American Keyboards Suck (and more)

So for all my whining and complaining about Moroccan Keyboards, I now find myself in the ironic position of floundering on my own, previously efficacious American Keyboard...I feel like an immigrant with little education, lost in a linguistic gray zone, damned to forever speak two languages badly. I reach for the letter A and find myself with a Q, the letter M becomes a semi-colon...This sucks.

I finally made it back to Brooklyn tonight, my Dad having picked me up in Newark this afternoon. We went out for a nice Chinese dinner and he drove me back into Williambsburg, full, content and beginning to fade as the minutes ticked by.

I had an interesting experience in Paris the other day. Exhausted from my trip from Strasbourg to Paris, I stumbled into the airport of Charles de Gaulle, running hard on 3 hours of sleep in the train. My heart raced as I stumbled around the airport, fixing tickets, eating sandwiches and waiting on typically hellish French airport lines.

I finally made it onto the plane, sat back and enjoyed the empty seats on either side of me, pondered my good fortune, and promptly began snoozing, or as my brother would say, "blowing some Zeds." I awoke some time later, convinced that I had been sleeping for quite some time, confused by the lack of movement of our vehicle. I suddenly looked up to find a strange sight on the plane: French firemen, fully laden with airtanks and whatnot, pointing in my general direction. They approached the man next to me (thank god! my heart races at the mere sight of any person of authority in an airport, for truly irrational reasons), and began asking him questions. He responded to their inquiries by telling them that he had smelled gasoline or smoke or something.



We all left the plane minutes later, confused and a little annoyed, hoping that the problem would soon be figured out and taken care of.

Five hours later I found myself sitting at a hotel bar with Tony (21 yrs old, Marine Guard at American Embassy in Togo) and Paul (62 yrs old, economist) talking and laughing at enjoying some beers (thanks Paul!) and eating peanuts and dealing with the wise ass behind the bar. We then headed to dinner, to enjoy some red wine and osso bucco and discuss politics and war and food and everything that comes up between total strangers happily stranded and pushed together to eat dinner in Paris.

Finding myself in this situation, I had the opportunity to think about personal encounters, and reflect on the situations in which we often meet people, the ways in which so many of our daily meeting are so prescribed, so preordained by lines of class and race and gender and geography. Travel is, of course, a wonderful antidote to these barriers, but even during voyages, people tend to huddle together, to find people that look and walk and talk like them, to search for something that can serve as an anchor in an unfamiliar place.

And so, I say that Air France's terrible planning and infrastructure and constant strikes and confusing directions and generally haphazard way of conducting business can truly offer a solution to bland and expected conversations and banal nascent friendships. It is Air France's crazy flight problems that let me meet the Deutsch (last name) couple, a recently and happily married Hasidic couple 60-something years young and share a wonderful flight with them. The Gallic aviation industry is likewise responsible for the banter I interchanged with the four Indian people whose names I never got and for the girl I met in the hotel that might have been propositioning me, although then again maybe she wasn't, as I didn't try to find out.

I often compare this sort of occurence to getting stuck in an elevator with a bunch of strangers. I have always imagined that this could be a great experience, although one always would run the risk of finding two people quickly becoming enemies in a confined space or of someone smelling really bad. I have always hoped, however, that an entrapment of this sort would result in possibly short-lived, yet intense friendships, as seems to have been the case with Air France Flight 018, Paris to Newark, NJ.

It is now back to the "grind" for me, back to daily work and subways and schedules and responsibilities. It is with great excitement and hope however, that I undertake this next period of my life, having faith that time away and new experiences have provided me with a fresh viewpoint and state of mind that will allow me to live quotidian life with new vigor and open eyes.