Today is actually May 3rd, 2008. I have failed to recount the events of our last day in New Zealand until now, first because while I was on both planes, the asshole in front of me leaned his seat all the way back, leaving me with no room at all. Both fucking planes. Then, since we've gotten home, I've been procrastinating. Today Amanda is making me do it. So, while this entry will convey what actually happened, it will lack the eloquent grace of my previous entries (as Amanda put it) and probably leave out some of the finer details, which might be for the best.
We began our day by gutting the hotel room and repacking all of our stuff as haphazardly as we pleased, determined to simply sort it all out after we were safely home. We packed Lucy loosely and set out into Auckland to do the last of our souvenir shopping, which for me at least amounted to most of my souvenir shopping.
We parked under the Sky City tower again. As we left the ramp via the elevator ("lift"), we decided to go get our parking validated immediately, so as to avoid the hassles of trying to do it later as we had previously. We knew there was a validation machine where you could do it yourself, we'd done it the previous day (I don't think I mentioned this before…it was sitting outside the casino, which is within the Sky City Tower's lobby-building-thing, since the casino was closed for Good Friday). We went into the casino looking for the validation machine and ended up gambling. This was my first time gambling, ever. Alyssa's too, I believe. Amanda was our guide. She taught us how to run a slot machine. I frittered away ten dollars and that was enough for me. I had gambled. I was cool with it. Done.
We walked up and down Queen Street, pretty much their main shopping area, while Alyssa dove in and out of every single bookstore we saw looking for some books she could just as easily have gotten back home. She spent like $1,000,000 on books. Once she finally found her things, she started whining about wanting to go even though the rest of us had not finished our shopping yet. We are coming close to the point where I finally attempted to slit Alyssa's throat.
After that, we drove Blue Lucky Lucy to the New Zealand Rent-A-Car in Auckland, where we had naively assumed they would take the van and drive us over to the airport, like how they had picked us up from the airport in the beginning. How foolish we were! No. We had to pay five bucks a person to ride the shuttle bus to the airport. The lady at the front desk, when Amanda had asked about transportation to the airport, had said nothing of the fee. We thought it was free. Somehow we managed to scrape $15 out between the three of us.
Getting through the airport was an adventure into hell, and I don't mean the pizza company. First problem: the weight was not distributed evenly in our luggage, something was too heavy. I frantically unpacked everything and repacked it, throwing shit all around and into bags wherever I could, until I eventually ended up with a carryon bag full of dirty laundry, something which, the previous night, I had insisted I was not going to do. Alyssa blames me for buying so many CDs. I argue that my CDs all fit nicely into the bottom of one bag, whereas all her fucking books and the odd-shaped fragile souvenirs she bought for every single person she knows, including stuff for the kitchen at the pizza place she USED to work at, and people she hasn't seen in over a year, were the reasons for the packing difficulties. We should have just separated our stuff out and packed our own belongings so that Alyssa could have dealt with her own fucking shit. Bitch.
Airline regulations state that you can have two carryons which cannot be over 7kg each. I ended up with two which each weighed almost 12kg, but the one fortunate thing that happened in the airport was that nobody harassed me about my carryons.
We wanted to proceed to our gate, but apparently there is a departure tax that everybody must pay to get out of the country WHICH WAS NOT INCLUDED IN OUR TICKET PRICE. Why the hell wasn't that included?! There were over two hundred dollars in various taxes on those tickets in the first place! Even typing this now, over a month later, I can feel my rage returning. These are things which should have, at the very least, been explained to us ahead of time. Like maybe when we purchased the tickets. Me being completely broke at this point, Amanda paid my departure tax. She had also picked up the bill for the last few souvenirs I'd purchased.
That paid, we proceeded to our gate. I got up after a time to use the bathroom, which had the stupidest doors I have ever seen in my life. I opened the door and found a man using the toilet, excused myself and shut the door and walked away sheepishly. I had first said, if they're single toilet rooms, why don't they have locks on the doors? Because I had figured I was walking into a normal restroom. But no, once I got into one, I found that it was because they had some sort of electric lock which you had to activate by pushing buttons or something. I can't really remember, now, how all that worked, just that it was stupid.
So we're about to board the plane and they introduce our friend, Mr. "I have to randomly search bags because the United States government requires that of us for every plane coming near their airspace." I am holding a bag full of dirty laundry. I do not want the security guard opening my bag full of dirty laundry. As we stood in line, I saw him grab somebody for a random search and I said to Amanda and Alyssa, "Go! Go! GO!!" but quietly, because I didn't want anybody to know that I didn't want to be randomly searched because I did not want the security guard opening my bag full of dirty laundry. We managed to escape him.
Now on board an Air New Zealand 777, just like the one we'd rode over the ocean on the first time. Unfortunately, this time, we did not get window seats. In fact we were stuck right in the middle of the plane, but at least we were all together. The food was spectacular again. Seriously, that's some of the best food I've ever had in my life. On the plane I watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was excessively long and thoroughly boring. I think it would have been better if it had been an hour shorter, it's kind of like the first Star Trek movie that way.
Apparently we flew through some sort of severe storm, the captain asked that the windows all be closed and we felt the plane rocking more vigorously than before. We're still not entirely sure what was going on, but Amanda and I both said that if we'd have had window seats, we'd have left the windows open.
Nearing the United States, an announcement was made that we had some paperwork to fill out before we could be let in. The captain specifically said, do not scribble or cross anything out, they would provide a replacement form if we made mistakes. So what does Alyssa do? She screws up, and then scribbles stuff out and does it again. I told her she had to get a new form. At first she wouldn't listen to me, but eventually she did.
This included a list of all items purchased in New Zealand which we were bringing back to the US. At first this was imposing to me, because I said there was no way I was going to remember everything that I purchased or how much I paid for it. If I was supposed to be saving receipts, they should have told me that beforehand! But seeing the small amount of space they gave for it, I just lumped everything into three broad categories and it totaled out to about $200. The rules, as printed on the back of that sheet, state that everyone is entitled to up to $800 before they have to pay duty on it. Amanda's also came out to between $200-300. Alyssa's came out to $1100. I told her she was going to have to pay duty on that, and asked if she just wanted Amanda or me to claim some of that so that she could get through customs. She said no and changed her estimates on her form, by scribbling them out and writing new ones in. I told her to get a new form and she said no. She said she had already filled it out twice and she was not going to do it again. This was where I threatened to slit her throat and actually meant it. I said, "We are going to get detained in customs. If they go searching through your bags and steal my shit, I am going to slit your throat." And I did mean it. It's such a simple form, there are like ten fields to fill out. If you've already got your numbers, like she did, it takes two minutes. After a heated argument Amanda finally somehow convinced her to do it. Given the opportunity right at that moment, if Amanda had not been sitting between us, I may have actually strangled her.
When we'd gone to New Zealand, we checked out baggage in Chicago and got it back in Christchurch, no problem. On the way back, for some reason, they unchecked all of our luggage in San Francisco, made us haul it across the entire freaking airport, and check it again. They didn't even look at it or anything, they just had us carry it across the airport for no apparent reason.
In customs, the guy read our immigration forms and saw that we were bringing food, so he asked what kind of food. I gave him a complete itemized list: three cans of macaroni and cheese, a bag of uncooked noodles, one jar of cheese sauce, one bottle of pancake mix, two bottles of soda. That is all. He told us to take our luggage over to a scanner across the room. So we hauled all our stuff over to that scanner, waited in a ginormous line, and when we got to the front of it, the guy asked us what we had, and I gave him the same itemized list. Then he said, "oh, you don't need to go through here. This is only for fresh produce and meat."
…
Assholes.
So we hauled our luggage across the great expanse that is San Francisco's International Airport, checked our luggage again, and waited at the gate.
We got stuck with about four rows in between each of us, and all of us exactly in the center of our rows with two people on either side in this American Airlines 777. It was seriously like, "Back to the ghetto with you!" The in-flight movie was Alvin & the Chipmunks. I strapped on my iPod and read Everything's Eventual by Stephen King for most of the flight, including the story "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What it is in French," which is about Déjà vu and a plane crash. King's own notes after the story say that he thinks the story is about Hell. Also not the pizza company.
By the time we landed, I had to pee so very, very badly, probably worse than I ever had in my life. I'm far too polite to ask two people to move for me so I can get up to go potty, and I figured that a four-hour flight shouldn't be too bad, right? Eh. The exceptional bumpiness as we taxied across Chicago's airport for over half an hour did not help matters.
We waited for probably half an hour for our luggage to come through the thing. We found Amanda's parents, and we went home. We dropped all of our luggage in a disorganized pile in the middle of our apartment, found out some of the souvenir gifts, and presented them to people at the homecoming/Easter party my mom threw for us at 10:00 at night.
And that's the story of why I hate airports.
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