Planes and a 5 month old

Monday, June 8

It is funny how you can start in SLC at 1 pm, three hours later end up in Chicago at 5 pm, 8 hours later end up in Munich, Germany at 12 pm the next day and two hours later end up in Kiev at 4 pm. How does fourteen hours just disappear?

I don’t really like flying. My first plane ride ever was about four years ago (how sad is that!) when we took our trip to Guatemala. One of the planes we rode on was a small plane that only held about thirty people and the turbulence was horrible. Needless to say, I arrived in Guatemala about ready to lose the tasty “egg burrito” that was served for breakfast on the plane (yuck!). This trip, the first plane we rode in was a little bigger – holding about fifty people – however, they put Alex, Allie, and my mom together and Tony and I on the very last row of the plane. Small planes are noisy anyway but the last row is about 10 times noisier and the motion sickness pill I took seemed to have no effect. Despite the fact that Tony was a perfect angel and slept almost the whole flight, I ended up with a migraine that followed me through the remaining ten hours of flight time.

Unlike US airlines that seem to avoid feeding their passengers at all costs and charge you $6 for an alcoholic drink, Lufthansa (the German airline we took our last two flights on) seemed to feed us all the time and tried to get all their passengers “liquored up” before landing. On our eight hour flight from Chicago to Germany, they fed us dinner and breakfast, offered alcohol before dinner, again offered alcohol with dinner, and again offered alcohol after dinner. I guess they figure alcohol induced passengers are happy passengers?

Despite the fact that we had ample leg room, due to our seats being designed to fit a bassinet in front of us, I was uncomfortable with my headache and had finally drifted off to sleep only to be woken up by a screaming child. I am happy to report that this was not my child – my child was fast asleep in the basinet in front of us and had been for the last five hours – and I, along with the other passengers that would have been content to stay fast asleep for the remainder to the flight, cursed the parent who let their child scream and cry for the next two hours and wished that the alcohol cart would come by again :)

But we finally made it to Kiev where Irina, Helen (Elena) and Oleg were there to meet us. We had to take two cars to get to the apartment we were staying at, since we had so many people and so much luggage. Alex, me and Tony rode with Oleg and we heard no complaints when we put our seatbelts on (whew!) - in fact, Oleg actually put his seat belt on too! The apartment we are staying at is clean and fairly nice - I will post pictures later. We arrived on a holiday - St. Catherine's day, I think. So all the banks were closed and after trying three of those currency exchange places, finally found one that was open. So, we were housed, had money - we were set for our adventure!

Things I have learned by traveling with an infant:
1) People are nicer to you when you have a baby. The flight attendants love you and your fellow passengers – even the grumpy guy sitting next to you – can’t help but respond when they have a happy “wee little fellow” giving them big smiles.
2) It takes FOREVER for the lady at the United Airlines counter to check you in. Apparently you can’t use the automated system to check in if you have a baby with you and so you get the help of the airline employee whom you assume knows what they are doing. However, I don’t know if she was having system issues or was just incompetent but it took a half an hour for her to print out our boarding passes, which means that we didn’t have time to eat lunch before we board the plane and the plane did not serve lunch.
3) You get to board the plane first – even before the first-class passengers.
4) At the SLC airport, there is a special line for families with strollers that is a lot shorter than the other lines.
5) They do not stop you at customs in the Ukraine when you have a baby – or maybe it had something to do with it being a holiday and the guy just didn’t want to deal with all of our luggage!