Meanwhile in Tunis... The servers are down at the airport

I am finally sitting on the porch in VA, with two happy dogs at my feet, watching it lightly rain in the mountains. Getting here is a bit of a story...

As the title says, I arrived at the Tunis airport on Saturday morning (it was already 95 degrees at 8 am) to find it more dysfunctional than it normally is. Catherine and Omar had dropped me off early, since I had two bags to check and that always adds a lot of time. The first thing I noticed was almost all the flights were delayed, which was slightly concerning. They finally announced the check-in gate for Munich and I thought I had a pretty good place in line, so I thought all was well. Then, the line didn't move. And didn't move. And didn't move. All the lines were inching forward at a snails pace and the guy behind me asked if this was normal. We started chatting about the lethargic bureaucracy of Tunisia, but then we got up to the front and we figured out that this wasn't the normal disorganization. The servers for the entire Tunis airport were down. They couldn't look up reservations, they couldn't log our bags into the system, and each ticket had to be hand written. Each of us was given a number, not a seat name, and sent on our way. This is what the baggage tracking slips looked like:

As soon as I saw that, I was pretty much convinced that I would never see my bags again.

I finally made it through passport control and I made the mistake of thinking the hard part was over. We still didn't know what the numbers on our boarding passes meant, but it seemed like that would get worked out. 

As departure time got closer, it became clear that check-in was only the beginning. There was no indication of us boarding and every single person going to Munich had a connecting flight. At 11:50 (30 minutes after we were supposed to depart) the staff informed us that the flight was delayed and that we would be boarding soon. At that point all the passengers rushed the gate and stood in line. We were in that line for another 20 minutes. Finally when we boarded, they were checking our boarding passes and crossing our names off of lists, since the server was still down. It was free seating in the plane, which wad an exciting experience of jostling and elbow jabbing. Once we were on the plane, we sat there for another hour, because they had to load all the bags by hand, which meant crosschecking all the luggage with a list from the check-in desk and recording the transfer onto the plane manually. We took off two and a half hours late and at that point, about half of us had missed our flights already.

View from my hotel room

Once we arrived in Munich, we all dutifully lined up at customer service and one by one had our hopes dashed about getting out of Munich on Saturday. While I was waiting to get my new boarding pass, I got an email from Amara saying that she was waiting to surprise me in DC. The day delay kind of ruined that whole plan... We were sent off to an airport hotel, which took another two hours of waiting to get to. The hotel didn't have enough space in its shuttle for everyone and it took five trips to get everyone. The hotel was fine and I quite enjoyed my view. I'd like to get back to Munich and actually see the city at some point.

As I finished that last sentence, a DHL truck came up the driveway and delivered 7 boxes from me from Tunisia!!!! I really can't believe they made it this quickly. I only beat them by a day. Now comes the fun task of unpacking. But I'm leaving that for a while. A huge thank you to Samia for helping me through the process of getting my stuff out of Tunisia, which in itself is a story that I will recount later.

Anyway, to finish my story, we finally arrived at the hotel in Munich and I crashed. The hotel was very efficient (they probably deal with situations like this all the time) and had my room, shuttle back to the airport, and meals booked in 5 minutes.

When I headed back to the Munich airport the next morning, I checked in and immediately asked about my checked bags. The woman looked at my baggage tickets and looked perplexed. I explained the situation in Tunis and she called the baggage people to see what they had to say. While she was on the phone, she got that concerned look on her face that you never want to see. She said that they couldn't find the bags and that I would have to check with my departure gate to see if they could locate them. At the point, I wrote off everything I had in those bags as gone and continued through the extensive security that is required to fly to the US from Europe. After turning on my computer, camera, and explaining the rest of my electronics twice, I finally made it to the gate. They luckily found my bags and got them on my flight. I didn't truly believe this until I saw both bags in Dulles hours later. Getting through customs and seeing my family was a complete relief!

So that was my trip home from Tunisia. It seems appropriate that my last flight from there was such a series of unfortunate events. I haven't quite processed the fact that I'm back for good, but I'll get there. In the meantime, I am going to go get a cell phone so I can actually communicate with people here!

I will miss everyone in Tunis and expect regular life updates. I just will have to go back soon to see everyone and to do all the things that I didn't get to do while living there. Inshallah.