In Orlando, warm, safe and sound!
The trip home was exhausting, but actually seemed to go by pretty quickly, with a few incidents of note:
Ghetto. I use the term not in its original definition as an area where people are forced to live by law or by economics, but by its more common, modern defnition: something that makes sense but violates societal mores. It's ghetto when you eat your cereal out of a frying pan. It's ghetto when you forgo repairing your car window and instead use a piece of cardboard and duct tape. And it's pretty ghetto when you spend the night sleeping on the floor of an airport bathroom, but it does make sense:
Not finding it financially viable to get a hotel room for my 7:00 AM flight, I had decided to sleep in the airport after arriving from Zhytomyr via Kyiv at 11:30 PM. All the benches were covered in Ukranians doing the same. After sleeping sitting up for an hour or so, I noticed the two girls I had been squeezed between were no longer there, possibly chased off by body odor or snoring. I could finally recline, which I did until I was awoken by a couple with two young children who obviously needed the benches more so than my whole body. Back to sitting up and finding myself awake, I decided to answer nature's call.
In my several hours of sleeping/sitting in a stupor, I had noticed the following problems with sleeping on the benches:
1) It was f-ing cold. The benches were right inside the airport doors and freezing air came in with every opening. The smartest and longest-staying of the sleepers were those on the benches farthest back. Not posessing either quality, my bench was sub-zero.
2) It was loud. Televisions played a loud, non-stop loop that included two techno videos, commercials, Ukraine promotional videos, a short segment on foot wrestling (I'm not kidding) and an "inspirational" short about Lance Armstrong. This does not help when one is trying to sleep sitting up.
3) It wasn't secure. I hadn't been overly worried about people stealing anything while I slept: after all, this was an airport and those there had to buy tickets, right? But, of course, right before I left, Diana was warning me about people who prowled the airports at night. I had hoped to get through customs and sleep on the other side where you HAD to have a ticket, but we weren't allowed to go through until two hours before flight time. Right by the door, I did realize I was very exposed to anyone who felt like walking in.
So I was half-awake in the bathroom, realizing how nice a bathroom it was. Most Ukranian bathrooms have turkish toilets: a piece of flat porceline or wood surrounding a hole in the ground. But this was a completely modern bathroom and immaculate and, most intestingly, had stalls that were pretty much completely enclosed: there was maybe three inches of space between the floor and the stall walls, making each a veritable cubical. And it was in there that I realized that it was warm, quiet and secure.
So, ghetto. But yes, I put my head on my bag, put my jacket over me, curled up on the floor and went to sleep. And stop what you're thinking, because I've crashed on the floors of many an apartment and that floor was far, far, far cleaner than all of them. It was my little bathroom bungalow.
Fast forward to my layover in Amsterdam. Those of us coming from non-first world countries, i.e. Ukraine, were in a little line having our passports throughly examined and waiting to get on the trans-Atlantic flight to Detroit. I talked a little to the burly Ukranian with a large beard next to me.
On the flight, it turns out he is in the row ahead of me and I find out he a priest is with the Orthodox church and is going to Detroit to preach to its rather large Ukranian diaspora population before returning to his home town of Lutzk, Ukraine.
A little before landing, he asks me to help him with his customs form. I fill in most the information from his passport, translate the rest for him and go back to my seat.
We land. As I'm pulling my bag from the overhead compartment, I nearly hit an extremely attractive girl in the face. We make introductions and it's with a bit of a kick-myself that I realize that this girl sat catty-corner to me the whole flight and in my trans-Atlantic stupor never noticed. In the wait to get off the plane and walking towards customs, we chat for a while: she's from Norway and on her way to Ohio to see her American mother for the holidays. She has dual nationality, meaning she can go through the American line. Just as we're about continue on our way, though, the Ukranian priest asks if I can translate for him at customs. Priest. Hot Norwegian girl. Priest. Hot Norwegian girl.
Dammit. Maybe I'll get some brownie points with God out of this.
The girl walks on an I stand with the priest in the forever-long foreigner line.
We got to talking a bit more, the priest and I, and it turned out he wasn't a priest: I had simply assumed that because he said he was with the church and would be preaching. He was a bishop and the leader of the central Orthodox church in Lutzk, which is why the Ukranians of Detroit paid for him to travel to speak to them.
I notice the girl isn't far from us in the other line. Well, never miss opportunities, right. This holy man, this bishop, this monk (he was a monk, too), approved with an encouraging nod for me to leave him for a few minutes and smiled when I came back with her email address. Man of God or not, he knows a hot girl when he sees one. And it wasn't futile getting the address: one day I may well be in Norway (it can happen: I met a Czech girl on Michicgan Ave in Chicago, got her email and two years later--last summer--visted her in Czech Republic); so it can happen.
I translated for the bishop at the border, with customs and with exit security, each time these people asking if he had brought any food from Ukraine and each time I translated the question I think he was beginning to wonder if I was translating it correctly. By the end he was like "No, I am not carrying food!" (but in Russian, of course).
I am glad I am not a custom's agent. The bishop was speaking directly to her in fast Russian and she's looking at me in desperation with an expression of "what the fuck is this guy saying?" and you have to figure they deal with this in fifty languges every day.
Through customs and before parting, the Bishop opened his luggage and handed me a CD. A present, he said, for helping. It was a recording of the choir at his church, and the church on the front was beautiful. He said if I was in Lutzk to ask for Mikail at the church and he would welcome me. "I thought your name was Timofey," I said, having copied it serveral times from his passport. "Timofey is my name," he said. "When you become a monk, you take a religious name, and it's Mikail."
Of course.
So I bid good-bye to Mikail and went to find my plane to Orlando.