On the way home from church on Christmas Eve, my dad and I stopped by his office to pick up my mom’s Christmas present.
“How can I get this into the house without your mother seeing?” my dad asked.
“I know!” I said, “I’ll set a glass down on the table without a coaster! That’ll totally distract her!”
Hey, this isn’t the line for the PS3!
After our impromptu lost-luggage party, Scep and Katie took Stick and me out to a Montclair restaurant. It’s one of my favorites, and it’s the one where Scep and I have have our traditional pre-holiday margaritas. I bounced around in my chair unable to decide what to eat. I’m so excited to be back in an English-speaking country that I’ve become really chatty with everyone I see, so I ended up ordering what the waitress though would be a good back-in-the-US dinner. Yay! Scep, Katie, Stick and me are all back at home, eating delicious frizzled onions!
But I had about two bites of my amazing Western food… and it made me really, really sick.
When I got off the plane, my mom saw me getting escorted away from the other passengers, but she didn’t know I was heading to the lost-luggage area and she was worried that I was getting hauled off for questioning. She might have freaked out just a little tiny bit.
So when I went to pick up Stick today, and I saw him leaving the other passengers, I knew he was just going to the lost-luggage office. (I think his bags heard about the cool adventures my bags were having) Scep and Katie had come with me to the airport, and we call went to wait in the line with Stick. We met some other people who’d be wearing their traveling clothes on Christmas Day, and we started our own party in the lost-luggage line.
On the plus side, the British Airways missing bags office was was right next to the Air India lost luggage office so I could ask if they’d seen my bags recently.
“What were you doing in Moscow?” the immigration guy at Newark airport asked.
“Transfering planes from China, I was only there for a few hours.”
“What were you doing in China?”
“I was teaching English in Yantai and I had the greatest students ever and they actually paid me money to make up English games and play with middle schoolers! And I — “
“For how long?” he asked, scrutinizing my visas. Then he looked at all the other passport stamps, and started to ask more questions. “And then were did you go?”
“Then I went to Rome for ten days and then I had high romance, because guess what? Stick still likes me! And now I’m going home for Christmas, because honestly, where would I rather spend Christmas than New Jersey?”
“Welcome back,” he said, adding another stamp to my passport, and I was so happy to be home, I almost cried.
My euphoria lasted for about ten minutes, then I found out that the airline sent my bags to the wrong country, and Stick’s connecting flight got cancelled, so yesterday I lost everything (including my boyfriend) to the airlines.
Sorry for the recent lack of content. I don’t have anything to say that’s not ridiculously sappy, and any time I spend blogging is time I’m not spending making googly-eyes with Stick, which he says sweet things like “Great job spotting the ablative absolute, baby!”
This guy’s getting a little head from his wife…
Most people don’t know this, but the Romans actually colonized Yantai.
