Over the last few weeks, two parallel sets of misfortunes have been unfolding: one on a global scale, and of tremendous significance; and one on a personal level, and not important to anyone but me.
The more important narrative has, of course, been that of a short-fingered orange sex criminal being appointed to the office of the most powerful man (and yes, it’s still an office apparently reserved solely for men) in the world. The much less important one involves me leaving a trail of lost and damaged property through Europe, along with a few stray fragments of my heart – let’s start with that one.
I arrived in Europe a month ago. I flew from my hometown to London Gatwick via a hilariously convoluted itinerary, getting the most complicated ticket possible in order to save money and also score a free 14-hour layover in St. John’s, Newfoundland, the easternmost city in North America. It was my first time on the Atlantic coast of North America, and my hopes of exploring one of the oldest European settlements on the continent were dashed by the tail end of Hurricane Matthew, which caused untold suffering in the Caribbean, but merely produced some nasty 80 km/h gusts of freezing Atlantic wind by the time it reached Canada. (Speaking of the mismatch between global and personal tragedies…)
After spending most of my 14 hours huddling inside coffee shops and riding St. Johns’ incredibly inadequate (but very friendly) public transit, I returned to the warmth of the airport to wait for my flight to Gatwick. While sitting at the gate, a very short, very friendly Newfoundland girl with flashy fluorescent hair and lovely green eyes engaged me in conversation. It was her first time traveling alone, and she seemed positively delighted to meet another solo traveler. I had heard that Newfoundlanders were the friendliest people in Canada, but I couldn’t see much of it during a day when their city was an uninhabitable wasteland. But here, sure enough, was that famed Newfoundland gregariousness, courtesy of a 4’11” salon owner. In spite of my feeling somewhat groggy after two days outside of an actual bed, her friendliness made me perk up, and I was glad to have found a potential travel buddy. She was endlessly enthusiastic, inquisitive, and really nice, in a way I wasn’t accustomed to Canadian women being. She was really cute, to boot, and I thought she might even like me.
We were seated across from each other in the same row. During the stunningly short (less than 5 hours!) flight to London, I foolishly forewent sleep in order to watch Creed on the inflight entertainment system, because it’s just such an ass-kickingly great movie. (Michael B. Jordan was robbed! #oscarssowhite) I glanced aside occasionally to see her dozing soundly, with no chance to exchange stray smiles.
By the time we arrived in Gatwick, the lack of sleep was taking its toll. I struggled to produce witty repartee while passing through immigration, baggage claim and customs, and found myself working hard to maintain healthy eye contact with someone thirteen inches shorter than me. As luck would have it, we were staying in the same part of London, so I figured I at least had a while to muster the energy needed to be at least somewhat witty and charming. Unfortunately, while standing with her on the airport train and trying to think of a good way to test the waters of her interest, some doughy-faced jagoff from our flight interrupted my train of thought by asking, “Where are you guys from?” Needless to say, he was more interested in the origins of my attractive travel buddy than of myself, and I instantly found myself in the position of third wheel, with neither of them making any effort to include me. Perhaps her attention had only wandered from me as an infinitely friendly and open-hearted person who was always happy to make new friends. Perhaps she fancied the idea of creating a Wizard of Oz-style motley crew of solo travelers to take London by storm. If I hadn’t been dangerously sleep-deprived, I would have either toughed it out or forcefully instructed the interloper to make like a tree and get out of here. This irritant was not one of the alpha males who had pushed me out of the way in the past; he was just a pest. But in my current condition, battered by wind and running on fumes, all I could manage to do was remove myself from the situation: Once we arrived at Victoria Station and she had invited him to join us for breakfast, I told this lovely, potentially once-in-a-lifetime girl that three is an awkward number, and I was going to just go on to my hostel. Without even looking at her, I heard her disappointedly ask, “Are you sure?” I mumbled something and walked away, with no method of staying in contact with her, dragging my suitcase in my wake.
Thirty seconds later, I realized what a colossally dumbassed thing I had done, and I rushed back to the place where I had left them. I dragged my suitcase around the station for a while, but they were nowhere to be seen. In my sleep-deprivation, I somehow couldn’t even remember her name, but only that she was a 4’11”, 23-year-old salon owner from Newfoundland. (Does that ring a bell for anyone reading this?) I plodded through London while weighed down with regret for the next four days, my malaise only occasionally broken by free world-class art galleries and a delightful reunion with a dear friend and his charming partner.
And then, when I checked out of my hostel and flew to Athens on Ryanair, I managed to leave a sweatshirt behind. Whoops. Perhaps it’s because I had to wake up at a dreadfully early hour to take the airport bus to London’s horrendously far-flung Stansted airport. Checking out of a hostel at 5 AM is a uniquely unpleasant affair, as you fumble with your luggage in the dark, trying to illuminate your valuables using the LED flashlight on your phone without disturbing the 26 other guests who have been stacked inside a single dorm room with industrial efficiency. Under these circumstances, it’s quite easy to leave a sweatshirt hanging over the radiator. I imagine it hanging there still, forever waiting for an owner who will never come to claim it.
I arrived at Stansted with grim expectations, between the airport’s dire 2/10 average visitor rating on Skytrax and Ryanair’s abysmal reputation. As it turned out, Ryanair was not the problem – I had been well advised that they do not fuck around, and took all due precautions, including printing out my boarding pass to avoid paying a whopping 40 Euro printing fee. The only Ryanair staffperson I interacted with prior to the gate was a highly cordial baggage drop attendant, and his refined British manners certainly exceeded my meagre expectations.
The airport, however, was every bit the nightmare that I expected. From the cavernous chaos of the check-in hall you must take a mandatory five-minute walk through a vast duty-free mall (pity the passenger in a hurry!), after which you find yourself crowded together with other passengers in a central waiting area. This is not yet the gate – rather, you must sit here in a state of limbo until half an hour before your flight, waiting for your gate to be announced on the screen. At this point, you proceed to the gate and stand around some more (not much seating to be had!) before boarding finally commences.
It was in this ignominious holding area that I met another person whose sheer goodness shone through amidst the stress of the day and the unpleasantness of my surroundings. After a completely failed attempt to chat up an older gentleman, I started talking to a Greek woman who I had just observed enjoying a sandwich with unusual gusto. She was soon regaling me, very enthusiastically, with the story of how she had been living in that dreadful airport since the previous day. She had been working in London and was flying home to visit her family in Athens for a few days; unfortunately, an error had occurred with her online check-in, and in the course of her arguing with Ryanair staff about whether she had to pay the ludicrous airport check-in fee, check-in for her flight had closed. She was forced to purchase an entirely new ticket and then camp out for about 18 hours in this 2/10 monstrosity of an airport. I was stunned that she could repeat this harrowing tale with such good humour and so little bitterness, and I could tell that she had an extraordinarily kind heart. I was happy to have a new airport buddy, though in this case with purely platonic interest. We chatted with great enthusiasm, and her adorableness culminated with her following me to my seat to see if she could talk one of my neighbours into swapping seats with her. Unfortunately, I was surrounded by couples on all sides, so it was a non-starter.
I was later able to move to an empty emergency exit row, and went up to the front of the plane to see if she wanted to join me. After her airport ordeal, I was not surprised to see her fast asleep under her jacket, completely hidden from the world, looking like a pile of coats tossed onto a bed at a party. I went back to my seat, hoping to catch up and maybe exchange contacts later.
While disembarking from the plane, I was about to catch up with her when I realized that I had left something in my seat pocket. Needless to say, it’s not easy to move toward the back of a plane that is unloading passengers, and I had to stand helplessly by while waiting for the throngs to exit the aircraft. By the time I grabbed my latest nearly-lost personal item, I had last her in the vastness of the Athens airport. Not only would she have been a good local contact, but I feel like she might have turned into a lifelong friend – her aura of sheer human decency was just that palpable. But, nope.
Days later, I happened to see someone who looked like her walking into the subway at Syntagma Square in downtown Athens. I stared at her with uncertainty, not quite sure if it was really the same woman from the flight. By the time I realized it probably was, she had disappeared underground, and I continued to stand petrified as my last chance to catch up with her faded away. Apparently life has never sent an opportunity my way that I was not happy to enthusiastically piss away.
I traveled through Greece while leaving a breadcrumb trail of toiletries in guesthouses and Airbnbs – Minor stuff, but an ongoing tribute to my frazzled state of mind. But my coup de grace came when I arrived in Bulgaria and checked into a cozy private room that I booked on Airbnb. The owner was away for the weekend, and her somewhat ill-informed neighbour was attempting to hold down the fort. When I asked him about doing laundry at the apartment, which featured a washer but no dryer, he gave a vague response that sent me looking for the nearest laundromat. By the time I got there it had closed. The laundromat was across the street from a park, and I explained my predicament to a random stranger and sought advice. She suggested that I dry my clothes on the radiator, as per Bulgarian custom. I thanked her for her advice and headed back to the apartment to wash my clothes.
Unfortunately, the washing machine had a few surprises in store for me. After having used North American models growing up and paying other people to wash my clothes for me in Asia (yes, I admit it!), I was not prepared for the odd Bulgarian design that confronted me after I lifted up three different covers to expose the mechanism within. Instead of a horizontally spinning tub that fills with water from the bottom, this one featured a cage that rotates vertically. While trying to adjust the settings I accidentally turned the machine on, and it began to slowly rotate the cage while spraying water all over the kitchen floor. I panicked and began to yank the cage backward to get my clothes inside while multiple layers of covers came crashing down. I finally managed to cram everything in and shut the lid, leaving me to deal with an incredibly wet floor.
After sopping up the water with a full roll of toilet paper, I pulled out my phone to take a Facebook break, only to uncomprehendingly gaze upon a seriously cracked screen. As I gathered my thoughts, I realized that, during my epic wrestling match with the washing machine, one of the lids had come down directly onto my front pocket, cracking the Gorilla Glass from the side. (Subsequent Googling revealed that Gorilla Glass is in fact only shatterproof when hit from the centre – something I wish I had understood before I absent-mindedly removed the phone’s case so that USB cables could plug in more snugly.) After I got over my shock and tried to remove my freshly washed laundry from the machine, I found myself unable to open it. I was now in the position of having a potentially broken washing machine full of wet clothes, with its owner being far away for at least 24 hours more. And then it got worse.
As I walked over the kitchen floor near the washing machine, I noticed that it was a little bit lumpy. I realized that it was laminate flooring – the same kind that had cost me hundreds of dollars in damages when I did a bad job of defrosting my refrigerator in a condo I had rented. I wasn’t sure how much of the floor damage had been caused previously, but I was now confronted with a cracked screen, a broken washing machine, and a damaged floor, with a long time to dwell on it before I faced the owner’s wrath firsthand.
That night, I lay lifelessly in bed, peeking out the window occasionally to watch Saturday night revelers marching toward a big concert nearby. Their festiveness just made me feel worse. The next evening, after 28-odd hours of misery, the wrath came. I returned to the apartment from an outing to find the understandably pissed-off landlady struggling to push the jammed laundry cage loose with a stick inbetween blasts of verbal rage. Eventually she managed to get things rolling smoothly, and extricated the culprit: a sock that had jammed up the outside of the cage during my desperate struggle to cram all of my clothes inside. I wasn’t sure if she hadn’t noticed the floor or didn’t care, but I was too afraid to ask until she had calmed down. When I finally mustered the courage, it turned out that she didn’t seem to care, explaining that plenty of water had gotten into that flooring before due to its location in the kitchen.
She had now relaxed to the point that I could recognize the lovely person described in so many Airbnb reviews. She said that now that we had resolved our washing machine crisis, we could become friends – a stunning reversal, to be sure! Partly out of gratitude and partly to avoid a bad review, I rushed off to the supermarket the next morning and loaded up on fancy olive oil, coffee, and other miscellanea, and thrust them into her hands before rushing off to my next destination in Bulgaria. It was a perfect example of sheer kindness and graciousness helping to offset my litany of minor misfortunes, and it would not be the last.
I managed to drop my phone and crack it even more the very next day, but otherwise managed to make it out of Bulgaria with no additional casualties aside from a really fancy water bottle, and with many more random acts of kindness along the way. And then I got to Romania.
My visit to Bucharest was a dreary affair, with one day spent entirely in bed – perhaps the price I paid for getting too much sun while trekking to an old monastery in a cliff face. My days out of bed were spent getting rained on and struggling with the erratic friendliness of the locals – some extremely nice, others too cool for school, and many of the older generation simply weighed down with the residual crustiness of the Iron Curtain. The city did not impress compared to the remarkable sunniness of Bulgaria, and I was happy to catch a train to the city of Brasov in Translyvania, just in time for the fateful 2016 US Presidential Election. I checked into my accommodations, my own 3-bedroom apartment with a mountain view that set me back by the princely sum of 22 Euros a night.
I went to sleep reading my usual pablum from the American liberal echo chamber: the New York Times, Salon, The Atlantic, and, most regrettably, Slate. I feasted on smug articles reassuring me that Donald Trump didn’t have a snowball’s chance of winning the presidency, with the whiz-bang statistical modeling to prove it – Slate showed Clinton leading by a slim margin in each of the six battleground states being tracked. One article regaled the reader with a planned event where thousands would stand outside Trump Tower in New York the day after his guaranteed loss, pointing and laughing. Nonetheless, I stayed up long enough to see that the actual numbers coming in from Florida were far less rosy, but convinced myself that it was too soon to lose hope. The New York Times gave Clinton an 85% chance of winning.
I woke up around 4 AM after a bad dream and took a bathroom break. Clinton was lagging behind in electoral votes, but the predictions remained strangely rosy.
After a few more hours of sleep, the apocalypse had arrived. I spent the next few hours lazing around in bed, waiting for more states to be called, as Trump inched his way toward 270. And then, in a flash, CNN.com was reporting that Clinton had called Trump to concede. The pussy-grabbing, Muslim-banning climate change-denier would be the next President of the United States of America. After spending the past year frequently depressed by the steady escalation of climate change, with each successive month being the hottest on record, my pessimistic predictions for the future of humanity now had to factor in the most powerful man on earth being someone who would jumpstart a hundred coal-fired power plants just for the sheer joy of reversing Barack Obama’s policies. The consequences of his election will be especially frightful for every American who doesn’t have the privileged position of being a white male, but no human being who relies on a steady supply of food, water, and dry shelter will be untouched. And if I accept this development with a certain amount of grim resignation, it’s only because I’ve long felt the same resignation toward watching humanity fearlessly proceed on its slow-motion collision course with the iceberg of climate disaster (not that there will be many literal icebergs left by then). And then I checked my bags.
Something was missing: the messenger bag that I used to carry my tablet and power bank. I couldn’t find it in the apartment. I called up the Airbnb owner, who had picked me up at the train station; no luck. I realized I must have left it on the train, or perhaps on the platform in Brasov where I sat while waiting for the owner to pick me up. (I had booked the apartment on short notice through Booking.com, and when I called up the owner I was fortunate to discover that she and her boyfriend were eating ice cream nearby.) After collecting myself and internalizing the latest of many minor misfortunes, I prepared for what turned out to be a hilariously convoluted trip to the train station.
First I went to the supermarket to get yogurt, because eating good Balkan yogurt gets priority over everything else, including a lost tablet and power bank. I got to the cash register, only to be informed by the extremely pleasant cashier that they had no spoons on hand. It was an obstacle on my yogurt quest, but I couldn’t help but notice what a tremendously friendly person she was – just the kind of boost I needed when confronted with so many setbacks, both spoon-related and otherwise. I opened it up at the checkout after paying, and was about to foolishly attempt eating it with a coffee stir stick when I noticed what looked like a coating of ice inside the container. I brought it to the attention of the staff – badly refrigerated yogurt with ice crystals is a lot less delicious than actual frozen yogurt – and they patiently and uncomplainingly brought me a replacement.
I opened the second one, stuck my finger cautiously inside it, and realized that it wasn’t ice at all – just a harmless forth that had accumulated at the top. They were totally ready to replace this dumbass foreigner’s perfectly fine yogurt, and were ready to do it with a smile. I felt ashamed and insisted on paying for both.
I headed back to my apartment to eat some of my yogurt and refrigerate the rest, along with all the other groceries I had picked up when I realized I wouldn’t be getting away from home so easily. I spent a bit of time on the sofa watching the world go to hell on my Facebook feed, and then made a second attempt to reach the train station.
This time I made the bus just in time, only to discover that tickets were not sold on board, and I would have to buy tickets at a convenience store and wait 20 minutes for the next bus. I killed time with a surprisingly good automat espresso, followed by a surprisingly bad and much more expensive human-made one from a local pizzeria. I opted for the human touch so I could have wifi and get out of the rain, but the warm smiles of the staff ended up being what justified paying five times as much for my second caffeine shot.
I finally reached the railway station and proceeded to the information window. With help from some English-savvy bystanders, the information lady informed me that they had no lost luggage policy, there was no chance anyone would have turned it in, and I should just go to the police. I insisted on checking at the administration office, where another staffperson reluctantly agreed to call the train’s final station, in spite of her obvious irritation. Frustratingly, the initially helpful bystanders began to lecture me about how I was no longer in my country (wherever that might be), and I couldn’t expect Romania to have such lavish luxuries as a lost and found counter or any sort of coherent policy on what staff should do when they find a bag on the ground. They scolded me that I couldn’t expect people here to be honest and return it, as if the idea of someone taking it for themselves hadn’t occurred to me. After ten years overseas I resent the insinuation that I expect the entire planet to conform to the Canadian way of doing things, and did not welcome it as a response to my innocent inquiries.
I desperately searched the platforms, and even asked a sympathetic-looking snack vendor (with help from Google Translate) whether she had seen my bag. Finally, quite by accident, I stumbled upon the railway police station, a place I initially had no intention of visiting – Why file a report and get caught up in the Eastern European bureaucratic machinery with no chance of anything coming of it? Nonetheless, I wandered in aimlessly, expecting manhandling and solicitation of bribes.
Instead, I was met with a kind, smiling officer. He listened patiently and seriously to my frivolous story of minor property loss, and did not shoot me down by telling me that I was on a fool’s errand. He even allowed me to sit with him while we patiently pored over CCTV footage from the station, a process that took much longer than it needed to due to my total misjudgment of how long I waited on the platform before getting picked up.
Watching the CCTV footage was a bit of a trip, too – I got the heady thrill of voyeurism, felt suspicious toward every person seen pacing around on camera, and realized that I myself have been that suspicious character in thousands of CCTV recordings over the years. Finally we found me, heading toward my ride with my backpack and suitcase, but not the missing bag. We chatted a bit about his excellent English (which he learned largely from the Cartoon Network), after which he called up the railway police at the other station, to no avail. I thanked him profusely for his time, and he gracefully brushed off my gratitude. Then he finally took my e-mail address, lowering my already very low expectations in the most delicate manner possible.
As I left the police station, it finally clicked. After having experienced so many random acts of kindness amidst the minor idiotic misfortunes of my trip, I understood how these simple gestures of humanity – as expressed through my gracious Airbnb hosts, chatty bakery owners, the warm-hearted supermarket staff, and so many other kind souls in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania – could just cut through all that crap. Cell phone screens and tablets could be replaced, but my memories of these good souls would be indelible. Even a connection that began at an airport gate and got cut short at Victoria Station can be something to be celebrated, and not mourned.
Of course, my misfortunes are trivial, and I juxtapose them with the serious global problems we face precisely to emphasize how insignificant they really are. It’s harder to say that the horrors about to be unleashed by the Vulgarian-Elect can be negated with a few smiles and the cordial processing of lost luggage claims. My heart goes out to everyone who is going to suffer as a result of this horrific dying gasp of white privilege – the women, LGBT individuals and visible minorities of the United States; the Mexicans suffering massive currency devaluation; the Ukrainians about to have their country trampled on even more horrifically than before; and all human beings who rely on clean water and a secure food supply to live. But I can only hope that these little gestures of kindness can still provide us with tiny pockets of sanity and comfort amidst our problems, both the inane and the monumental, as the entire world steadily goes to shit. If World War III doesn’t get us, rising global temperatures will, but at least we can still smile at someone when they replace our non-defective yogurt without complaining. (At least, as long as we still have yogurt, and aren’t forced to live off crickets and seaweed – that will come later.) It’s still better than nothing, isn’t it?