I´m waiting to board a plane to Santiago after almost a week at home in Virginia for my friend´s wedding (pictures to come). After about an hour of panicking about my bags getting to Chile, I am calm now and resting after running all over the airport in Buenos Aires. I have no money to buy food so I´m stuffing my face with the Halloween candy I brought back ¨for my students¨. I cannot wait to get home to my I., Olive, and apartment. But I am dreading going back to work because I´m afraid they took my classes away from me or aren´t going to pay me because I wasn´t here to turn in my hours. BUT, I will save the bulk of that worrying until tomorrow morning at 8am when I have my first class.
In the meantime, I can´t help but think about 3 lovely Argentine women I met on my flight from Washington to Buenos Aires. The first, I met in a panicked state while walking to my gate. She was screaming in Spanish and the information desk employee was begging for a translator so I thought I´d try out my frantic Spanish comprehension. I think I just cut it because this woman was yelling and sighing and running back and forth so I really had to concentrate to get all she was saying.
It went something like this (in translation, of course):
my girls, they took my girls!! the police...because of dolls!!! i was in New York and now I´m here and my girls!! We have to go home and the police have my girls and we bought those dolls and my pássport and I need to go to Buenos Aires!!!!
Finally, she got a call (from international police, I guess?) that her girls were being released from custody and when I saw her at our gate she was a totally different person and calmly explained that she and her daughters were basically stripped and searched and then brought into one of those little rooms all because they brought those little tiny snowglobes on. Needless to say, they´ll never go back to Dulles Airport because they were so hysterical and scared and it´s all because they accidentally brought something through security and then couldn´t speak English well enough to explain it.
Minutes before I met the first woman, I was in line at security thinking about how it had changed a lot and hired all new people since the last time I´d been there. This may have just been my particular line, but all of the employees seemed a lot meaner than usual and I heard several extremely racist comments told as running jokes coming from the NSA employees in the short 3 minutes I was there. I think it´s more than coincidence that I noticed those changes only to witness their product minutes later with the mother of the daughters who were detained.
This treatment of people is disgusting. I won´t get into details about my views on national security and the threat of terror (yet), but I have a problem with NSA´s changes after September 11, 2001, and I hate that 3 extremely friendly and wonderful women will never come back to the U.S. because of the experience they had last night.
I am grateful to have met them and then coincidentally sat next to them on the plane because they were so sweet and it´d be so nice to visit them when I´m Buenos Aires this December.
That´s about it! Can´t wait to land in Santiago!
Oh, and I voted yesterday! All I can say is take that, McCain and retarded Sarah Palin
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