After all the hubbub and rigmarole and ictus of interviewing, collecting all the documentation, making a mad dash to the Polish Embassy, waiting to receive my passport with the new work visa pasted in back from the Embassy, finding reasonably priced flights, and packing my bags, all I had to do was endure the largest hurricane ever known to mankind and wait for the flight time.
It was to be a quick do... fly to JFK, no biggie layover, fly to Warsaw on a quiet red-eye, arriving at noonish where my new manager would be waiting to drive me to Radom and my new apartment. Easy peasy!
Turned out a little differently.
The first hop was easy... I had to pay for 2 bags, and one of them was overweight, so that incurred an additional charge, but boarding was easy and there were no screaming babies... in fact, I barely remember the flight and THAT always means it was successful. We actually arrived at JFK early!
I arrived from CLT at Terminal 8 and my LOT Airlines flight to Warsaw was leaving from Terminal 7. I've never used Terminal 7 before -- it seems to be filled with international airlines which only have a few flights per day... which translated not only into shorter check-in lines at the airlines, but also shorter lines at TSA. It was amazing! (Note to self -- for future international flights from JFK, find out the airlines that fly out of Terminal 7.)
While waiting in one of those waaay short lines, multiple people tried to speak Polish to me and were surprised that I don’t understand! Woah! Guess that's gonna be happening a lot after I get settled in in Poland... never happened in Italy. And while checking in, I chatted up the airlines guy from India, telling him I'm heading to Poland to teach English... and he went easy on my overweight bag charge...
I was really impressed with the electronic rating system that's been installed in the bathrooms JFK!
So things are going GREAT for a while....
And then, after sitting for an hour at an almost dead gate, hoards of people arrived en masse, ready to party, like flood gates had opened. Lots of families with LOTS of little KIDS, lots of young people in Spring Break mode.
Turns out we had arrived at Terminal 7 at a magical time, a sort of bewitching hour for Orthodox Jews planning to travel to Israel on holiday -- immediately after one series of holidays ends with just enough time before the next series begins for the full flight from JFK to Tel Aviv... including a 9 hour layover in Warsaw!
And so, as all the holiday people where boarding, I sat watching with a new buddy from the TSA line (a New Yorker whose mother grew up in Radom, Poland where I’ll be living!)... while we speculated if we'd get any sleep on the flight.