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Departure:

Live from New York, at 10:30 am EST, I have been awake for 5 hours. We are totally fine, and our luggage is here, we are here, and we even sort of slept. We got in last night around midnight, totally crashed, woke up around 5 am, and now we’re confused and meandering around the house and wondering if we should go back to bed. I was lying awake reminding myself to write this down, so I thought if I got it over with I would maybe be able to sleep again. So if this is delirious sounding, that’s why.

We woke up on Saturday morning and did our normal thing, went to breakfast, last minute touches on packing, getting picked up for the airport at 11:30. We were going to call some guy (Dennis) and have him arrange a car for us, but he turned out to want to drive us himself. He’s a lawyer who knows Sasha somehow. Of course, he was running late and this made me very nervous and unpleasant. Kudos to Dad for not abandoning me on the streets of Ukraine.

Then he shows up but it’s some friend driving his car because he got so trashed the night before he’s still drunk, at noon. Just the guy I want to take me to catch a plane. He continued to drink beer as we drove. We got to the airport and got our seats changed so we weren’t in the last row! Our seats recline! Went through security (or rather, an x ray machine, which wasn’t secure at all), as we brought with our carry-on’s plenty of opened bottled water, vodka, and other random stuff no one gave a damn about.

We were also picking up our tickets for both flights, to Poland and to the US. Dad and I give the airport people our passports and they immediately print out Dad’s tickets and give him his passport back. They frown at mine for a while, and some guy comes and takes it and talks on the phone for a while with a serious face. They move us to the side to wait, because they do not see records of me on any flights today. Interesting. I look up at Dad at this point, and ask him to please not leave me behind in Odessa.

They find my tickets. We easily make it to Poland on time. We get off the plane, and, hm, there is a very very long line. We think, OK, we have an hour before our next flight and this will probably move fast, this is a line to get through some sort of passport control and then to security; everyone in this line has another plane to catch. But no. It doesn’t move. We watch people in line with us miss their flights, to Zurich, Chicago.

We are halfway through the line and our plane is leaving in a half hour. From another terminal.

We elbow past a mother and four kids. I still feel really sorry about that actually. I still don’t really know what they were looking at or for in that line, but we made it to security, where we got a lot of crap for having big bottles of vodka (but Ukraine let us do it! was our excuse) and, strangely, this very laptop. Our plane is supposed to be boarding. We are running. We made it, computer, pumpkin, vodka and all. We get to the gate, the last in the building (isn’t it always?) and of course, the plane is not going anywhere. No one’s on it. We get beer and Mexican food, Polish style.

Dad and I apply two different strategies to jet lag avoidance, as an experiment. I planned to stay awake all night until we get home (and I did!) while Dad sleeps as much as possible. Unlike our flight to Poland, we saw two movies, and I watched them both, and laughed out loud a lot which I attribute to fatigue. The children in front of me ask a lot of questions, and I practice the Russian alphabet. Azbuka.

We land late, but perfectly, and customs is a breeze. My suitcase comes out first, and Dad assumes his is lost while we wait a good while for it, but it comes. The little old man doesn’t break 55 the whole way home, but what can you do?

I slap myself to stay awake, like in movies, and surprisingly it works a lot. The experiment proves fruitless; we’re all awake by 545, but happy. I can’t think very well right now, but I am comfortable at home. I look forward to having a couple more days of ignoring the real world. I miss Odessa, too. The relatives are all calling!