Khartoum

The time in Frankfurt passed quickly. Got a bottle of duty free whisky, checked my email, ordered a toasted ham and cheese sandwich and a coffee in German. Good news: they understood and spoke back to me in German. Bad news: Worst ham and cheese toastie ever!

Shortly after take-off the stewardess asked the guy sitting beside me if he wanted to move so we could both have an empty seat next to us. Oh joy! A window seat, with the adjacent aisle seat empty! Managed to doze on and off in various almost-comfortable positions.

The clouds cleared as we left the Mediterranean and started to fly over the Egyptian desert. Started to see circles of crop irrigation, then the Nile came into view. We were somewhere like Abu Simbel, where the Nile widens out into a huge lake. Amazing! I’m not really fond of flying, but I love seeing the earth from a plane.

About an hour age we began our descent into Khartoum. First mud houses and mud roads appear, then a big and apparently thriving city with apartment buildings, mosques, and some quite fancy architecture, with concrete moulded into sinuous curves. Lot of unusual looking planes around the airport, the one next to us is labelled “Marsland” which sounds a bit like science fiction. The sun is beginning to set and we have to stay on board for refuelling.

Two hours till Addis….

Frankfurt

Got 30 mins free WiFi at the airport.
There should be a special place in hell for whoever decided that flights from Toronto to Europe should almost always be overnight.
Is there a worse way to start a trip than to try to sleep sitting upright with little leg room?
Even if by some miracle you got to sleep straight after dinner and slept till they woke you up for breakfast, there is only a maximum of about five hours in which you could possibly sleep. And in reality, if you sleep for half that time you are doing well.
Craisins for breakfast? Is that some strange German cultural thing or what?

As good as flying gets

I am at the gate at Pearson Airport. Got my bags checked in and my boarding pass issued by Lufthansa within 15 minutes of being dropped off at Terminal 1. I'd call that typical Germanic efficiency, but my daughter would call me a  racist.

The bags weighed 21 and 22 kg, against a maximum allowance of 23 kg. My little electronic luggage scales predicted that exactly. They have paid for themselves many times over!

Another half hour saw me through security with no glitches and nothing confiscated.

Now I have found a fairly comfy seat, uncovered a flap on the floor, and connected to the free airport WiFi Network.

My flight is said to be on time, and I already have my boarding pass for the Frankfurt-Addis portion.

Its about as good as flying ever gets. So far, so good.

21 hours till I arrive in Addis....

Flight !!!

Woke up this morning and immediately checked my phone.

I have a ticket made out in my correct name, flying to Ethiopia on Sunday afternoon!

It felt like Christmas, coming downstairs to find Santa had left presents by the chimney!

It’s been hard, the last four days, to stay interested in packing, reading tourist information, and working on my lectures, when my trip was “in jeopardy” according to the Toronto organizers.

It’s difficult to deal with people you don’t know well by e-mail, especially when there are language and cultural issues. I don’t respond well to blasé comments like “It will all work out in the end, you are not out of pocket here, don’t worry”.

I don’t like being powerless, so I did not really mind the initial situation, which amounted to “We made a mistake, you have to fix it”. If I could have fixed it I would have been happy to do so, but it turned out that I could not.

Once I realized I had to leave the solution of the problem to the same people who had the attributes necessary to create the problem, I was unhappy. The difficult issue was how strongly to express that displeasure, and to whom. By my standards, I was very calm and restrained, but by Ethiopian standards I may have come across as rude and pushy. At that stage, my goal was not to make friends, but to express exactly the right amount of frustration, anger and indignation to motivate the maximum degree of effort to fix the problem as soon as possible.

It seems to have worked and I have my ticket.

Would I have it by now if I had not made a bit of a fuss? There is no way I will ever be able to find out.

Now I can book my internal Ethiopian flight to Lalibela and get the discount for passengers arriving on the national airline except … oh dear, my travel agent has today off! Guess it will have to wait one more day…

No flight!

Just spent an interesting 45 minutes with a very kind travel agent (shout out to Romina at the Bayview Ave Flight Centre!).

Even though the booking was nothing to do with her, she looked through the documentation and called Ethiopian Airlines on my behalf. She got through to a gentleman called Boris in India. He said that the flight was still booked  under the last name "Loa", first name "Oystons". He said that there was nothing I could do about that, as it's not my ticket! I did not pay for it, and it's not got my name on it!

He said that the people who issued the ticket could cancel it and buy a new one in the correct name, for a $300 penalty.

I have let the people in Ethiopia know it is their responsibility to fix this.

I was going to spend tonight going over my packing, but my heart is not in it when I don't have a ticket to go!

Flight

For the last week or so I have been checking my email frequently as I have been expecting news that my flight has been booked by the University of Addis Ababa.

Not only is it less than ten days before I fly, but also there have been a flurry of emails confirming where I was leaving from, when I wanted to leave, and when I wanted to fly back, and the correct spelling of my name. This was information I had supplied about two months ago. In one email I was referred to as Petre,a miss-spelling of my middle name, but eventually my full name was written out by the Toronto organisers, with the notation that "Oyston" is my last name,

 Finally got the details on Friday.There are two interesting things about my flight. For one,it will arrive late Monday night, when I am supposed to start work on Monday morning. The other is that my name is written as Dr OYSTONS\LOA.

There are a few good things: For one, I get to go to curling next Saturday, which I thought I was going to miss. I was expecting to be over the Atlantic by Saturday night. They have the correct date for me to fly back to Canada. Also, I prefer the flight they have given me, via Frankfurt, to the one I was expecting, as it divides the flight up into roughly equal parts, instead of a short hop to Washington and a 13 hour flight to Addis.

But the name thing seems to be an issue, Customs are a bit picky about the passport and the ticket matching up these days. I was pleased to wake up this morning to an email, I think from the airline, saying that they are fixing the issue. Then I got a worrying email from Addis, saying I had to contact the "Ticket Office" to confirm my details, without telling me how to do that. On the Ethiopian Airlines web site I eventually found an American 1-800 number, which worked from Canada. They said the issue had not been fixed, but that they were hoping my name would be right by in their system by Monday or Tuesday.

I still cannot buy internal flights at the reduced rate for international Ethiopian customers until the glitch is sorted out.

I know I can be a bit obsessive compulsive, and that I don't have a great tolerance for people who mess up doing simple tasks, but honestly, these are character traits you really want in an anesthesiologist. If I was like the guy in the local car dealership who only installed three of the four floor mats we ordered for our new car, I would leave a trail of dead bodies behind me at work......