A whole year?

Random travel notes

• Bidets are perfect for hand-washing clothes. Great for soaking your feet after a long day of sightseeing, too.
• While flipping through channels on the TV in our hotel room in Paris we noticed that they were mostly in English and German. Chloe said they saw the same thing in the south of Spain so we theorized that those must be the free cable channels.
• On our drive from the airport to our hotel in Paris I checked the speedometer: 160 kilometers per hour, just about 100 miles per hour. Cool, but there was no sensation of going fast because we were keeping pace with traffic.
• A charming hotel room quickly turns into hell when there is no air conditioning. Don't let them fool you: a fan is not enough.
• The small hotels we've stayed in have worked out great for us, but now I've confirmed what I've always suspected: I enjoy the anonymity of a larger hotel devoid of intimidating personalities. I'm a failure at travel of the backdoor variety. I'm always afraid I'm going to get yelled at for doing something wrong, like bringing food into the room (expressly forbidden in our Paris hotel). In Rome, the maid scared me (I at first took her to be a disgruntled guest because we'd hear her complaining in the hallway to no one in particular), and here in Paris I can feel the maid's impatient glare through the door. I didn't come to Paris to sleep, but nor did I come to be herded out of my room at the crack of noon.
• At 11:00 PM we watched the Eiffel Tower light up and sparkle. It was still that way at 12:30 AM, the last time I checked.
• I haven't yet seen a hotel hairdryer-on-the-wall that's worth the space it would save in my luggage if I were to leave mine at home.
• A little refrigerator in the hotel room is darn near on my necessity list.
• Next time I will bring a water bottle and not rely on buying bottled water (could easily spend more than $25 a day for one person and there are few places to refill one) or even on buying a bottle of water and refilling it in the hotel, which was my original plan. I get tired of carrying stuff around and I'm much less likely to throw away a water bottle than I am to throw away an empty bottle of water.
• It's true - pop is more expensive than wine, especially in eating establishments. And forget about free refills. It's also true that if chilly beverages are a deal-breaker for you you'd better stay home.
• It doesn't have to be too hot before it is far too hot to lug a backpack around. Just about everyone - men and women - carry different shapes of bags diagonally across their chests. In Rome I bought a purse-kind of thing that wasn't too big and did the same as the Spaniards and the Romans and now the French. It became our lifeline filled with everything we'd need for the day and with the things I wouldn't leave in our rooms: passports, train and plane tickets, money, debit card, water, snacks, maps, Vaseline Lip Therapy, which is like crack to me. But backpacks are great to haul around extra stuff at airports, bus, and train stations, as long as the zippers are locked.
• Those suitcases that convert to backpacks? Yeah, no one uses them. I have several and have never used them as backpacks. Rick Steves said his company doesn't sell one anymore for that reason. But I can't begin to imagine a suitcase without wheels.
• Plan on your luggage getting smashed and being opened by TSA. Better to plan on it than be surprised.
• When suitcase shopping, thicker is not better. There were many places where our largish suitcases fit, but wouldn't have if they had been just an inch thicker. Everything is crowded and your time will be more pleasant if you're not angering every person whose knees you bash every time you walk down the aisle.
• Heed all the warnings about safeguarding your wallet and valuable documents, but you don't need to be psychotic about it - common sense is enough. A guy at the train station in Rome was begging for help to get his suitcases from Left Luggage because his wallet had been stolen and the claim ticket was in it. The place was busy and the people behind the counter were not making his life any easier. They asked where his wallet had been and he patted his now-empty back pocket. Any sympathy they may have had vanished with that admission. He told them, nicely if a little desperately, that if they didn't help him find his luggage quickly  (amid thousands of bags) he would miss his train. They shrugged.
• Before I left I bought fancy-pants laminated folding maps of the major cities we visited. I had fun looking at them in my compulsive zeal before I left, but didn't need them in Europe. The ubiquitous free maps available everywhere and handed out automatically at our hotels (and stores, train, subway, and bus stations) were better, newer, and easier to follow. And I could get several: one for each day because I discovered that helpful people tend to draw all over them when you ask them them directions. That was great, but I get confused easily so I was able to start clean every day.

Confirmed

I leave for Madrid on June 28 and Chloe and I return from Copenhagen on July 22. In the message that the agent at SAS left on Friday, she said that unfortunately the taxes were high so for my two tickets it was going to be this much money. Expensive, but a little less than what I'd estimated. I very nearly panicked over the weekend, though, when I checked for flight information. On Orbitz, the cheapest Seattle-Madrid SAS flight was $2550 (SAS is one of the most expensive ways to fly to Madrid from here). On the SAS Web site, it's $3898. Either of those figures would have made it impossible for me to go. What did she mean by "two tickets?" One from here to Madrid and the other from Copenhagen to here? Or did she mean each way? I replayed her message, but that issue didn't magically clear up the more I played the message.

Today she assured me that she'd quoted me the round-trip price, and mine is not a standard ticket because I'm returning from a different place than where I'll arrive. I don't know if it's technically an open-jaw ticket, but it effectively is and the AAA travel agent told me that open-jaw tickets are almost as expensive as one-way tickets. That's two things she was wrong about. But why is the price on the SAS Web site almost three times as much as from an SAS salesperson?

I asked again, after being told so many times that it was impossible, if it really was okay if Chloe didn't do the Madrid-Copenhagen leg of the return trip. The Lovely Woman at SAS assured me, for the fourteenth time, that it was no problem. But do I have to tell someone she won't be leaving from Madrid? Will they assume she's not flying at all that day and cancel her Copenhagen to Seattle leg and then Chloe will be stuck in Denmark until she can get a job and earn enough money to pay a gazillion dollars for a full-fare, last-minute plane ticket (I have my ticket)? Again, Lovely Woman very kindly resisted the urge to tell me to relax and slap myself: she didn't even book Chloe from Madrid to Copenhagen, so what, exactly, would I tell who?

I'm a big fan of doing as much as possible online, but this exchange process has taught me that when it comes to spending money or making mission-critical arrangements, never rely on only one source.

Return details III

Today I went to yet another funeral, albeit this time a happy one. Everyone should have the good fortune of meeting at least one person like this - a person who has lived such a good and loving long life that she's happy to move on to the next step, and everyone who loves her (which is anyone who has ever met her) is happy for her. I came home to a message from the Lovely Woman at SAS. She's confirmed my flight out and our return home, on the same flight. If she'd been here I would have kissed her right on the mouth. Now, wasn't that easy?

Again, if you don't get the answer you want, ask some more. Eventually, you might get the answer you've been searching for. I'll call back on Monday to get the details and book everything, but as of right now it looks like I'm set to leave for Madrid on July 1 and Chloe and I will return from Copenhagen on July 22. Chloe's done with school on June 24, so she'll have to stay with someone until I get there. I hope she hasn't worn out her welcome and that we haven't assumed too much.

While good news, this only reminds Chloe that she'll have to leave Pamplona. She's kind of liking her not-quite-real life, a life where SATs and college applications and required courses for graduation don't exist. If she could combine that with her friends and family from home, it would be a perfect world. Wouldn't we all love a world like that.

Return details II

About a month or so ago I e-mailed the travel agent and told her that in addition to making Chloe's return reservation, I needed help in booking my trip. The students all have open return tickets, but they don't have a reservation until we give the agent a series of dates that will work. A return ticket isn't much good unless there's a flight available to use it on. The most important part was that Chloe and I would fly home on the same flight. She said she could help with that when I was ready.

So I called the travel agent yesterday. She was always busy so I expected voice mail, but this was a different message than I'd heard before: the number was no longer being monitored for messages. If you need to make return arrangements for any exchange student anywhere but Argentina, call this guy instead (Argentina-bound students get their own agent). I called that guy. His message said that he'd be on vacation and out for orientations until April 11. Fabulous. Our travel agent is no longer there, and I can't make arrangements for another month, knowing that return flights the latter part of July are already scarce. So I called back and left a message for the owner.

In the meantime, what the hell can it hurt, I called the local sales office (that the SAS agent had told me about) even though I wasn't concerned about the travel agency. I was transferred to a Lovely Woman who listened to my concerns. She is with group sales, knows all about exchange-student reservations, knew that our travel agent was no longer with the agency, and wanted to know how she could help. Well, can Chloe leave from Copenhagen without going through Madrid first? "Of course." Really? I was told that was impossible. "No problem, she just won't use her ticket from Madrid to Copenhagen." Well, that's wonderful news! "But," she cautioned me, "you won't get a refund. You'll have to forfeit that part of the fare" Yippee! I thought it might cost me money to do that so I'm very happy.

This is too good to be true, so I thought I might as well push my luck for the tricky part: getting us home together on the same flight. I'd looked on several online sites for return flights the third week of July and found nothing, and she said they were having problems booking other exchange students because the flights were full. But, just a sec. No, she just looked and there's no problem there. So I gave her some parameters and she said she'd call back. Okay, not this post - I'll finish this in the next post.

Return details I

We did not make Chloe's travel arrangements. Rotary takes care of that, which is okay with me. They use a travel agency that said they make the arrangements for about 700 exchange students per year. Because of the way Chloe got to Spain, I have a theory. Not even a theory, but outright conjecture. I'm guessing that Rotary pays the agency a flat fee and the agency negotiates rates from there; the better their negotiating skills, the more profit they make. Again, I have no idea if this is true, but if it is I'm all for that. It does tend to make for some strange arrangements, which would explain why Chloe got to Spain via Chicago and Copenhagen in about 24 hours. There are much easier ways to get from Seattle to Madrid and the Rotary guy in Madrid said he was going to complain to the travel agent because the kids were so exhausted by the time they arrived. Abby, for example, flew from Chicago to Madrid in much less time. But they had to make their own arrangements.

And it tends to make for some inflexible plane tickets. I've been to a couple of travel agents at AAA and called SAS a few times to ask them about Chloe's return ticket. Specifically, whether or not she has to go from Madrid to Copenhagen, or if she can skip that part. If we could leave directly from Copenhagen, it would be much better for our travel plans when I get there to not have to return to Spain to come home. It will also greatly influence the destinations I consider for our trip.

The answer has been that the fare basis is some hybrid of codes that no one else seems to understand, which means that no one can tell me if there's any flexibility with Chloe's ticket. Even SAS said that it was a negotiated fare that only the travel agent could decipher. My suggestion that the travel agent would not have negotiated that fare in a vacuum and so surely someone at SAS must have some idea of what it means was met with silence. The answers I got from two AAA travel agents were: 1) the ticket cannot be changed and if she doesn't depart from Madrid the entire ticket is void and 2) who knows, you'll have to talk to the original travel agent. From three phone calls to SAS, I got: 1) I don't know I have no idea what that means and 2) I can book a reservation only if it corresponds exactly to what the ticket says and 3) if you're concerned about your travel agent, you can call the local sales office and tell them of your concerns. I didn't say I had concerns about the travel agent and was, in fact, grateful that the travel agent went with the kids to San Francisco during the whole visa mess. And I'll finish this in the next post.

Reality bites

Chloe is not very happy. She called from a pay phone at a bus station en route to Pamplona and doesn't want to go back. From that, I've inferred that the trip was a success. The problem? Too much fun on the trip. School, homework, tests, school uniform (didn't take long for the novelty of that to wear off), cold weather, no beaches, and reality have lost their appeal. The problem with vacations is that they end.

Originally they were told that anyone who didn't live near Madrid would have to spend an extra night there at the end of the trip, but that that was included in the cost of the trip. That's how she read the information, and for us Alicia translated the itinerary thus: "The trip and the nights in Madrid cost yada yada euros. The students living out of Madrid will have to pay for the trip from their houses to Madrid, and from Madrid to their houses." And they did. Some took a train, some took a bus, and I'm guessing the students living in the Canary Islands employed a different mode of transportation to Madrid.

Chloe mentioned briefly that they ended up staying in a hostel in Madrid last night because, contrary to what the itinerary says, the trip officially ended that day and did not include another night's stay. A Rotary guy told them they should stay somewhere better but she said it was fine, even though they were left to fend for themselves and pay for their last night in Madrid on their own. They were told that they'd been e-mailed a message explaining the situation, but they didn't receive it. Just like they didn't receive information that there was going to be a trip in the first place.

These kinds of life experiences are great if everything turns out okay, as it did. Now they have an idea of how to not spend the night in a bus station in a major international city, and I think that Chloe wouldn't have been so nonchalant about fending for themselves if this had happened at the beginning of her stay. That's a good thing to have learned, but that's not what they signed up for. If they'd known they were going to be on their own the last night in Madrid, they would have made arrangements. Part of Rotary's appeal is that we know we can trust Rotary to take care of our kids. Some Rotary districts are wonderful and provide the students they are hosting with many unbelievable opportunities. Some are terrible and petty and won't allow the students any degree of individual responsibility. As with most organizations, the people on the front lines are more important than the lofty ideals of the organization as a whole. Where Chloe is the club and district seem to be indifferent, but at least that way the exchange familes don't have any expectations one way or the other. It would be nice, however, to be able to rely on what little information the students are given.

You can do it

We've been talking about travel plans for when I go meet Chloe. My first thought was that Chloe would somehow get down to Madrid and we'd meet there. She didn't like that idea: she didn't want to go down by herself, she might get lost, I might get lost. I told her that maybe I could meet her when she gets off the bus or the train. "Can you find the bus station?" I told her that I was pretty sure that it had been done before: a non-Spanish speaking person finding the bus station in Madrid.

I found myself telling her that I was pretty sure she could manage. How hard is it to get on a bus or train, get off in a major metropolitan city, then meet someone at a prearranged location?

Then I realized what I was saying: I want my sixteen-year-old daughter to travel about five hours by herself, to one of the biggest cities in the world, get off at a bus or train station (which are not often in the best parts of town), then hope the rest goes according to plan and we actually meet among the millions of citizens and hordes of travelers from around the world. All the while operating as if in the dark ages, without cell phones.

True, she flew far away from here and is living in a foreign country. But she didn't do any of that by herself. We'd probably have no problem meeting up, but if something went wrong she wouldn't automatically know what to do. It's entirely possible, probable, even, with the language barrier, that I'd make a few wrong turns in getting to our meeting spot. There's a good chance I would be hours late because of that. It's perfectly reasonable for her to be apprehensive about the whole idea. I'm sure she can do it, she just hasn't yet and there would be easier situations in which to learn that lesson.

Here I am suggesting that she suck it up and get herself down to Madrid and meet me. If she was at home and told me she was going to get on the ferry (30 seconds from our house), then somehow make her way to the train station to meet someone after she gets to Seattle, I'd tell her no way, not until she'd figured out exactly where it was, how she'd get there, how she'd get back, and what she'd do should a major earthquake collapse the Alaskan Way Viaduct. And I'll still do that after she gets home.

Red flags not of the bullfighting variety

I never did get an explanation of how Alicia was able to get her exchange visa before her 15th birthday, but now it appears that perhaps someone made an administrative error in Alicia’s favor. It was issued in August, and the expiration date is the middle of October 2005. There is no effective date given but I’d initially assumed that all exchange visas were good for one year from the date of issuance. So I assumed I assumed wrong.

Today when the Rotary district guy entered her information in the INS system (they had to register everyone with the sponsoring-organization information), her name came back with a big red flag next to it. No one seems to know what that means. Then I found out that Rotary had put the effective date of her exchange as October 24, after Alicia’s birthday (which makes sense with the October expiration date) because he couldn’t get around the date-limited birthdate field. Then he FedExed the whole package to Alicia’s family and they went to the US embassy in Madrid immediately to apply for the visa, which they received three days later in Pamplona.

So, she has a visa with an issue date of August 2004 and an expiration date of October 2005 from the US embassy in Madrid, which knew of her age problem (that’s the office that gave Alicia’s family the list of required documents for her visa, after they told her she was too young). Immigration let her, unaccompanied, through the gates of SeaTac airport and into the wild blue yonder of the USA. She’s officially part of Rotary International Youth Exchange and she’s going to school. I wonder what the red flag is for but I won’t be asking any questions I don’t know the answer to and won’t mention this to Alicia. Maybe Madrid didn’t complete their forms correctly. Maybe it’s a simple clerical error. But unless someone comes to take her away (in the 18 days before she turns 15), all I officially know is that I have a Spanish girl here with a valid J1 exchange visa.

Baggage weight

In the basic information from Rotary it says that you’re allowed 70 pounds per suitcase and gives the maximum dimensions for both bags combined. The travel agent also tells you to call the airlines to make sure, especially if you’ll be changing planes somewhere other than in the US.

If you’re ticketed all the way through to your final destination, you usually get the full 70 pound allowance within Europe (even if changing planes), even though the standard European allowance is only 44 pounds per bag (20 kilos). It might be even less in some countries other than in Europe.

But I called Iberia Airlines just in case, because Chloe has a stopover in Madrid (which I learned is different than a layover) and because I’ve learned to not trust anything printed because these things change so often. Even though all of her flights are on the same itinerary, because she’s spending two nights in Madrid (hence, the stopover and not layover), she has to go by the European allowance from Madrid to Pamplona. Both of her bags weighed 48 pounds on the United scales at the airport. If they enforce it strictly, she shouldn’t have to pay too much for the overage. Iberia says it’s 1% of the highest adult fare per kilo. I have no idea what that might come out to, but she’s only 3.6 kilos over. If they balk at the extra kilos, Chloe said she’s going to cry first and then, if necessary, hand over her debit card.

One of the kids who left Seattle yesterday goes from Madrid to Barcelona, but I don’t know by which airline. He didn’t call the airline and one bag is almost 70 pounds and the other is over 50. The host families over there are going to be a bit surprised because all of their kids were allowed only two bags at 20 kilos each. We’re hoping that Chloe and A2’s bags all fit in the car together.

So, again, if it could cost you extra money or in some way negatively affect your trip, never trust anything printed. Call, then call again. Even then, you’ll often get a different answer each time you ask. If you find your answer on their Web site (never trust third-party Web sites for vital information), print it out and take it with you. I’ve heard, “Well, then, Rotary should have to pay because they’re the ones who told us how much we could bring.” But Rotary also told you to call and double check.

All the pieces are here

Being a FedEx or other delivery driver in a residential area would be so much fun. All day long they're making people happy because they're bringing them stuff they want and have been eagerly waiting for. This time the FedEx guy brought the right thing: Chloe’s plane tickets. So now she has all the necessary documentation to leave home and spend the school year in Spain.

A has already sent her documents to Madrid and said that they were looking for plane tickets. I still don’t know the time frame or exactly how she’s getting around the DS2019. Chloe so wants her here before she leaves. It will be so odd: two girls from different parts of the world, living in each other’s homes and sleeping in each other’s beds. Chloe talked to A2 and asked about A’s sister, who’s in Kansas right now. She said she was very nice, talkative, and brought only one small suitcase. How did she do that? Chloe could fit in just one of her suitcases. A2 is not traveling with the group going from Chicago to Copenhagen, and she gets to Madrid in the morning, Chloe arrives at night. But they'll meet up there for the two-day orientation. She and A2 will be on the same floor at school, but A2 starts several days later and gets out several days earlier.

Anna Rae left this morning, which makes it all seem even more real. Her mom said it went well at the airport and thinks she’ll feel even better when she hears from Anna Rae after she arrives. She also had a good idea – bring a few bags of microwave popcorn. Other kids had said it was nice to have something they could make for themselves in the beginning without having to ask the host family where everything was in the kitchen. And Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Having a few familiar foods stashed away would be a nice security blanket.

The big picnic for friends and family is this Saturday and from then it will be only five more days until departure. Who’s bright idea was this?