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exhausting to tune in to
Thursday, July 27 2017
location: Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
There didn't seem to be any free WiFi or even electricity as Gretchen and I waited at the gate for our flight to Uganda. Fortunately, the wait was not especially long in the grand scheme of things. For the second and final leg of our journey, Gretchen and I opted to take advantage of our extended-legroom seats. It was a little bit of a pain to have to put all our stuff away during takeoff and landing (since there was no seat in front of us to stow anything under or in the seat-back of). But once up in the air (and we were there for over seven hours), we could bring our stuff down and sprawl it all out in the vast space in front of us, using it (for example) as props for our feet. We also figured out that there actually were trays and video screens for us, hidden in the armrests. They were a bit beat-up and hard to use, but they provided entertainment and a place to put our meals and drinks. I watched a couple movies on this flight. The first was a Bollywood flick with subtitles entitled Sarbjit, telling the true story of an Indian Sihk falsely arrested in Pakistan and the long and fruitless effort undertaken by his sister to free him. I'd hoped there'd be more over-the-top choreographed dance sequences, but there was only one, and it happened at the beginning. Next I watched High-Rise, the dystopian tale of a fancy apartment building that gradually falls into ruin as its residents go increasingly Lord of the Flies on one another (though it's not clear why the residents act as if they are stuck in the building and cannot escape).
For complicated reasons related to limited flight routes and a quiltwork of national laws, our flight to Entebbe first landed at Kigali in Rwanda (240 miles to the southwest), where we disgorged some passengers and took on others, though those others would only be going to Amsterdam; KLM does not move passengers between Kigali and Entebbe. Our tall blond Amazonian flight attendant (who strapped in in the fold-down seat in the vast legroom area in front of us) did her best to explain why the flights worked this way. She also explained what the letters in KLM (the world's oldest airline) stood for, and what sort of free time she has on the job. She told us that KLM jobs are highly coveted and that once someone gets hired by KLM, they never leave. (This probably accounts for the fact that an unusual number of KLM flight attendants appear to be fit women in their forties and fifties.)
Once we landed in Entebbe, the process of going through immigration was marred with confusion and conflicting instructions by the various airport employees telling us which lines to wait in. Gretchen had filled out and emailed visa applications for both of us, but we'd received conflicting information for hers and a a cancellation for mine, so we didn't really know what we'd be dealing with. But then it turned out that it's actually faster to go through immigration if one hasn't filled out the online paperwork at all. The only problem then was the business of the $50 entrance fee for each of us; for some reason we'd neglected to bring the necessary cash (and for some reason only American currency would do). By this point we were working with a nice and helpful immigration agent. She suggested we get the cash from an ATM machine that lay out in baggage claim. This meant walking out into a less-secure part of the airport. And indeed, Gretchen continued all the way out to the place where people stood with cards to greet arrivals so she could tell our driver what our situation was. After that, she was allowed to do something that would've been impossible in an American airport: she turned around and walked back in, going upstream through the layers of security. There was actually a metal detector set up for just for this, and the guys manage it didn't hassle Gretchen much as she went through. By some miracle our credit union let us remove a couple hundred dollars worth of Ugandan shillings from that airport ATM machine even though we hadn't alerted it to our travel plans. Next we had to convert that money into dollars, using one of three money-changing services that competed with each other elbow-to-elbow in the purest display of free market capitalism I'd seen in awhile. After that, Gretchen and I had to go upstream through a second checkpoint manned by two men, one of whom held an AK-47, but we were clearly harmless tourists, and they let us through.
Outside the airport, we finally joined our driver. His name was Robert, but because of his East African accent, Gretchen initially thought his name was "Robot" (and even referred to him that way initially). As Robert drove us to Kampala (sometimes passing through congested patches of poorly-illuminated evening celebrants), he tried to tell us various facts (such as that 85% of the population is Christian, 10% is Muslim, and 5% is animist), but we were tired and his accent was exhausting to tune in to. Eventually he got us to our hotel, La Petit Village, where our room was actually something of a suite. It had good WiFi and a nice shower. We went to bed a little after midnight local time.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?170727 feedback
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