Returning to the US

I've been in Morocco for a month and will be returning in a few days. I have hand-written pages of notes about my trip, but I haven't been able to get onto blogspot in weeks and it's tough getting time on the internet, because I have to use my sister's computer. When we're home, we're generally sleeping, eating, watching a movie (also on the computer) or my sister's using her computer.

There will be more stuff coming up online here and/or on astrotheophilus.blogspot.com as soon as I get home and can type it in. I promise. (And I take promises seriously.)

Yesterday, I was starting to pack for home, remembering to take out stuff that I'd promised to leave in-country. (In-country means Morocco for me for now. It's one of those PCV (PeaceCorps Volunteer) things. If I forget to explain one, let me know. There are lots of PCV things. There are also lots of Arabic and/or Tam phrases that I like a lot which I may well take home to the States. I'm going to try to remember to explain those eventually, too.)

I realized that I didn't know if my flight was on Monday morning at 10am or at 12 noon, since the time had changed once (or twice) and I couldn't remember which was the more recent change. We went online to Royal Air Maroc's (RAM's) website and looked up the schedule of flights from Casablanca (Casa for short) to JFK, the John F. Kennedy airport in NYC. There were one or two per day each day during this week except for Sunday and Monday, when there were none. We looked at this several times and then decided to call RAM. Because it costs 5dh (5 dirhams, where 8 dh = $1) a minute to make a phone call, we decided to use skypeout instead. My sister's internet connection is slow, though, so our connection wasn't great. Nonetheless, we were able to ascertain that, indeed, there was no flight on Monday and I was now booked on the Tuesday flight. We were quite amazed and disgruntled, flabbergasted, etc. Why hadn't I been told about this? When was I going to figure this out? RAM said that they didn't have any of my contact info, just my name and the reservation, so they didn't have a way to contact me.

The original flight had been made through expedia.com by my mom. I had never used expedia before (and won't be again), so my mom had made a new username and pwd for me, but hadn't bothered to tell me the pwd. She had emailed once saying that I could call her for it, but back before I came in-country, it didn't matter. Now, when it really mattered, my parents were awol on a driving trip all over the US. We have their itinerary, but, again, it costs $$ to call the US and we didn't know if they were traveling in-between spots, etc. We sent an email and went to the next option: calling expedia. Being booked on another flight a day later wasn't a problem for me by itself - in fact, it meant that I'd be able to go to my sister's host-mom's baby's naming party, which was a big deal. But, the problem for me was that I had had two other flights booked to get me back to SFO. I needed to get new ones.

Here are some of the notes that my sister took during the 45 minute completely useless waste of time phone call to expedia:

'After explaining the problem, I sat on hold for 15 minutes while she ??talked to RAM??. She could not solve the problem. I asked for her supervisor, and sat on hold for another 16 minutes. At 37 minutes in, she said she'd transfer me to her supervisor. At 42 minutes, she said the supervisor would take over. At 49 minutes, the supervisor "Randy" said he could not understand me, due to a poor connection, and hung up on me.'

We're going to send this to expedia. The people that we were talking to were obviously from India, so the fact that this guy gave his name as 'Randy' was nearly laughable and close to offensive. The fact that he then said that we had a bad connection and hung up on us was really offensive. Yes, we had a bad connection, but he just didn't want to deal w/ us, because expedia didn't know about RAM's cancellation of the flight and subsequent reassignment of my reservation, so they didn't want to give me different flights for the rest of the trip. I guess that they figured I was just jerking them around, but, no, in fact it was RAM and expedia had dropped the ball by not following up. I'd put money on the fact that RAM canceled the flight a month ago or more, but expedia figured that I had finished the first set of legs of my flight getting me to Morocco, so the rest didn't really matter. Or something.

In the end, we resorted to texting folks we knew who were on skype. My dad's account and my aunt Glorious' account were open and we texted them. Also, my dad's sister's account was open on gmail and we texted her. My dad's sister got back to us first, so we talked her into calling Delta directly. After 3-4 tries (and hang ups) she was able to get me on a flight direct from JFK to SFO. Safi. (Enough. I'm done. etc.)

Or so we thought. She told them to send an email confirmation (pretending that she was me). She gave them my email address ~4 times. No email. No email. This morning, we finally went online to Delta and I am confirmed on two flights on Tuesday. Safi. Finally. I've NEVER had a saga like this to fly somewhere and I haven't even left Berberville yet. (I call my sister's town Berberville in all public posts, as she does, for PCV safety reasons.)

To get to Casa from Berberville will require an ENTIRE day's travel. I'm going to get on a tranzit at 5-5:30 am (it leaves somewhere in there, or, occasionally, if it's full, at 4:50 - like last time we took it. My mom nearly had a cow, because she was on it, but my sister and I were lagging a bit, but we got on it.) It's 4 hours to Souktown. I may well write an entire post about the Berberville-Souktown tranzit, but not today. It may hold as many as 30 people, though (some on top) and it's smaller than a full-sized van in the US.

Then, we'll get two spots on a bus to one of the big-six cities in Morocco, either Mekne's or Fes. (The apostrophe is for an accent grave - downward facing accent.) That will be 4-5 hours. Then, my sister will say good-bye and I'll get on a train for the last 4-5 hours into Casa Voyageurs. (There are 2 train stations in Casa.) I'm getting a hotel right by the train station, since I don't want to have to worry about it the next morning when I take another train (this time only ~45 min) to the airport. If we can catch buses and trains in a timely manner, it's possible that I'll be able to see the sun set into the Atlantic ocean, which I may have done before from France, but I don't remember it. Anyway, inshallah (God willing).

I'll have my phone on once I get to JFK (inshallah at 2:45pm local time) until I have to turn it off at about 5pm local time on Tuesday. Hopefully I'll be able to say hi to some of you.