re: #114 Barefoot Grin

The first time I went to Japan when I was 17 as an exchange student no one told me how things were supposed to work when I got there. I knew the name of someone picking me up, but I didn’t even know that you have to clear customs and leave the secure area. I was waiting for her to be in the gate area (granted, at that time for domestic flights at least you could accompany people to gates in US). I waited about two hours before finally asking someone. Then on the way home I missed a connecting flight in LAX and had to spend the night on a bench in the terminal. I woke hearing someone rustling in my bags. A wiry elderly black women had boosted a book, but I let her take it and pretended not to see. She took Woody Allen’s Without Feathers. (Lots of making collect calls back home from public phones, etc., seems so strange now.)

I had a similar problem when I went to Brazil at fifteen. I was familiar with the principal of customs (having gone through the Canadian border over land) but not by air.

My mistake was checking my baggage all the way through: Lansing to Detroit, then LaGuardia, then helicopter commuter to JFK, then Rio, then São Paulo, then Araçatuba.

My baggage took a detour from LaGuardia to LAX, and it took over a month for Pan Am to find it and bring it to me. (My family there was stuck buying me clothes as well as school uniforms, they split the bill with my mother.)