NOVEMBER 01 (Cont’d)
And so, eventually, we staggered, stiff and cramped, from our flying
sardine tin, and untwisted our bodies as we made our way through the labyrinth
of passages and shopping outlets that made up our destination airport and,
after some time, found ourselves at the strangely familiar baggage carousel
that we suddenly recollected vividly from previous excursions, despite having
forgotten all about it – as most of us do with these ultimately trivial little
details - in the intervening years.
It was something about the scrape marks on the angled metal plates
from where they move around the curve that seemed suddenly very familiar…
perhaps from the several decades spent watching it go around and around from
that time our luggage got lost and ended up in Denver.
Yes, I have some baggage that is more well-travelled than I am.
Still, this time at least, our bags actually showed up as we hoped
if not expected and we wearily wheeled them out of the arrivals hall and out
into a warm autumnal evening in search of a taxi rank.
Soon after this, we paid an Asian-American taxi driver several
dollars for the privilege of letting us sit in the back of his vast yellow car
for a while whilst I tried to adjust to the fact that he seemed to be sitting
on the wrong side of the car to be driving it to one of only two hotels which
we had pre-booked before leaving home.
It’s only when you pay someone a seemingly huge amount of cash to
deliver you to a disappointing hotel which is located – for your own
convenience - just outside the airport perimeter, that you come to appreciate how
vast international airports really are.
However, we were safely delivered and soon checked in, getting the
room next to the fire escape that CSI: Miami used to always call the “Murder
Room” (because of the quick and easy
escape route) discovering that the light in the bathroom didn’t seem to
work and, less alarmingly, that the TV didn’t work either.
As we wouldn’t be watching any TV for the entire fortnight unless
one happened to be on in somewhere we were eating, this was no loss, but I did
wonder whether anyone would ever report it and it happened to be one that
nobody ever bothered looking at…?
After a moment of contemplation, we decided that, given that
domestic flights serve little in the way of food, we’d better eat, and we
decided to risk Room Service, which my Beloved bravely called, ordering a
chicken sandwich with a side of salad for herself and a less imaginative burger
with a side of fries for myself.
Within the allotted twenty minutes, a gentleman appeared with a
trolley and brought in a tray bearing four covered plates, we tipped him, and
off he went. It was only after he’d gone that we realised that the side orders
were actually on the plates with the main order, and that they had delivered –
and charged – for burgers for three.
A swift telephone call sorted out the fact that they’d brought too
much food, and another call informed us that our bill had been adjusted
accordingly, but there was still the tricky matter of those two extra meals to
be dealt with.
They told us to leave them outside the room on the tray along with
our used plates, leftovers (because the
chicken sandwich was, apparently, disappointingly rubbery), and cutlery,
and so another unwanted element got added to the vast amount of food waste that
the world produces, I had a pang of guilt – although not a pang that pricked at
me enough to eat three meals – knowing
that those leftovers were unlikely to get eaten by anybody.
And so the tray was eventually left outside as instructed and, after
a swift call to let the house management know that we had done so, it was whisked
away by the hotel cleaning pixies as we finally staggered to bed after a very
long day and grabbed as surprisingly extended number of hours sleep.
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