Elizabeth and I have had an eventful trip in NYC so far.
When we first arrived into the JFK at about 1:00am after a pleasant flight we made our way to the baggage claim with our now very full and heavy bags from the many, many things we bought at LeakyCon. Each of us managed to gain one more bag than we had when we arrived in Orlando (They should not have so much merchandise that I want to buy in one place. I spent far, far too much money there, very quickly.)
After waiting for about fifteen minutes at baggage claim I finally spotted my bag come ‘round on the carousel. When I picked it up I noticed it was wet. Like any cautious traveller my first instinct was to put the unknown substance right next to my face to smell it. Rum. My bag was soaked with rum. It was not my rum. I had no rum.
I quickly opened it so see if it had actually gotten on anything inside the bag because as far as I could tell it was mostly on the outside. The only thing that got to was, of course, my underwear. That can be washed though so nothing too drastic happened. My bag did reek which was unpleasant.
Elizabeth got her bag a few minutes later and low and although hers was not covered in alcohol her lock was missing and also an entire zipper was pulled off. Nothing was missing but we decided we should talk to someone about it anyway - I think part of the motivation as that the baggage help area was about ten metres away from where we were standing at that point in time.
The lady we spoke to couldn’t really do much for us - I got a voucher for a cleaning place and Elizabeth and I both got a thirty dollar voucher for goodwill. We have no idea when we’re going to use these so if anyone is planning on flying with Jet Blue tell us - we can give you 60 dollars off.
There wasn’t anything we could do about the bag situation at that point and we both just wanted to get to our hostel so we headed for the taxi zone. We’d decided previously that even though it was a 70 dollar cab ride that we would just do it because A. it was 2:00 in the morning and we weren’t sure how safe public transport would be and B. were very tired and didn’t want to get lost.
One of the staff members at the airport got a taxi for us and as the cab driver was putting out bags in the boot (or trunk, I suppose if you’re American) I warned him to be careful of my bag because it was sticky with rum. He then gave me a look and said “I can’t put this in the cab because it will make the whole car stink.” English wasn’t his first language and I think he thought I had a bottle of rum in my bag. After a moment of panic, the guy who had called the cab over talked the driver into letting us get into the cab with the bag.
So one scarily fast cab ride later (we worked out he was going about 150km/h at his highest speed. Most of the time it was about 120-130km/hr) we arrived at our hostel and were greeted by a china town neighbourhood that reminded me a little too much of Bangladesh. We climbed a staircase with our loads of bags and paid for our room.
We weren’t expecting anything fancy from the place that we were staying but I think that we still both got a shock when we walked into our room and it was barely big enough to fit the bed in. At that point everything just seemed bad and we freaked out we were in a dodgy neighbourhood. We had no kitchen facilities when we had been planning on buying groceries rather than eating out every day so our food plan had been ruined also. The fact that we were both very tired didn’t help at all either. That night we both went to sleep while still feeling quite anxious but hoping tomorrow would be a better day in the great city of New York.
I was planning on doing a longer post and putting in what happened today as well but I am tired and this is already long enough. Know that our trip has gotten a lot better than this described and that the next post will be happy.
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