After a month away I'm still surprised by certain American tendencies. At lunch the other day, the waitress brought some honey for Hania's tea, for which Hania thanked her.
"My pleasure," she said. "Enjoy."
Three words we never heard in Poland
Two weeks ago, shortly after arriving in D.C., we made our way to Union Station to catch our train to Charlottesville. We were a few hours early so we strolled around the terminal. There were no interesting places for lunch – the offerings being mostly of the fast-food variety – but there were three chocolate shops each representing a different country: Switzerland, Belgium, and England.
When our train arrived, we took the escalator down to the platform. Walking past the large, hulking engine I thought of the picture a friend had recently sent from Madrid of the sleek, low-slung, aerodynamic train he was about to board to Barcelona. Americans used to travel to Europe to see the Old World and now it’s what Europeans find in the U.S.
Lucky for me, no one at Jetblue reads my blog. Yesterday I received an email from the airline apologizing for the inconvenience I was caused on Tuesday ("We're sorry you did not experience the high level of service we aim to provide") and offering me $50 of credit toward my next flight.
Yesterday morning we arrived at Washington’s Ronald Reagan airport early, as prescribed, and, after making our way through security, went to El Central for a delicious breakfast of huevos rancheros. During the meal, no less than four staff members stopped by to ask us how our food was.
Arriving at the gate, we learned that our flight was going to be delayed due to storms in Fort Lauderdale that had held up the departure of our plane. We took seats facing the corridor where I read Lauren Groff’s Florida while occasionally looking up and observing the passing parade of summer travelers.
Our plane arrived but, an announcement informed us, there was a problem with one of the engines, and we would have to wait for the next plane from Florida. Hania and I headed off and took a seat at the bar of Legal Sea Foods, where I had a crab cake that was make up almost entirely of crabmeat and Hania had gluten-free fried calamari. Back at the gate, I read another short story set in Florida.
We boarded at around 2 pm, four hours after we were supposed to. Not long after takeoff I found on the screen in front of me the Women’s European Championship soccer match between England and Sweden. This proved to be more of a distraction than the pageant of travelers in the terminal had been. While we were in the air, England scored four goals, including one on a back kick as the player was moving away from the goal, something I had never seen before, by a male or female player.
We landed in Fort Lauderdale around four-thirty. It had been an extremely enjoyable day of travel.
The current issue of Condé Nast Traveler features an article on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca that contains this sentence: “That evening I went for an early dinner at Kakurega, an omakase place, perched under a palapa, that has brought gastronomic cred to Punta Pájaros.” Reading this I suddenly felt no desire to go to Punta Pájaros.”