Matching Tracksuits

Nature is teasing our family. Perhaps mocking. But I’ll be magnanimous and say “Teasing.” We were supposed to leave for Poland today.

We should be on a journey that ends tomorrow with hugs, rosół, and views like this:

This post should not be possible. Yet nature made it possible by making the trip impossible.

And as if that were not enough, today was a perfect example of what polskie lato can be like: it never got above 60 degrees today.

The flight was canceled. One would think getting a refund in such a case would be a fairly simple process. After all, a service paid for was never delivered. Still, we’d booked the flight through a middleman, so to speak, and Lufthansa said we had to deal with this third party. So we dealt with the agency that booked our flights. They informed us that they could not refund all of the money we’d paid for the tickets. For each ticket, Lufthansa would impose a $185 fee and the agency would impose a $100 fee. 

I remembered, though, an email I’d gotten from Lufthansa, which read, in part:

The expanded route network offers you, our valued customers, more options for rebooking existing or canceled tickets to a variety of travel destinations, in accordance with the applicable conditions. As I wrote in my last letter, any ticket booked until May 15, 2020, which was affected by a flight cancellation, can be rebooked one time free of charge. You can also apply the value of your booking to a new ticket at a later date. Additionally, your travel date and destination can be changed in our route network. In this case, the rebooking must be made by January 31, 2021 and your new trip must begin by December 31, 2021. For a new confirmed travel date up to December 31, 2020, we will give you an additional € 50 toward bookings changed by August 31, 2020. Should you prefer a refund, this option is also available. We are increasing the capacities in order to process refunds more quickly.

I called back and forwarded the email to the agency as we spoke.

“Well, sir, that was just an email Lufthansa sent out to all ticket holders. Your ticket was purchased with many restrictions.”

“I don’t recall being informed of any such restrictions. The email doesn’t indicate that tickets purchased with certain restrictions are not eligible,” I replied with surprising calm.

I’d done a little research about them before calling and found the following notes at a review site, all published within the last week:

One star is too much for this company. Sure, the agents that book your trip are friendly and the prices are cheap. HOWEVER, this company is dubious. They are now charging people to cancel flights, as necessary due to the pandemic. I had a trip booked to go to Greece, and the airline required me to cancel it through the travel agent —-. —- charged $150 to my credit card, without my consent, just to cancel my flight. I’m working with my credit card to stop the payment, but —- is fighting back, saying I agreed to this term. LIARS! Save yourself and NEVER use this company. It’s incomprehensible that they would attempt to profit from the pandemic. Shame on them.

Another also seemed to have issues with getting refunds: “Horrible horrible con-artist at best. you are taking a chance using this company, refuse to give back refunds approved by airlines.” And then there was this long story:

As many others said, i am also having issues receiving my refund! My flight to Europe was canceled, i was willing to change the flight, but they said the airline has no other flights this month. So i requested a refund. I purchased another flight with another agency, surprisingly they had flights with the same airline for dates i wanted. I called —- today for an update on my refund and Owen said that the airline put a hold on all refunds. That was odd to me. Right after, i called an airline directly, and they said they did not put a hold on any refunds and they are processing refunds, but they were unable to help me because the agency is the one that has to request a refund from them. I emailed —- rep who told me the airline put a stop to refunds and told him what i was told by the airline rep…no response… Im disappointed on how they are handling this.. They are very nice when purchasing the flights to get your business but this is unacceptable! I refuse to have almost 4k stolen!!

What I suspected was that they were planning on pocketing that money for themselves. I suggested that legal action might be required.

“I am just informing you of your options,” the man replied, completely non-plussed.

In the end, though, he told me he would do what he could and called back much later saying that he’d talked to the airline, and they’d agreed to waive the fee. “Bullshit,” I thought. “Your manager agreed to waive that fee.” However, they insisted on the $100/ticket service charge. Now, we’d been working on this all afternoon, and we’d called other friends who’d been in the same situation (one of whom was also flying Lufthansa), and they’d had no problems getting refunds and their cancelation fee was non-existent or only $50. At that point, though, I was just tired of the fight. We’d been working on the issue for five hours, and I just felt exhausted with the whole thing.

I think that’s what they were counting on.

It’s June 1, which means that my mad experiment of maintaining a 1,000/word/day average for an entire month is at an end. Adding in the journal writings — thoughts I want to record but not necessarily share — brings me to 1,002 per day. At least according to the WP widget that measures that. Something about it seems a little off, but I don’t care — it’s all over now anyway.

The more significant event of it being June 1 is that it’s the anniversary of my first departure for Poland in 1996:

I don’t know what to write — I don’t know what to feel. I’ve been shoved to this moment by a force more powerful than anything I’ve ever encountered. It seems time was jerked from me like a tablecloth yanked from a table. It’s been so sudden that I don’t believe I’ve even begun to deal with the emotions. What I’m about to do still feels as unreal to me as the landscape far beneath me.

Yet as I leave, as I finally get under way, a calm has settled in. The most difficult part is over. I cannot turn back now even if I wanted to. With that finality is an almost perverse security. Now that I can no longer cling, I no longer reach. Of course this is just the eye in the first of many emotional storms I’ll face. I suppose part of it is simply the beauty of flying — it’s difficult to be upset up here.

Saturday 1 June 1996

That was 24 years ago; I was 23 on that day — it was more years ago than I was alive when I was experiencing it. Put it another way: it was more than half my life ago. It’s a common sentiment here, I know. It’s just that I’m always looking around and noticing it again.

My time in Poland was one of my most prolific journaling periods: I averaged 25,000-30,000 words a month. There was so much to write about when everything was new and every day presented new challenges.

That number decreased when I moved back to America. But as I reread my journal from 1996 last night, I decided to do something I used to do fairly frequently but haven’t in a couple of years: go look at the day’s date twenty years earlier.

I’m back in America. I have been for almost a week now. And I feel awful. Just as I suspected/expected I would. Even “just as I feared I would.” “Tell me that it’s nobody’s fault, nobody’s fault but my own,” sings Beck now, and I guess that’s somewhat appropriate. I don’t know if “fault” is the best word choice, but all the same . . .

I feel like I have a huge choice to make in about six months or so: stay or go. The implications are huge. I want to go back to Lipnica so badly it’s killing me — paralyzing me with depression sometimes. Yesterday I just lay on the couch, thinking, “I have to go back, and yet I can’t go back.” […]

So what are my options? One option seems most promising: go back for one year to see. I don’t know that I can ever stop thinking, “I might have made a terrible mistake in leaving,” unless I go back for a while and test the hypothesis. At any rate, that’s what I want to do. The implications of that are fairly substantial, though. […]

And here’s the shock: four years ago I’d just finished my first day of training in Radom. It’s around 4:30 in Poland now — I’d be just about to finish the first day. Four years ago. Four years. That’s 1,460 days ago. A long damn time. No, quite the opposite. Four years is almost nothing. Two years is nothing. I guess it’s true what they say about time going faster the older you get.

What I don’t want is to realize that I’ve been back from Poland for four years and think, “I’ve done nothing important with my life in that time.” I don’t want to think at the age of sixty, “I wasted my life, by and large.” And that’s exactly what I’m afraid will happen — unless I go back. I keep treating that as if it’s my only option, and it really isn’t. But it’s the only one I’m aware of; it’s the one I feel is sure to bring me happiness and fulfillment.

Two quotes — from the same song — seem particularly relevant now:

The nearer your destination,
the more you’re slip slidin’ away. . . .
A bad day’s when I lie in bed
and think of things that might have been.

What makes all this so difficult is that I could talk to someone in Lipnica about my dilemma — Teresa[, a former student], for example — and she would simply reply, “So come back.” How I wish it were that easy!

It turned out, it was that easy. And so almost nineteen years ago, I went back. It all seems so distant and so near at the same time.

The same thoughts plague us now. We bought airline tickets for Poland this summer well before the pandemic was even a blip on the radar. The tickets for the kids and me are dated June 16. From the beginning, we said, “Let’s wait and see.” Lufthansa informed us that, due to the pandemic, fees for rescheduling would be waived (I’m assuming for one rescheduling), so we’ve just sat on the tickets, waiting.

“We won’t be going,” I kept saying. “There’s no way.” Yet restrictions are lifting. Poland is opening its borders to international flights June 15; Lufthansa says the flights are still a “go.” All passengers have to wear masks the entire flight, and there will be fewer people on the plane, but it’s not canceled. But then there are the questions.

• “International” in this case only means “European” it turns out. We’ll flying into Poland from Munich, though. Does that make a difference?
• Would we be quarantined upon arrival?
• How will the protests around the country affect this? I expect to see a huge spike in cases in a couple of weeks — just when we’re leaving. Will that affect things if it tragically comes to fruition?
• Most importantly of all: is it even safe and sane to be considering this?

To be honest, we wouldn’t be considering it at all if we were on our normal two-year cycle. “We’ll skip a year because the situation demands it,” we would say. But the problem is, we already said that last year. K hasn’t seen her mother in three years now. Sure there are the Saturday-morning Skype chats that can go on for quite a long time, but that’s hardly a substitute.

We’ll make a decision next Monday, we decided. It will still be a week in advance, and it gives us one more week to sort things out.