Friday, January 28, 2005

Forget What I Wrote

Well it rained this morning in Cape Town. But I really can't complain. I've been traveling for 34 days and this is the second time I've seen rain. I've been pretty lucky before.

Given the weather, I decided to go see a movie. I went to a theater at the Victoria and Albert Waterfront and saw "Yesterday," a South African film that just this week was nominated this week for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture. That language, by the way, is Zulu. But I relied on the English subtitles. It's about the AIDs epidemic sweeping Africa and Nelson Mandela's Foundation was involved in the production of the movie. As you can imagine South Africans are proud to have one of their own movies nominated.

I also went to the airport today to retrieve my missing bag. I have to fess up. About 10 minutes after writing in my blog that my bag would "show up when it shows up" I couldn't stop obsessing over getting it back. My email to Lufthansa has yet to be answered. The staff at the baggage claim office at the Cape Town airport are so inefficient and clueless it was almost comical. One fellow, Pierre, kept telling me my bag would arrive on Friday if I was "lucky" even though, according to him, the only flight arriving on Friday had already left and my bag wasn't on it. I guess that would be lucky!

In the end I emailed United Airlines and within an hour they had traced my bag and informed me that it HAD arrived in Cape Town Thursday morning and was waiting at the baggage claim office.

So I called baggage claim again and after they insisted my bag still wasn't there I read them the email from United that identified exactly which flight my bag had been on. The baggage claim idiots called me back 30 minutes later with the "good news" my bag had "arrived." And rather than counting on their courier getting it to me I figured I'd be better off going to the airport myself to get it.

Isn't traveling fun?

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