Honey, we're home!

We are home from our trip to Ireland (in Leslie's case) and Ireland and New York (in mine). Being back in Ireland was nice for me, although hectic. It was the week of my brother's wedding, and there was lots and lots to do. The wedding was beautiful, everyone seemed happy, and a good time was had by all.

After the wedding Les stayed in Ireland, but I took off the next morning for New York. I had been warned that three continents in two weeks was a lot, and it truly was. I was pretty exhausted by the time I got there, but it was wonderful to be home. I didn't do anything really touristy, except walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and back and go to Junior's for cheesecake. If you have never been to Junior's, you don't know what good cheesecake is. I had mine for breakfast. It was fantastic.

Seeing my friends was a wonderful homecoming experience. We're all doing a diverse range of things and have all moved on to new jobs, schools and opportunities, but our friendships have endured. We just hung out in diners as always, except instead of talking about the SATs, we now talk about our apartments and jobs. It's weird to see people you've known for so long but who are now in a new context.

Being back in New York made me somewhat homesick, which is a feeling I have not experienced since I've been in Melbourne. At first the city felt dirty, sometimes disgusting and very difficult to live in and get by in. But after a day, I realised that of course New York is those things, but it's completely worth it all. It's not just the subways, or the sheer size of it, or that I can go to a hole-in-the-wall creperie and have dark chocolate and raspberry crepes in the Bowery one day and then to a Ukranian diner (but not the really authentic Ukranian diner, that's on the next block) for pierogis on the Lower East Side the next, and it's not just the people and the atmosphere and that there's always something going on somewhere. The city is alive and full of buzz, and it made me yearn to be part of it again. The life in the city is changing, and not always for the better, but it's not dead. Living in New York City isn't like living anywhere else in the world. So maybe we'll get back there someday. I'm not done with New York yet. I'm not ready to have fully moved away.

But for now, I do love Melbourne. It's not dirty, disgusting or difficult, and it is a vibrant city unto itself. It ain't New York, but what is?

Getting back to Melbourne proved difficult. My travel difficulties started when I tried to fly from New York back to Ireland. I hadn't written down my flight number, and I couldn't find my flight on any of the screens at Newark airport, in New Jersey, where I was supposed to fly out. I panicked, but fortunately I called a friend and he checked my e-mail for me and confirmed that I was indeed in the right place. I found the correct check-in desk, but my flight was delayed by an hour. I was supposed to connect in Atlanta for a flight to Ireland, and I would have missed my connection. The check-in clerk said there was nothing else going to Ireland that night out of Newark, but he could get me onto a flight out of Kennedy, an airport in Queens about an hour away. He said I'd have to get myself to Kennedy, but it was a direct flight. I said OK, so I had to rush to get the bus to JFK. But the seat Delta gave me on this new flight was in business class, so all was forgiven. I felt like a 16-year-old in a liquor store and that the authorities were going to swoop at any moment, as I clearly did not belong among the suits in business class. The flight attendants were obsequious, always checking to see if I needed things. The glassware and silverware were real glass and real metal. I ordered steak (you actually order from a menu), and although post-911 regulations mean that airlines can't give business class passengers steak knives, the butter knife they gave me was plenty to cut it, it was so tender.

So that turned out to be a change much for the better. The rest of our travel snaggles were not nearly as fortuitous. I arrived in Ireland on Friday morning, and Les and I were due to fly out at 7pm for London, where we were to change to a Qantas flight to Melbourne at 10pm. Dublin Airport was having radar trouble, and flights were running half an hour late. We only had two hours to connect in Heathrow, which is barely enough time, and if we were half an hour late we would miss our Qantas flight. So we decided to buy another earlier flight, a 6pm, figuring it would get us to Heathrow at 7.30 and we would have two and a half hours. We needn't have bothered. The 6pm flight was three hours late, and we didn't arrive in London until 10.30.

After a fruitless trip to the international terminal to try to talk to a Qantas or BA person (the Aer Lingus people had told us to do that in Dublin) and back, we joined a 3-hour queue to talk to Aer Lingus. At 3am we finally got to to talk to an agent, who said that because my flight was booked as two separate tickets (Dublin-London and London-Melbourne), there was nothing she could do for me. "We said we'd get you to London, and we got you to London." I don't believe that this was true, as Aer Lingus and Qantas are in the same alliance. But she'd had a rough night.

Leslie's ticket was booked as a single ticket, so she said she could get him a standby ticket for a noon flight out the next day. She said all flights were coming up as full, and standby was the best she could do. She got us a hotel for a few hours and told us to come back to the airport at 8 and throw ourselves on Qantas' mercy, although they would not have to honour my ticket if they didn't want to.

We slept for three hours and came back to see Qantas, and here our luck changed. We encountered a lovely Qantas agent, who gave me no trouble about having two separate tickets. He booked us both standby tickets for the noon flight (despite her word, the Aer Lingus woman had not, in fact, booked Leslie a standby ticket at all), although he warned us that it was running three hours delayed and was oversold by 15 people. There was a possibility he could get us as far as Hong Kong, and then we'd be stuck there. He said that we should come back to him when the flight closed at noon and he would do what he could.

At noon, he had blessed news. We had flights all the way to Melbourne, in adjacent seats. We checked through our luggage, and he didn't give Leslie any difficulty about his being 8kg overweight other than ribbing him a little about having a heavier suitcase than his girlfriend, when it's usually women who try to carry to much. We got home about a day later than we were supposed to, but we got home.

It's good to be home.