The trip back to New York went pretty smoothly but we did witness one bizarre event. At the San Jose check in, my bag was 3.8kg overweight, so I quickly transferred a big book and 2 heavy packing cells to my hand luggage. After check in I realized that my choice wasn’t so clever, I’d chosen all my toiletries (completely forgetting in my haste the issue with liquids onboard). I’d been trying to find out along the way what to do about this and then in Panama Airport we came across a team of young pink topped Panamanian women who’d been instructed to search all our hand luggage for liquids. Snowdon and I sat and watched a huge crowd of passengers cram up in a big line itching to get on our New York flight. They appeared irritated by the inconvenience. As the line thinned out we stepped up for our turn. I showed the ladies my toiletry bags and began to explain my predicament. “Oh sunscreen no!” is how the ‘pink lady’ response began. A boy wailed behind us. His mother began to yell. As I swung around to see what was going on, I was met by the furious and indignant stare of the mother, who said directly to me (I guess as a ‘comrade’ being the only other woman passenger still in the area), “She has broken my son’s favourite bag – what am I going to do with him wailing on the plane for the next 6 hours?” My reaction was: raise eyebrows, spin back around to remove self from the situation, return to own issue, make sure the pink ladies didn’t think that I agreed with her by referring to the lady – loca (crazy). During the next few minutes I turned around several more times to see the lady ranting, raving and abusing the poor pink lady and her supervisor with high aggression and high volume (the supervisor ensured that the bag actually got searched!). Now engraved in my mind is one of her comments, “I have never seen anyone be so cruel to a child before” referring to the gentle Panamanian pink lady who had broken part of the very well used boys bag. Eventually they left to board but she returned shortly after to aggressively ask who was going to clean up the boys vomit. He was so stressed out by all the commotion that he’d brought up his dinner.
Meanwhile the lovely ladies had accepted my request of stashing my toiletries under the plane, thus allowing me to keep EVERYTHING (thank goodness it would have been $$ to replace it all). I thanked them profusely and stopped at the very upset lady to say, “por favor no te preocupes, no se que pasa con esta mujer” (please don’t worry about it, I don’t know what’s up with that lady). As I walked in the plane I saw the incredulous looks of the majority of the plane – awestruck at what must have been the continued ranting of this woman. It appeared that the whole plane, including Snowdon and I were frowning upon this lady. When we found our seats, after having a bit of time to think about how I could have handled that situation better (and thinking of what the Buddha would have done), I said to Snowdon, “you know you’re really spiritually aware when you can show compassion for a woman like that” (and I mean in the moment not afterwards - that's much easier!).
I continued to wonder what the lady needed. I think what would have made the difference to her was someone acknowledging what she was saying. Maybe inside she was just a frightened lady who didn’t know how to deal with her son. Although it was both brutal and fascinating to be a spectator of her behaviour, like us all she was just acting how she knows how to act….
After navigating our way to Paul’s house in Brooklyn in the early morning, arriving at 7am, we sank delighted into the deliciously cozy bed that was waiting for us. We awoke many hours later to the cozy Sunday sounds and mouth watering smells of …..bacon …..hmmm. I thought, ‘hmm that’s nice they’re having bacon and eggs for breakfast’, then snoozed some more. We woke up at what we thought was midday, only to find out that it was actually 3.30pm local time! Paul said, "we were about to start throwing mango’s at you" (Paul and Gina were in their cabina when I’d walked past and a monkey had dropped a gigantic mango on me, a few days later one had bounced off a tree and hit Snowdon, quite an unlikely occurrence with him being under the cabina roof).We sat down to a magnificent brunch with coffee, and muffins topped with baby spinach, bacon, eggs and hollandaise sauce. Flash man – what a greeting! We had a lovely relaxing Sunday afternoon chilling about Paul and brother Steve’s lovely Brooklyn apartment.
In the evening we returned to the airport to pick up our hire car. We had another strange experience with the hire lady Rosa who wanted us to sign the rental agreement with an incorrect total amount on it. She found it hard to understand our resistance. After a series of hard to follow interactions, including one of, “if you had of called me and told me that you were going to turn up 10 min early I would have prepared it for the new time”. Eventually I asked, “Can’t you print out another bill with the correct amount on it?” She said, “No, what would be the point of that when we have this one and I’ve written 7.55am on the top”. Make sense? We didn’t think so either… Finally she scrubbed out the incorrect amount, wrote the correct amount and we hastily signed it to complete the handover!
We headed into the big city – Manhattan! We were wowed at what we saw! I knew about the lit up billboards but experiencing them was something else. Due to a malfunctioning cigarette lighter in our hire car, we ended up stuck in the city with no map and a flat GPS. After a nice Irish meal, a quick look at the Hard Rock café (where I was excited to see various singers original concert clothing) and Snowdon finding our way back to the airport to get a car upgrade (nice), we fell into bed at 4am.
The next day began our sponsored family trip down south (originally we’d planned a very limited stop in New York lest we be left with nil finances, so thank you Harold for making this extra adventure possible!!!!!). First stop Washington DC! On the way we stopped at two places: the first a gorgeous and delicious farmers market in Philadelphia, the second a sketchy market in Baltimore (where we felt quite uncomfortable and hastily vacated). That night we stayed at the Travelodge in Silver Spring, Washington that night, and watched ‘The Big One’ (borrowed from Paul) by Michael Moore, on our Mac Book – very informative!
The next morning we headed into Washington. It was wonderful! We got free parking for 3hrs right in the middle of all the sites and this is what we saw:
The Whitehouse
The Washington Monument
While we were viewing the Washington Monument this military helicopter flew right over us - the road to the White House was closed off when we passed by so we say Obama was in it.
The World War II Memorial
The famous pool in-between the WWII memorial and the Lincoln memorial (which Snowdon remembered from the movie Forest Gump)
The Lincoln Memorial
The Vietnam War Memorial
The Korean War Memorial
The Holocaust Museum: very well explained, displayed and educational but of course disturbingly shocking that this ever took place.
On our way out of Washington DC we found ‘The Big Chair’ (aka Anacostia's Big Chair).
After a wonderful few hours in Washington DC (and Japanese for a late lunch) it was time to head to Pinehurst, North Carolina (see the next blog for that)!
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