Saturday, 4 September 2010

Departure: Take #2

Success!
I finally made it to Montreal last night, but I have come to the conclusion that I hate travelling on my own. After the stupid cancelled flight of Thursday, I finally made it to Amsterdam where I'd been booked into a hotel for the night. Problem #1: I had no idea which hotel shuttle I was supposed to be on. The voucher I had said 'VD Valk' which is apparently the A4 or something stupid like that. Some security guy asked where I was trying to get to, and yes, I cried. I was sleep deprived and stressed, it's allowed. Got the the hotel, which was lovely, got a free meal, which was actually really tasty, and then went to bed. I needed to be up at about 5am, so I ordered a wake up call for then. When it came, she said 'this is your 5am wake up call'. By the time I'm showered and dressed and everything and gone downstairs, it's 4.35am. Brilliant. Not only was I sleep deprived and stressed, I'd also just been cheated out of an hour of precious sleep.
Get to the airport and onto my flight to Paris no problem, then end up missing my connection to Montreal. I don't know how it happened, but the gate i was supposed to be boarding from was showing information for the 11.10 to Caracas. My flight was at 11. There's no way they'd have two flights that close together from the same gate. Managed to get onto the next flight and didn't have to do anything except hang around for an hour or so extra.
There was a French woman next to me on the flight to Montreal, who kept asking me things. How do you explain to someone what Port wine is, when she doesn't speak English, and you have seriously limited French? We managed to establish that it was wine, but I honestly couldn't get any further than that. It's not something they teach you in school, is it?
Sitting in Immigration was horrible. Three hours. Sitting on the floor. With bad hips and a bad back. Unimpressed. So by the time I've left the airport, it's about 7.30pm local time, but I'm running on a timezone that says it's about midnight. I'm exhausted, I'm starving, I'm dehydrated, I'm grimy and being munched on by midges. I can't find my hotel. Lovely bus driver helped me by calling services and finding out where the hotel is, then he gets me as close as he can on the bus route, and calls me a cab to take me the last bit. Starving though I was, I dove in the shower, ruined another pristine white hotel towel with my freshly dyed hair, and passed out on the bed. Woke up at about 4.30 this morning and think I dozed for a while.
Just got back from breakfast (crepes with strawberries and cream) of which I managed one crepe and most of the strawberries, along with two cups of coffee and an apple juice. I was struggling to eat that much.
Planning on getting the 10.30 bus to Sherbrooke, which means I still have about 45 minutes to an hour to kill before I need to get going (it's 9am now). Thank god for free internet...

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