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So, I walk down the stairs into the station with my smallest bill being $10. No problem – the guy behind the window can make change. Uh oh – there is no guy – only machines. Ok, the machines take bills – no problem. Well, there was a problem – the machines don’t make change for bills. I had to buy a ticket with $10 of money on it. I only wanted a $1.25 one-trip ticket! But wait – the machine takes credit cards! Yes! I inserted my credit card and charged my one-way T ticket for $1.25.

It is very surreal going from Bulgaria where no one takes credit cards to Boston where you can’t even buy a $1.25 ticket without a credit card!

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I managed to have a few minor scared during the week in the US. One night I stayed with my sister and nearly locked myself out of her house. She and her fiancé had already left for work and I was moping around getting ready to leave. She lives in the second floor of a two story house with the landlord living on the first floor. While getting ready I head a loud meowing coming from behind one of the doors in my sisters house. Curious I opened the door where there was a shared stairway. Immediately the cat bounced up the stairs towards me. It was cute so I stopped down to pet it. It was obvious the cat was more interested in my sisters apartment than me and he/she (didn’t look at it that close) tried to get past me into the apartment. Oh, no you don’t little cat. I closed the door to stop it from going in. As soon as I closed it I realized I probably just locked myself out. Sure enough I did. Immediately I had visions of walking to my sisters office in my T-shirt, boxer shirts and socks to get her key. Luckily, the front door was left unlocked so I was able to get back in. Whew, almost a close one.

The second close call involved my sister’s car which I borrowed all week. On Sunday night I got together with a couple friends and was drinking with them when my sister called. She wanted to tell me that she passed a car with the lights on in the parking lot which looked a lot like hers. She got close to it and found out it was hers! I had left the light on. Luckily I had also forgotten to lock the passenger door so she was able to get into the car to turn off the lights.

The third involved my mother’s treadmill. I stayed with my parents a couple days and meandered into the basement where my mother had a new treadmill I hadn’t seen yet. Most treadmills I’ve been on have a button you press repeatedly to increase speed. This treadmill had a dial – heretofore known as “the most sensitive dial known to man”. I turn the dial a fraction of an inch and all of a sudden the treadmill is moving … well, let’s just say way faster than I thought it would be. I nearly slammed my head on the controls and launched myself off the back. Luckily my lightning fast reflexes were able to recover. My father (who saw it all) had a good laugh out of it though.

Because I used frequent flier miles (and I live in a backwards Eastern European capital that no one travels to) I had two changeovers on my flight. The most interesting was arriving into Newark. About 30 minutes before landing the announcement comes over the loudspeaker asking anyone with medical knowledge to press their service light. Now that is not something you want to hear on a plane – unless you immediately think of the movie “Airplane” and start laughing out loud while people look at you like you are a psychopath. Of course then you try to think if you had the chicken or the fish and the laughing stops. So anyway, the “incident” was only 5 or 6 rows in front of me so I was sort of able to see what was going on. They had her on oxygen through to the landing but I was never able to figure out what exactly the problem was. If you ask me it was the 35 MPH cross winds the plane was flying through on its approach. I almost needed oxygen too. So we get to the gate and the flight attendant tells everyone to stay in their seats so the EMTs waiting at the airport can get to the patient. After a 9 hour flight no one is super happy about this, but we all understand the reasons. So we dock and wait. Then we wait some more. Yea, now there is a crack EMT squad at Newark. They were probably late because they had to take that annoying little train from another terminal and wait in a 4 mile security line. After about 5 minutes a Port Authority police officer comes on board. He’s not sure what to do so he calls for EMTs. Weren’t they already supposed to be there? Didn’t someone call ahead? What, was the basketball game not over yet? Anyway, there is only so long you can get passengers to sit on a docked plane after a 9 hour flight so eventually we all piled into the aisles scrambled off the plane despite flight attendants urging us to stay seated. Well, it’s 175 passengers vs. 5 flight attendants so we won. I never did see an EMT. The moral of the story – don’t get sick on an airplane landing at Newark.

Rant: Newark is the only airport I’ve been to where, when you connect flights ON THE SAME AIRLINE, you have to go through the whole security process again. Thus on one trip from the US to Bulgaria I had to go through three full security checks (and associated lines). The one in Newark is a pain because first you go through a bomb detection scanner (or I assume that’s what it was) that blows air on you, then you have to go through a metal detector. The interesting thing is that all three security checks found different reasons to halt me. The first is was my belt. On the second, my belt was ok, but the pack of gum (with metallic wrapper) set off the alarm. On the third one nothing set off the alarm. I love the consistency.

Well, I finally made it back to BG. I was thinking in my 6 hour layover in Milan that there should be rooms with cots that you can rent by the hour. The cots can be divided by cubicle walls. There is a special room for snorers. There aren’t any alarms to disturb sleepers – either an attendant can wake you up or install a special alarm that vibrates the bed. I would have gladly paid 20 euro for a few hours of comfortable sleep. Those airport chairs just don’t cut it.

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