M. Hurwitz’s Holiday

NOTE:  LESS THIS TRAVEL PIECE, WRITTEN IN 2007, GIVE OFFENSE TO MY BRITISH FRIENDS, LET IT BE UNDERSTOOD THAT THE HEATHROW AIRPORT REFERRED TO HEREIN WAS ITS STATE PRIOR TO ITS EXTENSIVE RENOVATION

MONSIEUR HURWITZ’S HOLIDAY

 A 1953, French comedy, “M. Hulot’s Holiday,” directed by Jacques Tati, depicts an amiable vacationer who, with a natural genius for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, barely survives his brush with a series of minor disasters.

Whereas my foreshortened stature bears no resemblance to M. Hulot’s lanky frame and I am considerably older than the character portrayed on the screen, I believe a movie reminiscent of the classic film could have been made of my own recent holiday experience.  Indeed, were such a movie to be made, I flatter myself in thinking that it would resound equally well upon the masochistic streak that continues to amuse Tati’s audiences.

Ominously, my misadventures began at the very start of my international trip.  After confidently proffering my now obsolescent paper tickets, Dallas-London-Athens, at American Airline’s counter, I received not the expected cooperative smile but a decidedly uncooperative frown.  I had acquired the tickets weeks before, but in the last few days, Olympic Airlines had disrupted my itinerary by cancelling their flight from London’s Gatwick to Athens and substituting a later flight leaving from London’s other major airport, Heathrow.  Yes, the ticket agent behind the counter could see that Travelocity had rebooked me to fly into Heathrow so that I could make connection with the alternate Olympic flight, but things were not as simple as they seemed.  The fare on my ticket was based on an advance purchase and the changed arrangements had been made only days before-a far different matter.  After solemnly consulting her terminal, she disclosed-with, I thought, more than a hint of satisfaction-that there was an extra charge involved.  One-thousand dollars and change, to be exact, virtually doubling the entire cost of my round-trip ticket.  True to its slogan, American Airlines knew all too well why in the hell I flew all right.

My protest was based on what I innocently thought were two inarguable propositions: one, the necessity for the change had been entirely out of my control, and, two, my Travelocity agent (an agreeable, but marginally understandable Indian) confirmed in an unbelievably lengthy phone call that a seat on American to Heathrow was available and that the airline had agreed to a cost-free exchange.  To which my American Airline’s diehard loyalist had two rejoinders of her own.  One, her company bore no responsibility for what Olympic did or didn’t do and, two, she could find no confirmation of American’s willingness to waive the extra charge.  But, I countered vigorously, I had in hand my revised itinerary complete with an unrevised price tag.  She did not deign to look at it.  Travelocity’s itinerary was immaterial, she insisted, intimating, I presumed, that I had stayed up the previous night doctoring the printout.

To make a long story short, I was at the counter a full half hour haggling with the agent and, later, with her more reasonable supervisor before I was finally able to march to the gate with a boarding pass in hand.  A boarding pass that was, I smugly congratulated myself, penalty-free.

Still groggy from a sleepless, eleven-hour flight, I was intimidated by Heathrow’s cavernous spaces until reassured by a prominent “arriving passenger” arrow posted on the wall.  Taking heart in the certainty that I was, without doubt, an “arriving passenger,” I dutifully followed the trail established by a succession of similar arrows taking care to ignore any distracting signage that might lead me astray.  Trudging along determinedly-down block-long halls, up and down flights of stairs, around this corner and that- as long as there was one of telltale signs in view I was prepared to go to hell and back which, in fact, seemed more and more to be the case.  Suddenly, the path of the trek, which had been more of less linear, devolved into an interminable series of roped-off zigzags that, although presenting one more unwelcome obstacle, promised that there was an end to this trail of tears.  In company with a horde of presumably fellow arrival types, I mechanically shuffled back and forth edging ever closer to the exit that would lead, I assumed, to Olympic’s treasured portal.  Finally I was able to present my papers to a courteous-looking passport examiner who, after glancing at them, patiently explained that I was suffering from a case of self-delusion.  I was not, in Heathrowese terms, an “arriving passenger.”  I was instead a member of the “transferring flights” persuasion.  His sympathetic, even apologetic, tone suggested that my tenacious fixation on one consistent set of signs had, in a sense, been praiseworthy.  It was, unfortunately, the wrong set.

There were no “wrong way” signs lining my way back, but there might as well have been from the looks I got as I elbowed my way through crowds of legitimate “arriving passengers,” who, apparently secure in their identity, made no bones about resenting my hindering their aggressive advance.  At last, battered and bruised, I managed to struggle back to my point of beginning and from there start off in my newfound, properly ordained, persona.  Under the thrall of a different set of signs, I proceeded down another maze of halls that led, this time, to an outside entrance from whence a waiting tram took me and my fellow “transferring flightests” to Heathrow’s Terminal Two.  I was now assuredly on the right track and determined that no force on earth could deter me from it.  Despite the appearance of yet another set of cattle-run zigzags that had to be overcome, I persevered forward-this time successfully passing muster with the passport examiner-and made my way into the building.

More respectful now of Heathrow’s regulatory order, I paid special attention to a sign before the passage leading to the gates that read “All Passengers Without a Boarding Pass Must Obtain One on the Second Floor Before Proceeding to the Gate.”  Thanks to the confusion in Dallas, I did not, in fact, have a boarding pass for my flight to Athens, so I had every intention of mounting the first set of stairs I came to as instructed.  Far be it from me to again risk bucking the system.  What I failed to realize, however, was that the sign conveyed an unexpressed parenthetical addendum to wit: It’s behind you, stupid!  Unappreciative of the British gift for understatement, I blindly continued forward down a forbidding, tunnel-like corridor wearily dragging my luggage past gate after gate interrupted only by long empty stretches and doors posted with threats to do unspeakable things to anyone but airline employees who dared enter.  I suppose I would still be pursuing my misguided quest to this day had not a merciful airline attendant had me execute an about face and beat a retreat, for the second time that morning, back to where I had started.

When I found it, the second floor, sure enough, contained a long counter surmounted by a row of illuminated signs displaying every one of the innumerable airlines that landed at Heathrow-every airline, that is, but Olympic.  Twice I futilely surveyed the long line of signs.  It seemed that I could fly to every corner of the earth on airlines I never heard of provided I did not step foot on the one place I needed to go.  When I was relieved of my befuddlement by one of the people behind the counter, I realized that, once again, I had failed to exercise common sense in interpreting Heathrow’s elementary-albeit unwritten-guidelines.  It turned out that had I given my supposed mystery a moment’s thought, its solution would have been self-evident:   Olympic and Il Italia shared the same counter space.  And why should they not?  Greece and Italy were on a peaceful, and presumably neighborly, footing.  Both were Mediterranean countries sharing much in the way of common history, customs, and temperament.  The trivial bit of confusion on my part, notwithstanding, this sly, surreptitious bit of frugality was, if anything, to be commended.

My spirits, briefly lifted by the bright, prominent Il Italia sign nearby, promptly sank when I saw what was beneath it-a milling crowd of people commensurate in number with the worshippers at a papal mass.  It would, I despaired, take hours to accommodate all these travelers and, for the first time, worried about making it to the gate in time.  But I was unduly pessimistic.  Suddenly a mechanism behind the counter began spitting out what seemed like enough boarding passes to fill a 747.  These were bundled together by the attending agent and handed to the crowd’s imposing bearded leader who practically emptied the line with a single sweep of his arm.

Now only one well-groomed young man stood between me and the counter.  Based on his appearance and demeanor, I had every reason to expect the ensuing travel arrangements to be business-like and brief.  Yet another of my miscalculations in a day that had known nothing but.  Whatever had been the young man’s original intention in visiting the Il Italia booth was now replaced by a determination to engage in as intimate a form of cohabitation with the airline’s stunningly beautiful agent as circumstances allowed.  Worse, from my standpoint, was that she seemed to have no objection to this exercise in instant familiarity.  What two complete strangers could find to talk about I could not imagine, but apparently there was enough inventiveness on both sides to supply all that was needed.  As the minutes dragged on, I worried lest the boarding-pass machine had switched itself off and called it quits for the day, but it finally revived long enough to deliver a single document that somehow had taken infinitely longer to produce than the entire stack of documents that had dispersed the previous crowd.  Be that as it may, the young man reluctantly abandoned his tryst and I now had the agent’s undivided attention.  Inexplicably, she abruptly lost the conviviality that had flowered so naturally just moments before and my boarding pass was delivered with scarcely a word.  There was nothing for me to do then but leave her side after but a few heady minutes and take whatever consolation I could from the limp piece of cardboard that commemorated our encounter.  At least I was, after hours of Herculean labor, actually approaching the Olympic gate that had, by now, assumed, in my mind, an image worthy of its namesake-that of a mountaintop temple run by smiling, black-bearded, open-armed priests and etherealized by a chorus of white-robed virgins.

It is compulsory for comedies to have a happy ending, and I am pleased to report that mine was no exception.  The last scene went like this.  I arrived at Athens dog tired from twenty-hours of travel time aggravated by my misadventures.  My final destination, however, was not the city itself but its port of Piraeus where a hotel reservation and, hopefully a comfortable bed, awaited.  Directions from an information desk led me to a bus that I boarded and, with a sigh of relief, sank into one of its seats.  From now on it would be a piece of cake.  I would alight in Piraeus-village-sized as I pictured it-and with the aid of my little computer-generated map, stroll over to my hotel described on its website as “centrally-located.”  What I discovered, however, was not a village at all but a fair sized city sprawled over miles of seashore.  As the bus sped by clusters of buildings spaced long blocks apart, it occurred to me that I was totally lost.  Piraeus’s city center might lie ahead or had already been left far behind.  My little map was restricted to the area immediately around my hotel and, moreover, its street names in English bore no resemblance to the Greek street signs I saw from the window.  The bus driver spoke no English and impatiently waved me aside to concentrate, as well he might, on negotiating his way down the crowded highway.  Nearly panic stricken, I then walked down the aisle imploring one passenger after another for help.  No one volunteered-few, if any, I supposed, spoke English-until I came to a fiftyish-looking gentleman who beckoned me take a seat alongside him.  When I did so, he took my map from my hand and pondered over it as the bus roared on, now alarmingly in a direction away from the water.  I would have gotten off right then and there were it not that my silent, seemingly confused, companion refused to surrender the only link I had to my night’s lodging.  Mercifully, a block or two further on-the Aegean was now a good mile behind us-a gruff voice commanded, “we get off here.”

My newfound friend then took one of my suitcases in hand and marched me to the hotel entrance, handed me the luggage, shook my hand, and disappeared into the crowd.  What this act of kindness to a stranger cost him I don’t know.  Surely a good deal of time and probably an additional bus fare as well.  As it was, though, he supplied, as I said, the requisite happy ending to an arduous day.  A newly initiated Grecophile, I laid my head on my pillow, joined hands with my fellow survivor, M. Hulot, and together we marched into the night, for the time being at least, safe from life’s travails.