Flight woes !!!!

“You want to know what it is like to be on a plane for 22 hours? Sit in a chair, squeeze your head as hard as you can, don’t stop, then take a paper bag and put it over your mouth and nose and breathe your own air over and over and over.”
– Lewis Black, comedian

I have nobody to blame except myself for my latest predicament.

It was simply ludicrous of me to have embarked on another plane trip before I had removed the dregs of my previous long-haul flight from my system.

Falling for the usual sales gimmick of low fares, I chose to travel with a lesser-known Asian carrier to Amsterdam. Of course, I had my travel blinkers on, which meant the airline’s discreet and fine-print disclaimer of ‘you might find yourself indulging more in transit than flying-time and your so-called straightforward journey will sprout as many legs as an octopus’ was conveniently ignored by itchy-feet me.

Ah poor me. Little did I know what ‘delightful’ surprises I was in for. For someone bitten by the travel bug for the last three years, I should be immune to the discomforts of travelling. But the rigmarole of flying, especially economy flying, never ceases to astound me.

I fully appreciate the rigorous and numerous customs and security checks undertaken in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But one cannot deny the hardships and excessive procedures that ordinary travellers are subjected to.

I am always one of the lucky ones to get metal detectors to ‘ping’ every time I walk through them. Bingo! Full body frisking here I come. How do I convince the stony faced security guard that I have no concealed weapon in my waist-band but just extra flab I attempted to camouflage under my one-size-smaller jeans?

Just when you think you have just finished your five minutes of frisk fame, you realize your ‘lucky’ stars continue to shine. You get chosen for a random drug test and more frisking.

It gets further maddening to discover all your space-saving strategies and nights of careful packing can be undone in a minute and your stash of undergarments and cheap tourist trinkets are out for public display yet again.

I still have not been able to figure out if it was the destination I had chosen or the political and bureaucratic intricacies of the transit country that posed one hurdle after the other this time.

Normally I am used to breezing through international airports with the immunity provided by my Australian passport. One glance and usually I get away scot-free with minimal control checks. However, this time I certainly found things to be quite different.

The moment I disembarked for transit, my passport got whisked away for so-called stamping. No prior information was given by my flight agent regarding the local customs of this particular country nor were the airport officials helpful as to what was happening. I then found out from another Australian couple, who were also detained, that our itinerary now included another domestic trip to the capital city of the transit country. Surprise, surprise!

After futile attempts at conversation in English with the dolled-up airport authority allegedly responsible for customer service, both my new-found travel buddies and I gave up and sat there resigned, waiting for our passports to arrive.

Finally after a nail-biting wait, we were reunited with our passports and without any explanation shooed off to continue our transit.
Then we began the arduous journey of seeking further information only to be passed from one desk to another and from one supervisor to another.

Most signs were baffling given the predominant use of the local language and was often missing or incorrect because the airport was still in the throes of refurbishment. Very few people spoke English. Soon a crowd gathered for Amsterdam and the motley collection of sleep-deprived passengers were herded sheep-like between various transit lounges, staircases and flights. Finally we were relieved to learn that we were on our way to Amsterdam.

It is perhaps a regular saga that people experience in airports; but I was struck anew with the chaos associated with what should have been a simple transit and travel.

There was something freaky about being kept in the dark in this Asian country known more for its information censorship than its growing economic and political power.

Our long period of stay in Australia has us accustomed to a country whose culture and lifestyle reflects its liberal democratic traditions and values especially including highly regarded freedom of expression and information.

It was indeed a wake-up call to realise what one enjoys in Australia, especially us naturalised citizens. It is not just the security or living comforts that we are talking about here, but the littlest of things that one always takes for granted, especially access to information.

Home Alone.....

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.

- Angela Schwindt

Eerily quiet, the house is.

(No, I am not converting to Yoda speak, but I should admit it works for me, at least for better emphasis.)

I bet the apparent lack of noise from our house for the last two weeks must be quite disconcerting to our neighbours. No, the kids have not yet flown the nest; empty nest syndrome is still a decade away for me.

Neither have I auctioned the kids on e-Bay…..erm, not yet. Well, school holidays do seem to bring all kinds of weird behaviour in parents and in some, as our Geelong mother would agree, a rather warped sense of humour.

Well, coming back to the post, the kids have gone to Melbourne to spend the school holidays with their cousins. Very simple it sounds…..but not so simple was the aftermath of our decision.

Two weeks ago

Like all other Kryptonian mothers out there, I too was resigned to spending most of my time juggling plenty of balls in the air and whingeing the rest of the time, about being exhausted.

To say mornings in our house were chaotic would be an understatement – everyday without exception, the house looked like being hit by a tornado. I should say my husband and I started each morning with a miracle; getting the kids ready for school without having a stroke in the midst of all the shouting matches was indeed something to be silently grateful for.

Something or the other constantly grew roots on our couch – if it weren’t for our technology addicted kids in front of the LCD screen, it was half-eaten food crumbs, wrappers, dirty plates, drink cups or socks. The house usually in varying states of disarray left me constantly exhausted, fractious and often staggered by the amount of work, two brats under ten can generate every single day of the week.

Above the inordinate amount of cleaning, washing and chauffeuring I had to do, it was the noise that usually drove me nuts. Not a day passed without the kids having a squabble over something or a fight for the TV remote, throw Dad into the fighting pit for his daily dose of news; it can get seriously ugly at home.

Dinner time, bed time, well to be honest every other time was a noisy affair at our house. The house did have noise insulation but unfortunately it was simplex in nature – only parents’ voices were filtered and never got through to the kids.

School Holidays

So naturally when my husband came up with this brilliant idea of offloading the sources of the noise for a couple of weeks to his brother’s, I greeted it with great enthusiasm. We drew up a list of what we were going to do during our two weeks of quiet and peace and I have to admit the list kept growing longer and longer by the impending hour of the kids’ departure. Very soon, the kids were dropped off at their cousins and we came home to a haven of tranquillity.

A day or two passed, everything was still in its place as day one – no bedclothes out of place, no dirty plates in sight, no overflowing laundry baskets, no vacuuming either. And above all no noise; by now we should have been simply overjoyed and ecstatic at the life of leisure and normalcy we had without the kids. But in reality, did we??

Very soon our sanctuary of peace and quiet was becoming too stifling for us, the monotony of the days was getting to us without the kids to break it or infuse the old sense of excitement into our lives. And thanks to the profusion of carbon tax in the media, the TV remote lay unclaimed. The house still remained clean but hopelessly empty, as if its very soul had gone into hiding.

We got to do the things we wanted – we fitted in dinners, drinks, movies, entertaining friends and even a weekend trip to Adelaide, but somehow there was not the imagined exuberance in it, but just the motions of completing a list that we had drawn up. As there was no pressing need to be at home at the said time, there were longer days at work. We hardly cooked, there were more and more takeaways or eating outside –no timelines, no routines to guide us and above all we both had this sense of free-falling or should I say failing? We even started missing the incessant noise and chatter that served as a backdrop to every single activity we did as a family.

Any modicum of work life balance that we seemed to have flew out of the window the minute the kids quit the scene. It was quite a revelation when we came to realise the routines and family rituals that we had put in place helped us parents more than the kids. Funnily enough without the kids to structure our time and life, things were increasingly chaotic than before. Suddenly we found ourselves adrift in the ocean of our lives without the kids to steer our course.

Two weeks seemed to stretch to an eternity and we were all ready to call it quits to our newfound bohemian style of living. We not only had selective amnesia about life pre-kids, but also it looked like we simply had lost the capacity to enjoy leisure and life guilt-free without the children in tow. The break that we had much anticipated for now seemed more like a sentence to us and we could not wait for them to come home soon.

Isn’t it ironical we spend the first 25 years of our life being moulded by our parents and then the next 25 by our children? I do not know if other parents are in the same boat as us, but it looks like we find our identity as parents more gratifying than any other identity we might take.

Yes, when the two weeks are up, I will resume my role as a juggling parent and even resort to the cardinal sin of whingeing….. but then we all know I would not have it any other way, right???