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recipe for deep-vein thrombosis
Friday, August 2 2019
location: Room 169, Ibis Airport Hotel, Hamburg, Germany
There was a surprisingly big breakfast on offer this morning in the Ibis dining area. There wasn't much for us vegans except fruit, but there was soy milk for Gretchen to put in her coffee. There wasn't decaf, though, because Gretchen is the first person who has ever stayed in an Ibis who wanted decaf (if you've ever been to an Ibis, you know what I mean).
We got a little lost on the walk back to the airport, forking off the street we should've taken and heading a little too far east. When I realized we were in an unfamiliar neighborhood, we busted a left and walked through a pleasant little unnamed park (53.627542N, 10.010516E).
Our first stop in the airport was at the Dallmeyers where we'd had those pretzels. This time we got three of them, as well as a loaf of black bread and a few other bready things. Our cashier was an older woman whose English skills were only good enough for basic transactions; when Gretchen needed to ask about whether a bread contained milk or eggs, she had to call over one of her colleagues. Having spent a little time in Germany, I was beginning to understand why a German might not come to develop the English skills you might expect. All of their media (which is mostly American) is dubbed over in German. Even the cartoons are dubbed, and Germans have little expectation that lips movements will correspond to actual words.
The impression we were getting from Aer Lingus was that they're not as advanced technologically as the other airlines we've dealt with. Last night Gretchen had been unable to order a vegan meal on their website because all of the customer login forms of appeared to be broken (in Chrome and Internet Explorer). Using Nancy's phone, though, she'd been able to rectify things yesterday (they apparently have lots of actual humans available to answer phones). Today in the airport, they supplied no automatic check-in machines, forcing us to wait in line behind all the people with luggage to check. This did give me a good oppotunity to wolf down a bunch of excellent Hamburg pretzel (complete with sauerkraut cream "cheese" spread, the only sauerkraut we'd had in Germany).
Going through security, I didn't see anyone removing laptops or taking off shoes, so I left my flipflops on and my laptop in my backpack. But evidently I should've removed it, because it got flagged, but only because of the laptop. Once it was separated from the bag, both went through without suspicion, despite the mess of wires my backpack contains.
Once we got to the gate for the first leg of our flight home (to Dublin), I thought I should maybe poop before getting on the plane. Gretchen had had no problem using the women's room, but when I tried the men's room door, I found it locked. So I went further afield, and that bathroom was locked too. I ended up having to use the toilet designed for the disabled, with its hand rails, tilted mirror, and other things that I'll hopefully never need. This was my first experience with a proper German toilet, the kind where the bowl is mostly shallow except for a narrow well that is not usually directly below your anus. This means that shitting into such a toilet always leaves a big fecal smear that cannot be eliminated by flushing. Apparently this is a feature that Germans want in their toilets.
On the flight to Dublin, I could see down to the ground through clear skies for much of the route. Of particular note was a massive windfarm off the west coast of England, between Lancashire County and the Isle of Man. The windmills were in a regular grid and I had never seen so many before in a single installation.
After landing in Dublin, I was surprised to see a range of mountains looming up on the horizon to the south. One of these had a surprisingly sharp peak. Ireland has mountains? These were, I later learned, the Wicklow Mountains, with a peak as high as 3,035 feet. That's about 75% as high above sea level as the highest of the Catskills.
After getting off the plane, we were put through the complete American immigration and customs ordeal. It began with the scanning of our bags, and then continued into a series of lines, one of which was in a room featuring a smiling photograph of Donald Trump. Yes, in Dublin, Ireland. Evidently the United States has moved its whole Great-Again border crossing nightmare process overseas for some flights, including the Aer Lingus connecting Dublin to Newark. We only had an hour to make our connection, and this process is always needlessly slow, and nobody with any power ever gives a shit if anyone is about to miss a plane. At some point an open door triggered an ear-piercing alarm, and it was left to run for something like ten minutes. It's as if part of border control's mandate is to make crossing an American border as unpleasant of a process as possible.
We got to our gate with plenty of time to spare, partly because the flight to Newark was running a half hour late. Because of some unexpected flight cancellation that had happened months ago, Gretchen hadn't gotten to pick our seats. This was how we both ended up near the back of the plane in the very middle (the rows were like AB-CDEF-GH and we had seat D and E). They were among the very worst seats on the plane, partly because we were trapped between (on my side) a very big (though not fat) gentleman who liked to sleep and (on Gretchen's side) a plump woman who had her face planted on her fold-out tray for most of the flight. That woman seemed depressed, as if she'd flown to her destination European wedding and been stood up by the groom. In any case, I never got out of my seat for the entire six point whatever hour flight. Given the seats, it was a surprisingly comfortable flight. Gretchen and I watched two whole movies together (that is, with them synchronized on our respective screens). The first of these was the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Life of the Party, where McCarthy's character, facing divorce, decides to go back to college and hang out with her dumb daughter and her slightly less dumb sorority sisters. That movie was probably only entertaining because we were watching it on an airplane. The other, which we watched after I'd drunk two gins with tonic (the first booze I'd ever bought on a plane) and passed out briefly from having taken an ambien, was the Mule. It features Clint Eastwood playing an octogenarian drug mule for a bunch of scary brown men. In addition to its gratuitous racism and bad writing, The Mule barely had a story arc. Clint Eastwood should go back to making advertisements for Republican candidates.
When we landed in Newark, there was no immigration or customs bullshit to deal with at all. After going through that gauntlet in Dublin, we'd apparently been on the security equivalent of a domestic flight.
Unfortunately, we quickly ran into traffic as we tried to drive around New York City at the height of Friday evening rush hour. Things didn't improve until we'd made it several miles north of where US 287 meets the Thruway at (near that shiny office building for Sharp Electronics).
Back at the house, the dogs were so tired from whatever they'd been doing all day that they didn't even get out of their beanbags. As for our housesitters, they'd done a great job and left hours before we arrived. No healthy person wants to chit chat after a day spent traveling. We'd woken up in daylight in Kiel Germany, and it was still daylight in Hurley, New York. Ah, the miracles of westward jet travel!
The east coast of England.
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