До побачення!

This is how you say Goodbye in Ukrainian! (I have not the slightest idea how to pronounce it) but I thought it would be an appropriate title for this post.  Last month I brought 87 children to the United States from Kiev, Ukraine to spend Christmas with host families in America.  Now it was time for these sweet orphans to head home.

Initially they had planned to send me all the way back to Kiev, but we realized it was going to be a lot less expensive if I just took the three girls that I brought to Dallas back to New York, where they would reunite with the rest of the kids and their chaperones before continuing their journey.

I met the Franklin and Atchley families at the Delta counter an hour and a half before our departure.  We were able to check their bags all the way to Kiev, so we would not have to mess with it in New York.  The Delta agent also gave gate passes to everyone so that we could all go to the departure lounge and visit a little longer before boarding the plane.

It's always a sad time for the kids and the families.  The Atchleys and the Franklins had hosted these same kids previously, so there is already a strong bond!

When they announced the call for final boarding, it was time to say goodbye.  The girls remained strong though and we made our way down to the plane.  It was booked very light, which gave our little regional jet the feeling of being a little bigger.

We had a fast and easy trip up to New York.  They were all fascinated with my Nook e-reader and were pretty good at reading the english, even if they did not always understand!

After we arrived in New York I was supposed to be met by another flight attendant who would take the girls over to Terminal 4 to the Aerosvit ticket counter, but no one was there.  Turns out there was some problems with another group connecting from Charlotte and so they were trying to handle that.  I got them over to Terminal 4 and made the hand off and hauled ass over to Terminal 8 to try and catch a 4pm departure on my airline back to DFW.

I made it just in time and settled into my seat, thinking I could relax and enjoy my 50% discount off wireless internet, but got an email that one of the escorts returning to Dallas with me had forgotten to hand over the passport for the child she escorted.  Thank goodness we had wifi onboard.  After working thru various scenarios, we figured out we could ship the passport via my airline's cargo division and get it back to New York the next morning.  The child and her Ukrainian chaperone would travel the next afternoon, so it all worked out in the end!

Catching up.....

I found myself pretty busy thru most of December so now that I am sitting reserve in January, I thought I would try to catch up on my mundane existence.

Some of the highlights from December included a rather "different" looking woman we had in First Class coming home from Maui.  This was a once in a lifetime passenger for sure, and I made sure to only capture her back to preserve her anonymity.  It's not every day someone wears curlers on the airplane!  This photo was quite the hit on Facebook!

I also tried Loco Moco for the first time at the Kihei Cafe down the street from our hotel.  It's a weird breakfast item, with a beef patty, eggs, rice, and brown gravy.  It was wonderful!

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day found me in Panama City.  It's a quick trip, with a short layover, but we tried to make the best of it.  We all planned to bring food, so the day of the trip we had turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, and dessert!  I went above and beyond and also put together little gift boxes for my crew (even the pilots!... what can I say, it was the holidays and I was feeling generous!).

Our take off out of Panama on Christmas Day had us flying from one end of the country to another and we got some pretty neat views of the Panama Canal as we climbed out!

January 1st marks the beginning of my reserve month.  Not a fun time, but it goes with the punches.  So far, I've only flown one trip.  I got called out for Madrid.  I had all these wonderful plans to go to the Observation Tower at the main post office on Castellana and then hit the museums, but we had a man who brought his own portable oxygen concentrator and about three hours into the flight it malfunctioned.  We had to divert to JFK because the man could not be off of oxygen for more than a few minutes without going into distress.  By the time we took off again, we were several hours behind schedule and ended up landing in Madrid around 1pm and after nap time it was going to be too late to do anything.

Surprisingly, not one of the passengers complained to me about the delay.  The majority of the passengers were students going over to study for the semester.  It made me feel a bit old because I realized that it was about 15 years ago that I was in their shoes, going to Spain to study abroad!  It's a good thing I color my hair because these "moments" that remind me of my age are probably causing more and more gray!

My friend Catherine was on the trip, so we met up around 8pm and walked down to Puerta de Sol and the Plaza Mayor trying to look for a restaurant that a couple on the plane had told me about, but we never could find it.  We did walk several miles though, which was my only source of exercise for the day.  We never could find a place that really jumped out at us for dinner, so we ended up taking the metro over to Principe Pio so we could eat at Casa Mingo, a Cider house with great Asturian cuisine.  I first ate there when I studied abroad and you can't go wrong with their food!

The only pictures I snapped were the next morning from the back door of our plane.  The airport was pretty quiet that day because Iberia pilots had gone on strike.  It was a pretty day as you can see... not a cloud in the sky!