pulled over to a surprisingly clean gas station, where my fellow passenger and I sought out and discovered that “mosdó” is Hungarian for toilet, thanks to a very unhelpful sign on a helpfully ajar door.
We walked back to the car, and this time the passenger started talking to me… in German. This was extremely challenging for me for several reasons:
Firstly, I was already embarassed from the experience of having to explain to a male audience that I need to pee.
Secondly, I’m very nervous around strangers - why? I don’t know. And it’s doubly worse if they’re cute.
Thirdly, my German sucks! I learned about 2 months of it in school, and the rest came from watching the likes of Komissar Rex, Ein Fall für Zwei, and Ninja Turtles dubbed in German!
But we talked for a while, and he told me how good my German was, as required by international law to keep your conversational partner talking.
The taxi ride distance was incredibly shortened by enjoyable conversation. We were both dropped off at the same terminal, where we both had a flight leaving at roughly the same time. Due to a conspiracy of circumstances, we were unable to check in and spent a bit under an hour chit-chatting in a café - the only seats available, while drinking coffee and tea the slowest possible.
It was the kind of chit-chat which has some awkward silences, but truth be told, I still enjoyed it. After checking in, I was beginning to suspect rather paranoidly that he was tired of my company, and we both agreed I was going to go through security alone. I had a mission to hunt down a present for someone, you see…
But first I got his information, and after several hours of conversation, we actually introduced ourselves to each other. I’m so bad at these social things, like talking and introductions! I was blushing like crazy, and we did some kind of shuffling line-dance forward while exchanging details, because neither of us had enough hands to write down phone numbers and e-mail addresses while holding all our luggage.
By the time I got to security, I was so flustered that I nearly forgot my phone in my pocket. I passed through the metal detector without beeping, but then my backpack was siphoned off to a sidelane, where a grumpy-looking woman with bad English demanded I open my bag.
“Liquids?” She said.
“Liquids? Noo…. Shouldn’t be…”
“Yes!” She insisted. At this point I realized her previous question was not a question - just a demand to know why I was smuggling in liquids. “There liquids!”
I blinked.
“Shit! Ooh my waterbottle! I’m sorry!” I’d been so befuddled by the effort of talking to the cute German guy that I forgot to throw away my water. She glared at me as I took the water bottle out and handed it to her.
“Leave here?” She asked in choppy English.
“Yes.” I mean, what choice did I have?? Do they actually let you take water with you if you can prove to you that water is water? I think not!
Inside, I couldn’t remember which way the liquer shop was, so I checked left first and discovered useless glittery items, smelly perfume shops, and the toilets.
Of course, when I came out of the toilets, the German guy was headed towards them, and I stupidly supplied something along the lines of not finding the right store here. Lame!
Then, I headed to the opposite end, where I proceeded to pick and choose the gift out of a nice selection of wines. I took one good wine from 2000, one cheap wine from 2003, and then a package of chocolates to bring to work.
There was a huge line at the cashier I chose. She processed about 1 customer in 5 minutes, was very rude, and very slow. You could see she was suffering. I felt sorry for her until it was my turn, at which point (although I had placed all the items on the counter, supplied my bording card without being asked to, and had my wallet out and everything), she proceeded to be super-rude. My credit card didn’t work, so I tried my other one, and that one didn’t work either. She suggested maybe the PIN was wrong, but I knew it wasn’t, because although the machines spoke Hungarian, they always said “PIN OK” in sort of ok English. I tried to pay in cash, but was 10€ short… She sighed and glared at me. So then I tried to leave out the cheap wine and the chocolates, but she wouldn’t let me and insisted on trying the cards again, because she felt it would be too much work to do it all again.
SOOOooo.. Then, after re-attempting the cards and again failing, she finally acquiesced, with a bitter stare and another angry sigh, to leave out the two shopping items and let me pay by cash.
I know it was not my fault - both cards had enough value on them and I had definitely NOT hit the limit on either one that day, having only taken out a small amount of cash from the ATM earlier that day.
I don’t understand why she had to make it a problem with ME as a person when it must be something with their machines, or her punching in the wrong things.
Of course, being already embarassed, I didn’t put up a fight against being treated unfairly. And when I stepped out of the store, I encountered the German guy right outside of it.
By now I was REALLY red in the face from the harassment by the cashier, so I don’t even remember what I mumbled when he said that his flight had stolen my gate.
I proceeded to find my own gate, where I by some miracle found a seat and whipped out my laptop to surf the web on free wifi courtesy of Pannon. Of course, the wifi refused to work. Instead, I took out the tremendously confusing book of “Lies, Inc.” by Philip K. Dick and went to work on that.
They began calling people sitting at 20-25, then 26 to thirty-something… I had seat 6 of course, so I waited obediently until the very end. Which I would’ve done anyway… but I just found it annoying to be told to be very very last.
While waiting to board the plane, a lot of Finnish people making very stupid comments bumbled around, horribly confused why people at the Hungarian airport did not speak in Finnish when making announcements.
WHAT THE HELL, guys?! How on earth did you survive in Hungary on your vacation?? I can guarantee you that they did not speak Finnish to you at your hotel! In fact, you were lucky if they spoke ENGLISH! So how can you expect the Hungarian women to speak fluent FINNISH of all languages? It’s not like Finland is one of the main sources of tourism in Hungary!
Retards.
And there were the obligatory monstrous kids as well, who couldn’t stop touching things, breaking things, shoving people, cutting ahead in line, and screaming all the time. The angry mother with her “Now I’m really angry”-voice couldn’t keep them under control, despite clear verbal instructions. The little pea-brains kept forgetting the instructions 1 second after obeying them and resuming whatever deranged thing they were doing.
They must have passed out during the flight, because I didn’t hear them after take-off.
Oof.
And once I got onto the plane, everything was good. No friendly, cute German guy to distract my brain, and best of all, just nice, polite service…
Even my luggage arrived in one piece.
7 months ago
