Twelve Hours. Four Airports. One Happy American.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 10:40 Tuesday night.  We had the taxi driver come and pick us up around 5:30 to give us plenty of time to get over there.  He told us we'd avoid rush hour and have plenty of time.  He lied.  Worst. Traffic. Ever.  I was getting so carsick by the end.  We had way too many bags, that's for sure.  The three of us crammed in the back seat and each had at least one bag on our laps...this lasted for close to 2 hours as we traveled across the city.  Misery.  Pure misery.  But I tried not to be miserable since I was witnessing my very last Peruvian sights.  I wanted to soak it all up...even if I was soaking up a city that didn't belong to me.  A strange city.  A city that was modern and bright and loud.  Not my quiet Cajamarca surrounded by green mountains and peasant people.  This was a very different Peru I was leaving.

Noelle in front of the Jorge Chavez Airport...the hilarity of this picture will only be known by three gringas.

The Lima airport was so much better the third time around.  We had to do customs stuff again, but it all went smooth as silk.  It's amazing what three months in a country will do to you...Spanish isn't nearly as scary!

Oh, I almost forgot the best part of the airport!!!!  SECURITY.  Noelle had quite the experience in security.  Look closely at the picture....

That would be a security officer inspecting Noelle's PINK toolkit she packed in her carry-on.  A tool kit containing a hammer, screwdrivers etc.  Brittany and I were laughing so hard when we figured out what was taking her so long to get through.  How do you forget about an entire tool kit in your carry-on?!  Only Noelle :)  I think the security guy found it amusing.  He did give her back her tape measure though!  So she didn't lose the entire tool kit.  I'm sad she lost it, but grateful that we had it the entire time we were in Peru.  It was useful many, many times.

Once we got to the terminal we had a little reminiscing session.  I whipped out my computer and we looked at movies from the beginning of the trip...and even movies from the end.  We laughed as we remembered our first week, we started to tear up as we remembered leaving all our friends just a week before.  We had a few minutes left on our phone and used them up by calling Liz and saying goodbye to her (Miguel was in class).  We also decided it would be appropriate to have a last Peru airport picture to compare to our first-day airport picture.

Showing off our Macchu Pichu passport stamps.

The original... GROSS GROSS GROSS GROSSSSSSSSSSS.  Did we really look that bad??  And sadly, I know we looked much worse in the few days following this picture....

I slept the majority of the flight home.  I wasn't awake when they served dinner OR breakfast.  The next hour was slightly beyond crazy.  I had to deboard the flight, get all of my luggage, go through American customs, check my bags again, get through American security again and board my next flight in just over an hour.  I literally ran through that airport.  Thankfully, one of the officers working near security realized how close I was cutting it and scooted me to the front of the line.  Had she not done that, I probably wouldn't have made my flight.  And to make the story even better, my plane had to be a good 15 minute RUN across the Miami airport.  I had to be the very literal furthest terminal from the security gate.

The story ends well as I made my flight from Miami to Chicago and enjoyed a nice, relaxing layover.  I was quite perturbed at the price of food though!!  I paid 9 times as much for a bottle of water than I was used to.  My "meal" of water and a piece of string cheese cost me almost as much as a week's worth of food in Peru.  How does that even happen??

Strange coincidence #3452424:  On my flight from Miami to Chicago I sat in front of a woman who I sat next to on the horrible bus ride from Puno to Cusco!  I didn't even recognize her but she heard me talking about Peru and thought the story sounded familiar so she reintroduced herself to me.

On that same flight, a rather interesting gentleman sat in the seat one away from me (I was at the window, he on the isle with the middle seat empty).  I learned he had been a missionary in Costa Rica for a while and he just seemed like a very...well, I can't describe him.  He was annoying and kind of rude but tried to be funny about it.  Example:  A man, who clearly didn't speak English, tried to sit in the seat between us and he kept giving him a hard time about it being his seat and asking if he wanted to sit there and it just made me mad.  The man sat down and didn't say anything.  He looked Middle Eastern.  After a few minutes I looked over to a large tag hanging from his neck.  It said "Hello, my name is _______.  I am a refugee from Iran.  I speak no English.  My flight is ______ etc."

I instantly felt so much love and so much empathy for this man.  I obviously have NO clue whatsoever what his homelife was like to have to leave his country and come to America, but I could understand being in a country where I can't speak to anyone.  I understood the feeling that you feel dumb and helpless because you can't communicate and all you want to do is yell at people that you're an intelligent human being who's funny and can read and write and has been to college and has friends and a family and a life going for them!  But there's just no way to say any of that.  And I even knew a spattering of Spanish.  And Spanish and English have some similar words.  English and Arabic?  Yeah, not exactly sister languages.  I wanted to give him a big hug and tell him everything was going to be okay and America is awesome and he'll get the language eventually.  I wanted to welcome him!

Funny thing is that I kept wanting to speak to him in Spanish.  Like everyone that didn't know English would know Spanish because it's a foreign language.  It was a very odd sensation.

Now's the point where you can tell me I'm a horrible person.  I didn't do a thing.  I didn't say hello.  I didn't even smile at him.  I just sat there.  I probably put my earphones in, leaned against the wall and drifted into a semi-sleep before take-off.  I got scared.  I didn't know what to do to try to communicate.  I regret that now.  I regret that I couldn't even welcome him in English.  That would have been better than nothing.  I'm sure he would have appreciated it.  He went on with a few others to California to start a new life.  I guess by now he's been there for two months and I can only assume it's been some of the most frustrating two months of his life.  But I know it will get better for him.  I hope people are treating him well and showing more love than I did.

To give this story an even more depressing turn, remember the strange man I was sitting next to?  Well, I think sitting next to a Mormon girl and an Iranian refugee was too much for him because he got up and moved to a seat across the isle.  There was no more room over there than there was in his original seat.  He was up one row and on the other side, that was it.  I felt sorry for him.  I just felt his judgements shooting at us like little darts.  It was not the greatest feeling in the world.

But the flight went smooth and so did the flight from Chicago to Detroit.  In Detroit I was met by my mother with a great big hug.

I made it home.  I survived Peru.