The Form

On Halloween we spent a comfortable two hours aboard a Spanish Vueling (VWELL-ing) flight from Rome's Fiumicino airport to Prague's Vaclav Havel. This is one of the best operated airlines you've probably never heard of.  I sure hadn't heard of it. In fact, now I'm making a point of reminding myself how to pronounce its name (VWELL-ing! VWELL-ing!) so that I can tell people about it.

Except for one thing.

Halfway through, flight attendants strode down the aisle bearing a sheaf of forms to be filled out, and they were handing one out to everyone. The instructions came over the loudspeaker in no tongue I could understand, but I saw no reason for any form to be filled out. We were solidly within EU territory and, as Bill has drilled me more than once, "We have NOTHING to declare! NOTHING!"

We read the English side of the form, entitled "Disembarkation Form." As we interpreted things, focusing in particular on question 6, the form's goal was to stamp out ebola by determining whether one had been in Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Guinea recently. We hadn't, so we figured there was no need for us to fill out the form. I stuffed it in the seatback in front of me and folded my arms.

Meanwhile, the two stolid Czech guys sitting next to me, good citizens as Czechs tend to be, immediately bent to the task of filling out their forms, glancing at me sideways as I put mine away, untouched.

"Excuse me," I piped up. "Do you speak English?"

One of them did.

"Um, I don't think you need to fill out the form.  See?  It says here only if you've been in Africa.  You haven't been in Africa, have you?"

They grinned and continued filling out their forms.

I went on, "I'm not filling mine out. We might be worse off for filling it out and drawing attention to ourselves!"  I felt like Lech Walesa. Wrong country, but you know. Freedom and all.

Was I being a pushy American woman? No--this was the American way of perceiving the absurdity in a situation that these placid Czechs simply accepted. While waiting for the train in Orvieto the previous morning, we had met two Australians who gave us a refreshing new view of ourselves as a nationality.

"More than anything, Americans are funny, aren't they?" they'd said. We were thrilled. How delightful not to be painted with the "loud, obnoxious" brush. And this, even after I had applied the "exiled Limey prisoner" brush to them. We at once began regaling them with jokes such as we've never told and left them rolling on the train platform.

But the Czech gentlemen were not amused and obediently completed their forms.

When I saw free-thinking Italians, up and down the aisle, also filling out their forms, I read more closely and saw that the form was intended, not just to see if we'd been in Africa, but also to track our whereabouts once we reached our destination. They were leaving nothing to chance here.

In a few small additional acts of defiance, I provided, not my passport number, but my phone number; used the American order in my date abbreviations (10/31/14 instead of the European 31/10/14); and marked a large black X through question 6.

Air travel makes us ugly

It's hard to describe the bleakness of Iceland. The route from the airport to Reykjavik cuts through craggy black lava fields studded with standing piles of stone that look eerily like gnomes huddled against the cold. That your first exposure to this uniquely peculiar island should be such a lifeless moonscape somehow befits the place's character.

I should like Iceland, I really should. My ancestors were Vikings from nearly this far north, in the northernmost of the Shetland Islands.

I think I prefer Florida.

Icelanders' grasp of English is sketchy at best, and their native tongue sounds like a recording played backwards. I understood perhaps a third of what our driver tried to convey. I think he said that all the electricity here is powered by the geysers and that cold hotel water is either unmatched anywhere else on earth or impossible to achieve because the geysers are so hot. They are very proud of their water here. There doesn't appear to be much else, to be honest.

Because we arrived at our hotel in the morning, after a groggy night on a plane, and needed to crash well before the usual check-in hour, we had reserved an extra night and confirmed ahead of time that our room would be waiting. This was nearly too much for the unflappably pleasant blond elf at the front desk to comprehend. Wielding an infuriating smile and a soft, passive-aggressive voice, he consulted numerous calendars and rule books while Bill grew more restless. I now realized that the lad's demeanor was designed to defuse American impatience. His colleague, an Icelandic milkmaid in reindeer leggings and heavy sweaters, remained glued to her phone, showing no sign of talking to anyone. When she finally lent a hand, we were weaving with exhaustion, but succeeded.

New snags greeted us at the room. None of the lights appeared to work, nor would any of our numerous adapters allow us to charge any of our electronic devices.  Oh boy. I get the chance to talk to Snowball the Elf again. This time he provided an adapter for our iDevices, mildly admonishing me to return it when we were finished. I wanted to punch his sweet little nose. He also said that, to have electricity, one must insert one's door card in a special "No Smoking" slot inside the room.  Why refraining from smoking should have anything to do with turning on the lights was unclear to me, but it worked. All the lights went on at once, and we both fell asleep for several hours.

Mercury retrograde

I’ve always held a guarded belief in astrology, the influence of the planets and stars on our lives. 

Mercury, for example, rules intelligence, mind, memory, and all types of communication from talking and texting to writing. It also rules commerce, computers, telephones, transportation, and, um, air travel.  Mercury in particular can have a weird effect on all of us for several three-week spans during the year.  During these intervals, the fleet-footed red planet uncharacteristically slows down and appears to stop and move backwards, in a kind of cosmic optical illusion called Mercury retrograde.

During Mercury retrograde, communications and travel of all kinds go kerflooey.  Misunderstandings and arguments run rampant.  Communications in general fail.  If you don’t know ahead of time about Mercury retrograde, you wonder why your computer has gone on the fritz, your cell phone isn’t working properly, and everything in general seems to be going wrong.  Simple.  It’s the great Murphy’s Law of the universe: Mercury has gone retrograde. 

Mercury is retrograde this October, from the 4^th through the 25^th. Right now, in other words.



Larry Schwimmer of the Huffington Post regularly writes a column about the Top 10 Things Not to Do When Mercury Is Retrograde.  Among them:

Don't Accept or Start a Job. If you do, you may regret it. I had one client disregard that advice. She accepted a new job and by the time she started the month after, when Mercury went direct, the company had changed her job so much that it no longer resembled the one that she had accepted. Her reporting relationship had also totally shifted from the great guy she was going to work for to the loudmouth, chauvinistic boss from hell! During Mercury retrograde, things are not what they seem to be.

What makes this Larry Schwimmer dude so smart?  I ask you, why should people have to check with Mercury before starting or stopping a job? Note that October 4^th was the first day of the rest of my life, at which point I began a retirement during which I planned to freelance for my former employer.  Note, too, that I planned obsessively and scrupulously for a new email address and access to the company's systems, to go into effect October 4^th.  Right.  Neither the new email address nor the systems access works.

We leave on our world travels today.  What would wiseguy Larry Schwimmer say?

Avoid Traveling A Lot. If you can't put certain trips on hold, just be aware that you can expect an unusual amount of last-minute flight cancellations, meeting postponements and long transportation delays. Allow extra time when traveling; make sure your bags are very secure. Take extra precautions, because during this time they may be more likely to be lost or stolen. Re-confirm your reservations, appointments and addresses for your meetings, as delays and cancellations can be expected.

Bill doesn’t believe in Mercury retrograde.  As usual, I’m trying to remain optimistic. Hey, the passports and visas came back, didn't they?