Konichiwa

After an absence of several month (I think it was November of 2010) I finally was brave enough to venture back to Japan.  I have been avoiding it since the earthquake and tsunami in March (who am I kidding, I am not senior enough to even smell the trip on a regular basis).

I managed to grab one out of open time when bids finalized for July.  I was a bit worried the weather would not cooperate because a typhoon was supposed to skirt around Tokyo right before our arrival.  The last two times I was in Tokyo it rained and rained, so I was really hoping to have a nice day to go into Narita.

Fortunately the storm turned to the south and when we arrived in Tokyo the weather was great!  Since I was on the early trip, I got to the hotel in the early afternoon.  I quickly changed clothes and caught the next bus into town.  I forgot to bring socks and all I had were my knee high compression socks for work, so I wore my sneakers without socks and by the end of the day had a blister on my toe.

I spent an hour walking around the grounds of the Narita-san Temple.  It was nice and quiet and just what I needed to decompress after 13 hours on a plane with 250 other people.  I managed a new foot shot for my Facebook Album.  I am up to 52 pictures on it so I perhaps one day I can publish a Coffee Table book and make my fortune.

I know it is customary for people of Buddhist tradition to leave material things at shrines honoring Buddha or ancestors.  I guess this one must have been a fan of Evian and Thomas the Tank.

I made my way from the temple down Green Street to the Jet Lag Club.  It's a bar that caters to the airline crowd.  It's run by a guy named Vincent, who was Cabin Crew for Sabena Airlines, in Belgium until they folded after 9/11.  He moved to Japan and opened this bar.  It's a neat layout, with lots of airline memorabilia.  The highlight for me was Peanut, the Italian Greyhound, who serves as "Assistant Manager".

During my stay there were no earthquakes, or if there were, they were small enough that I did not feel them.  There were several major aftershocks a few days before our arrival, so I was a bit on edge about that.

Little Venice and Camden

Time to catch up on the blogging....  I had hope to do a London Walks tour of Little Venice and Camden Loch last week but we had the whole "Fuel Dump" and diversion back to Dallas.  So for the next trip, since we were actually on time, I was able to make a visit to this part of the city.  My friend Kathy, who is a Raleigh based, was laying over on the same day so she came along.

Little Venice is part of the Maida Vale section of London, part of the district of Westminster.  The poet Robert Browning lived in the area in the 18060's and coined the name Little Venice for the area.  Now the canals are populated with houseboats and floating restaurants and shops.

There was a strange green pond scum around some parts of the canal.... must be a summer thing.  We stopped at a place called the Waterway for some beers.... being a Friday afternoon, it really started to fill up with people.

Next we made our way over to Camden, which can be accessed via the canals of Little Venice.  After spending too much time at the little waterside bar, we missed the last ferry and ended up on an extended tour of the London Underground thanks to a deceptive Tube worker.  A nice Australian finally pointed us in the right direction.

Camden, an inner city district in London, is one of the last holdouts of the alternative punk scene that swept the city in the 70's and early 80's and was home to punk rock music.  Until her death last week, Amy Winehouse lived in the area.

We had dinner at a place called Lockside Bar & Kitchen.  It had a nice outdoor seating area with a view of the Camden Lock.  According to the bartender, the burgers were "brilliant" and I have to say they were pretty good.  The french fries were also the best I have had in the U.K.

The next day, as we were leaving, the weather turned crappy, so we were lucky we had nice and mild weather for our excursion.

Fuel Dump

I was able to trade my second trip of the month with open time for London.  I was happy to be there over a Sunday, because I like to go to a little Presbyterian Church (Church of Scotland) in Covent Garden for the Sunday evening service, called Crown Court Church.  It was going to be a great layover.  Even though it was a Sunday, I had found a 2pm London Walks tour of Little Venice and my friends Mary Jo and Lorelei, who were working the later departure, were going to join me for an afternoon of touring and pub visiting.  I would then make my way to Covent Garden for evening services and from there go to dinner with a friend I made from the church.

But of course it all fell apart because I made plans to do something on the layover.  I was the #2 on this trip, the Coach Galley.  I sent the girls out with the beverage carts after takeoff and just as they were finishing, and I was loading the meal carts for dinner, the Purser calls back to say we are diverting because of a Navigational malfunction.

We ended up going back to base since they had the part that needed to be replace, but we were very heavy with fuel as we were supposed to be on a Trans-Atlantic crossing.  We couldn't just turn around and land.  So we had to dump fuel, which in over 13 years of flying, I had never experienced before.  It came out of the back of the wing thru a little nozzle.  So over Memphis we turned around and flew back low and slow to have enough time to jettison our Jet-A.

Two and a half hours after take off, we landed at base like normal.  We taxied to the gate and then sat for an hour and half why they fixed the problem.  They closed the door about 10 minutes before we would have gone "illegal".  I guess I should be glad we didn't lose the trip completely.

We ended up arriving in London about noon instead of at 8am.  I thought I might still make the walking tour, but we did not get our rooms at the hotel until just before 2pm so it wasn't possible to get to the starting point in time.  I ended up running some errands and then napped for a few hours before heading to Covent Garden for church and dinner with my friend John.

Again I was fortunate to be flying with some great ladies in coach this trip.  It always makes even the most painful delay more tolerable when you work with nice people.  This picture was taken after almost 15 hours on duty all night.... and they can still manage a smile!

4th of July Surprise

Anytime there is a major holiday, you can pretty much guarantee that I will be in the air somewhere.  This 4th of July was no different.  I left the night of the 3rd for Buenos Aires, Argentina.  I am not generally a fan of this trip.  It's a long flight for the equipment that my company puts on that run, the drive downtown takes forever, and it's a short layover during the day and then back to the airport the same night.  But it's worth almost 22 hours and you're not even gone two full days.

I had a nice group of coworkers though.  My friend Melissa was onboard, and I always enjoy working with her (she is the one I play the green liquor seal game with... see the last part of the entry for December Recap).

When we arrived at the hotel, we had a little invite attached to the back of our room keys.  Our pick up was at 7:30 so we were excited about coming down for some light snacks.

Imagine our surprise when we found out it was a full buffet!  I had a nice cut of steak, a jacket potato, some corn, salad and a slice of New York Cheesecake!  They had wine as well, but we all had to pass on it as were flying that night.

For the record, the captain just has water in his glass.

So stuffed and happy, we made our way back to Ezeiza Airport for the flight home.  The place is crazy and crowded at the late hour as all the departures to North America leave at roughly the same time.

We were full and had a group of college aged girls who were down in South America on a Choir tour.  They were so incredibly high maintenance!  I had one "Diva in Training" who started to cry when I asked her if she wanted "Chicken or Beef?" because she was so uncomfortable with the dry air in the cabin and she was upset about the potential damage this was going to have on her wonderful voice.  Give me a break!  One of the chaperone's was hitting the wine pretty hard, but after spending a few weeks with this group of gals, I understand why!  The climax of the night was when one of the chaperone's, suffering from food poisoning and dehydration decided to come back and faint in the galley, banging her head on a cart latch on the way down.  Thankfully we had a Doctor onboard.  These girls wore me out!!!!

Latvian Escort

So the whole reason I got to even go to Riga was to bring 15 orphans to the United States for a month with host families during summer vacation.  The agency is a new partner for Airline Ambassadors.  It's called New Horizons.  You can check out their website at http://newhorizonsforchildren.org

I started my morning at 3:45 with a Lady Taxi to the Riga Airport.  At first glance, you think this might be some seedy call girl service, but it really is what is says.  A taxi company with female drivers.  It was strange to be checking out of the hotel at 3:45am and see the sun had already risen.  That's summer in the Baltic's for you.  I can only imagine how dark it is in winter time.

We would be traveling to New York via Warsaw, Poland on LOT Polish Airlines.  Once we arrived in New York, most of the kids were then supposed to connect to other flights to various cities in the United States.  There would be other flight attendants waiting for us in New York to escort them on the last legs of there journey.

I had two Latvian chaperones making the trip with me.  Arnis was the leader of the group.  He is a Social Worker and runs one of the state run orphanages.  Vitta, my other chaperone, is a school teacher who works with a local organization that supports orphaned kids.  They both proved invaluable to me.  They spoke good English and served as my translators, although most of the kids had some basic understanding.

Here is the group posing before we headed thru security.  In addition to our group, there would be another large group flying direct to New York on a later flight, as well as the group that Ingrid was taking to Atlanta.  The young man on the right of this picture is Viesturs.  He was real standoffish with me at first, but by the end of our journey, he had opened up a little and was more talkative.  He was 16 and the oldest orphan and was actually going to spend a year in the states on a student visa.  The youngest was little Roberts, down on the first row.  He was 5 and was traveling with his sister Zibela.  All in all, there were several sets of siblings.  Kind of heartbreaking when you realize that all they really have in the world is each other.  The blond girl next to Viesturs was Agnija.  She was 13 and spoke English very well.  She had learned all of her English from Facebook and MTV.

One last picture on Latvian soil as we boarded our LOT jet for Warsaw.  This was a quick flight at just over an hour.  For most of the kids, this was their first trip on an airplane.

Little Roberts was feisty, but with a face like this, how can you get tired of him?

We were scheduled for a 6 hour layover in Warsaw, which is kind of long.  The kids handled it well.  However, things started to go downhill pretty quickly when at 12:30, the scheduled departure time for our flight to New York, they announced the flight was delayed until 5:30pm. This was bad news.  All but two of the children were scheduled to make connecting flights that evening in New York and with our new arrival time 5 hours later, they would all misconnect.  To make things even more complicated, they were all booked on separate domestic tickets, so LOT could not assist me in any of the rebooking.  And to further complicate matters, we were mixing with the other group that was flying direct upon our arrival so that some of the kids from my group and some of the kids from their group were making domestic connections together.  Arnis was to take two of my kids to Chicago along with 5 kids from the other group.  An American Airlines Flight Attendant was taking one of my kids to Denver along with 4 from the other group.  The logistics of how this was going to play out now with our delay was all messed up.  

I could not find a pay phone in the airport so I had to bite the bullet and use the iPhone.  I called Margaret, my contact at Airline Ambassadors, at what would have been 5:30am her time, in Atlanta.  In retrospect, I had the easy part of this fiasco because all I had to do was sit in Warsaw and wait.  Margaret had to spend her entire day on the phone with New Horizons and work to make new arrangements for everyone.

By mid afternoon everyone was getting exhausted.  Some of these kids had traveled for 3 to 4 hours by car to Riga to make the flight and they finally passed out.  LOT was not the best at keeping us informed (I'll remember that the next time someone tells me my airline is short on information... I'll tell them to fly to Poland!).  

Finally about 3pm they brought hot meals for everyone.  Most of the kids were very well behaved with the exception of Andris.  He was a little monster.  He figured out if he kept going back to the counter, and showing his boarding card he could keep getting food.  I think by the end of it he had taken three meals and 5 cans of soda.  

The flight load must have dropped off with the delay because we were not full.  I was seated in the forward part of the cabin and the kids were more in the middle of the plane.  I had the seat next to me open which was nice for a 9 hour flight.  I slept most of the way to New York.  I did wake up to find the little monster Andris trying to go thru my bag.  Good thing I woke up when I did or I might have lost my wallet.  I think I had it pretty good overall though.  Ingrid, the other escort, had two kids screaming all over the plane, hitting the cabin crew and mocking a disabled person.  I was lucky if all I had to deal with was this little grifter.

Our arrival into JFK was a bit chaotic as everyone's itineraries had been changed around.  New Horizons had contacted a church they are affiliated with on Long Island and they came to the airport and would be providing the kids and chaperones with a place to stay overnight.  The two kids who were staying in the New York area, Djimistris and Kati posed for a photo with their host family.  They look kind of shell shocked.

I was also lucky enough to have a young man named Christian meet our group at the airport.  He is an American Eagle Flight Attendant and new to the Airline Ambassadors group.  He was very helpful in making sure everyone got to where they needed to be.

When it was all said and done, I hopped in a cab and made my way over to a hotel near LaGuardia Airport.  I was able to catch the jumpseat out of LGA for DFW the following morning.

Margaret and I always joke that my Airline Ambassador trips have all the drama and this one certainly was full of it.  But in the end, everyone got to where they needed to be, albeit a day or two behind schedule.

Latvia

I had the unique opportunity to participate in an Airline Ambassadors trip at the end of June to Riga, Latvia.  A small country located on the Baltic Sea, formerly part of the Soviet Union, Latvia is now part of the European Union.

Getting over there was quite a challenge (although it paled in comparison to getting home).  I flew on my own airline to Chicago and Helsinki, Finland.  From there I was supposed to connect to an Air Baltic flight to Riga.  My flight to Helsinki was delayed by over 4 hours so I missed my connection.  The agency for whom I was doing the trip had paid for my ticket from Helsinki to Riga, but it was a non-refunable fare, so I ended up having to buy a last minute walk up fare on Finnair for about $300.

The flight over to Riga only took about an hour from Finland.  It was a clear day and I had a wonderful view of the Baltic Coast during the flight.

The population of the town is about 700,000 people out of total population of 2.2 million.  The city center and "Old Town" are part of UNESCO and has been listed as a World Heritage Site.

My hotel, the Maritm, was an old Soviet tourist lodge in it's former life and was located near Ķīpsala, a small island on the Daugava River, opposite downtown.  It was in a quiet little neighborhood and sat across from Usvaras Park.  The park still has a monument to Soviet rule that is affectionately or not so affectionately known as "Stalin's Finger".  There was an electric tram line that ran in front of the hotel that would take you downtown in about 5 minutes, all for the price of .70 Lats (about $1.40).  Even though Latvia is one of the developing EU countries, the prices are very high for everything.  I can only imagine what life is like for the everyday Latvian who makes an average of $14,000 a year.

Another volunteer from Airline Ambassadors, Ingrid, had arrived the day before me.  She was a retired agent for Lufthansa in Atlanta.  She would be bringing a group of orphans out of Riga to Atlanta the same day I was traveling home.  She was waiting for me when I arrived at the hotel.  She had spent the day at Jurmala, a seaside town on the Baltic coast.


After getting unpacked and changed into some comfy clothes we took the tram into town and headed for a Russian restaurant that had been suggested by a girl at the Front Desk.  The weather was pleasant, probably in the low 70's, and we sat outside and enjoyed caviar with chilled vodka, and pelmeni (Russian dumplings served with sour cream).  Of course I washed it all down with a local beer.

Because the city is so far north, the sun is up from about 3am to about midnight.  It was nice to be able to walk around into the evening and not worry about it getting dark.  On the way back, we met a Canadian woman named Eva, who was staying at our hotel.  Both of her parents were Latvian and she was over here for a month to visit with relatives and do some sightseeing.


The next day we met up and made our way back downtown.  It was actually kind of warm once the clouds cleared away.  I purchased a ticket for a ride on a double decker bus.  It was one of those hop off, hop on, deals.  It provided a great way to see most of the main sights of the city.


St. Peter's Church is one of the most famous landmarks of the town.  The oldest parts of the building go back to 1209, although very little of that part remains today.  Over the centuries, new additions were built.  The church burned down in 1941, but in 1955, renovations began and the church for the most part is restored.  The unique clock tower only has an hour hand.

The Powder, or Sand Tower, is the only surviving tower from the original city walls.  It was used to store gun powder.  

The House of Blackheads was a German guild hall.  It was constructed in the 14 century, although largely destroyed when the Germans bombed the city in 1941.  The newer structure was build in the late 90's.

The Museum of the Occupation highlights the rule and occupation of the Soviets in 1940, the Nazi regime in 1941, and again the Soviets from 1944 to 1991.  I was surprised to learn that the Latvians initially greeted the Nazis arrival because it meant an end to Soviet occupation.  Those sentiments quickly changed and by the end of the war, the Nazis had killed 70,000 Latvian Jews.  Also highlighted where the Latvians shipped off to Russian gulags, or work camps.  These gulags were a popular place to send dissidents who were critical of communist rule.

The Riga Circus is the only permanently situated circus in the Baltics.  It has been at this site for over 150 years.

The most famous monument in the city is the Freedom Tower.  It honors the soldiers who died in the Latvian War of Independence of 1918-1920.  It was constructed in 1935 and is 138 feet tall.  The  monument sits on a Rotary thru the main street in town, Brīvības iela (Freedom Street).  Fortunately, the monument was left standing during Soviet occupation.  Russians tried to change it's meaning to better fit communist ideals, but the symbol of Latvian independence prevailed.

We made a stop at a Russian Orthodox Church, the most popular place for Russian worship in the city.  No photography was allowed inside, but like most Orthodox traditions, there were lots of icons and portraits of the saints, incense, and relics.

There are numerous public parks and gardens in Riga.  They are very popular with the locals and there are always people hanging out enjoying the good weather on a beautiful day.  The canal that runs thru the city even provides an opportunity for paddle boating and canoeing.

One of the most notorious buildings in town is the "Cat House".  It's actually not a brothel, which is what first came to my mind.  It is called the Cat House because of the feline statues that sit atop the turrets.  Legend has it that a wealthy tradesman was denied access to the local merchant guild, so to get his revenge, he constructed this building across the street from the guild hall.  He had cat sculptures put on the top of the building, with their butts pointed at the guild hall.  

After spending most of the day walking around, Ingrid and I went to an Italian restaurant for dinner.  I had a Philadelphia Pizza, which was a white pizza with salmon, cream cheese, and sesame seeds.  It was outstanding.  We made our way back to the hotel and met up with our new Canadian comrade Eve for drinks.  I turned in early since I was leaving on a 6am flight and needed to be at the airport by 4am the next morning.