Category: Travel Stories

No One Needs to Know Who I Am

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I was in university, I went through a phase that lasted about half a decade where I was extremely cynical of strangers wanting to know who I was or about my life.

This was in the late 2000s; I had finally acquired a Facebook account and learned that anyone could Google me and acquire more information about me than I necessarily wanted to provide. I’d always been somewhat talkative with random people I met on public transportation, beginning with a nice man who sat next to me when I was 6 and flying alone for the first time. Now I was growing more wary of offering any identifying information about myself to strangers. My name in particular is so unique and identifiable that I decided it was best not to give it to strangers. Sometimes I offered alternative pronunciations of my name; sometimes I used fake names.

It quickly turned into a game of playing pretend. I wouldn’t contradict any assumption made about me. I also didn’t want to explain my whole life story to random people, so I would pick a country and find ways to make it sound as though I was only from that place without actively lying.

It was a fun game.

But this also created more distance between me and the people I met. The conversations were fun, but I never stayed in touch with any of them. If anyone gave me their contact information, I threw it away. I never really remembered anything meaningful from the conversations. During, I was busy spinning my own tale and only superficially listening to the other person’s side of the conversation. Once we parted, I would forget everything: my own story and the other person’s.

I eventually stopped doing this as a rule because it began to feel tedious and burdensome. I was doing it in large part because I didn’t want to make conversation, I realized. It was all well and good as a strategy as long as it was fun, but once the fun was gone, there was no more point in continuing this, I thought. In that case, it was far easier to answer in monosyllables and communicate through non-verbals that I wasn’t interested in conversation. If I choose to make conversation with strangers, I now figure, it may as well be either sincere or enjoyable. Sometimes, it’s even both.

Congratulations, You’re a Mother! Wait, What?

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I was sixteen going on seventeen, my family made one long, extensive trip to see many of our family and friends in Japan and the US. Because my parents had work and therefore less flexible schedules, they returned home to India first. But my sisters and I wanted more time on the trip, and our parents agreed that we could return a little later.

We would be flying back to Hyderabad from Chicago, with an overnight layover in Singapore. My mother had a friend in Singapore who would be meeting us there and taking us to the hotel where we’d be staying the night, then back to the airport in the morning. This was my first time flying alone without the unaccompanied minor service, though I don’t remember if this was because my parents had conceded to my argument that I was well-traveled enough to render it pointless, or because whichever airline we were using considered me too old to qualify. Either way, I was in charge with my twelve-year-old sisters in tow.

Our last stop was with my Italian godfather who lives in Chicago, who defies the combined stereotypes about Italians, godfathers and Chicago by leading a perfectly ordinary life and being a perfectly lovely person.* My godfather took us to the airport. He had intended to come through security with us, but they would not allow him through because his keys were too pointy; they also could not hold onto his keys for him, and of course he couldn’t simply abandon his keys. So we said our farewells at security and my sisters and I headed to our gate.

When we reached the gate, they were announcing that the flight was overbooked and asking everyone to come to the counter to check their bookings. I told my sisters to take a seat and took our boarding passes and passports to the counter. They asked me if we would be willing to rebook to fly to Singapore via Tokyo instead of Hong Kong.

I probably should have flatly said no, but the prospect of Japan was a lure of incomparable allure to me. Sure, we’d only been to Japan a few weeks prior. But I hadn’t been back for 3 years prior to that (it felt like an eternity at the time—how naive I was), and I didn’t know when I’d get to go back again (not for another 9 years, as it turned out). Even if we were only in the airport, even if it was only an hour or two, wouldn’t it be nice just to be able to speak Japanese a little more?

The lady behind the counter saw my hesitation and pounced. She spoke of vouchers to give us significant discounts off our next flights.

“Someone’s meeting us in Singapore,” I explained to her. “I don’t know how to contact him. We have to arrive at the time we said we would.”

“That’s not a problem,” she assured me. “The flight from Tokyo only arrives five minutes later than your current booking.”

I was still hesitant.

“I can give you seats together on the other flight,” she continued to hedge. “You would have to be seated separately otherwise.”

I folded.

I had one other reason for conceding. The flight was supposed to have the sort of layover in Hong Kong where some passengers disembarked and some new passengers embarked while the plane refueled, but everyone heading onwards to Singapore remained on the plane. My sisters were extremely susceptible to motion sickness, and a part of me thought that maybe it would be better if it was two shorter flights with a break to walk around an airport in the middle than to have one long flight with a break in which we had to remain in our seats. Whether or not I consulted my sisters’ opinions I don’t remember; but I suspect that in my teenage arrogance, I made the decision unilaterally.

She reprinted our boarding passes, gave me 3 discount vouchers and belatedly informed me that we had to hurry as the other flight was already boarding. So it was: all the way on the other side of the airport.

So I collected my sisters and we ran through the airport, back through the illuminated tunnel and reached our gate just as they were boarding the last stragglers. There we encountered a hitch: the lady who had reprinted our boarding passes had misprinted them. She had printed one of my sister’s names twice, and the other one not at all. After some brief confusion, the flight attendant realized that there were, indeed, 3 seats among us even if there were only 2 names. She let us on.

Once we reached Tokyo, I took the boarding passes to get reprinted with the correct name. We hung about in bookstores and concession stands in the airport while we waited for our connecting flight. My sisters were already not feeling well. After an objectively underwhelming, subjectively tantalizing hour or two in Tokyo, we boarded our next flight.

After we had boarded, one of my sisters informed me that she felt sick. The other one added that she did, too. I pushed the flight attendant call button. When the flight attendant arrived, I asked her if she had any sort of medication for motion sickness. There was a flurry of activity as flight attendants conferred with each other and peered with concern at my sisters, who were looking distinctly unwell. In particular one English-speaking man and one Japanese-speaking woman kept coming and asking more questions and expressing different concerns.

They had no medication, and there was talk of letting us off the plane if my sisters were too sick to fly. But my sisters decided that they could brave the trip and we took off, though the two flight attendants continued to keep an eye on us.

Now, as I have mentioned before, I looked far older than my age. (“She’s looked 32 since she was 12,” my mother used to say.) Meanwhile, my sisters did and still do look far younger than their age. They still tell me countless stories of odd looks and incredulous comments that they receive when trying to purchase alcohol, despite being over the legal age limit.

I had never specified to either flight attendant that these were my sisters, and in the stress of sitting between two ashen sisters, it didn’t occur to me to wonder at all the questions the Japanese-speaking stewardess was asking me about the difficulties of twins until she asked, “Is their father still around?”

I blinked. “Yes,” I said. At last it dawned on me that she thought I was their mother.

I continued conversing with her without missing a beat. Though I don’t recall outright lying, I never outright informed her that no, these were in fact my sisters, and she never seemed to catch on.

When we eventually landed, we were among the last to disembark, and then we all went to the bathroom. This meant that we were among the last to leave the secure area for our flight, and all passengers from the Hong Kong flight were long gone. Our mother’s friend had apparently been frantically calling our mother (who expressed a complete lack of concern and assured him that fifteen minutes was hardly cause for concern) and asking the airport personnel for information.

This adventure quickly rose to the ranks among favorite dinner table conversations in our family.

*Because this is the internet, I feel that I must make it absolutely clear that this is a joke: I don’t subscribe to any stereotypes about Italians, godfathers, Chicago or any combination thereof. My godfather, meanwhile, is in fact a perfectly lovely person.

My Move to India, or How I Got Conned

Posted on by Kai Raine

In Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, there’s a paragraph where the main character remembers on the stupid decisions made by herself and her friend at the age of fifteen. She reflects that people should be locked up for a year at that age in a paragraph that seemed puzzling as a teenager, and then grew funnier and funnier as I distanced myself from my teenage self and headed into my twenties.

Here’s a piece of my own fifteen-year-old idiocy.

I flew to Hyderabad, India from Buffalo, New York to rejoin my parents and sisters. I had begun the trip as an unaccompanied minor, under the care of flight attendants, but as you may have read last week, in Doha it was forgotten that I was an unaccompanied minor and I ended the trip on my own. For the most part, I was happy about it. But naive as I was, it did leave me open to getting conned.

Immigration went without a hitch, but at customs, I got pulled aside. I was traveling with one or two large suitcases. A suitcase was marked with chalk, and I was told that because of those markings, I had to go talk to the customs officer at the desk. I went over to the desk.

The man behind the desk asked me if I was traveling with electronics.

“Not many,” I said. Just some cords and a phone. (Why I was carrying a phone in my suitcase I don’t really remember.)

“You have to pay a tax for electronics,” the man told me.

My heart skipped a beat and then started to pound. I envisioned losing everything in my suitcase. “I didn’t know that.”

The man named a sum of money that I was supposed to pay. Terrified that I would have to give up my entire suitcase, I went through the contents of my wallet. I don’t remember how much I had, but I think it was more or less $50. Whatever it was, it was less than he had told me to pay, even if I converted it into rupees.

“I don’t have that,” I told him. “But my parents will have come to pick me up. I could ask them for the money. Can I just leave and get the money and come back?”

“You can’t come back if you leave the secure area,” he told me, “and you can’t take this suitcase without paying the tax.”

“But I can’t pay,” I confessed. “I only have US dollars.”

“That’s no problem. How much do you have?” he asked me.

“Only fifty dollars,” I admitted.

“Well, I’ll let you off this time,” he said magnanimously with a smile. “But you know next time, you should carry more cash.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling terribly relieved. I handed him what money I had.

“So your parents are picking you up, then?” he asked.

“Oh, yes!” I told him, now talkative with relief.

“Your parents are American?”

“Well, yes, but my father is from India,” I told him, and happily explained how we had moved around and ended up moving to Hyderabad purely by coincidence. The customs officer nodded and smiled as he listened, and I felt reassured. Eventually, I finished my story and confirmed that it was okay that I now leave.

As soon as I got out of the secure area, I met my father. I told him about the nice customs officer who had let me pay a reduced tax on the electronics because I hadn’t had the money.

My father frowned.

“Did you ask for a receipt?” he said.

I blinked and said I hadn’t.

“You were conned,” he said bluntly. “There is no tax. Think about it: have you ever heard of a tax like that? And if it had been a tax, why would they let you go without paying in full? This sort of thing is common in India: people will try to trick you into giving them money. You’re going to have to learn to be more street smart. You should always ask for a receipt.”

Oh, how foolish I felt.

Reluctant Unaccompanied Minor, Forgotten

Posted on by Kai Raine

My mother has frequently joked that I’ve looked 32 since I was 12. (When I turned 24, I joked that by my mother’s own logic I was now 64 and the oldest member of our family. One of my sisters objected that I was misunderstanding: I stagnated at 32 at the age of 12, she said, and therefore was still 32.)

At the age of 14, I lived in Buffalo with my mother’s parents and my family lived in Hyderabad, India. I naturally visited them once or twice, traveling as an unaccompanied minor. Though this was only a trip I made once as a round trip, and then once more as a one-way trip to join my family, it was never unremarkable.

The preferred route in those days between Hyderabad and Buffalo was Buffalo -> JFK in New York -> London -> Doha or Dubai -> Hyderabad. I always ended up having long layovers, and it was excruciating. The only place where I didn’t mind being stuck for awhile was JFK, where there was a play room of sorts for unaccompanied minors: there were puzzles, a TV equipped with a playstation, various games and a few books. So of course, JFK was the only airport where I never spent any particularly long amount of time waiting between flights.

In London, I once missed my flight out of Heathrow due to a delay, and they rebooked everyone for a different flight that departed the next day and put them up in hotels for the night. But much to their distress, this was not an option for me. (Apparently it’s against policy to put an unaccompanied minor into a hotel.) They eventually settled on putting me on a different flight that left several hours later out of Gatwick. After a long, traffic-heavy trip in an airline-owned car to Gatwick with a flight attendant, I was handed off to a different flight attendant. Still, I had several hours to wait for my flight. The flight attendant explained apologetically to me that policy dictated that I had to stay with her, but they had only a tiny staff kitchen where I could sit for those hours. She told me that she would trust me to go out into the airport and come back by a designated time, and let me leave the area. I wandered around the small airport until I got bored, then spent the rest of the layover in that staff kitchen reading. (And wishing they would have just let me stay in a hotel like all the other people.)

International flights to and from Doha now principally go to and from Hamad International Airport, but at the time Doha International Airport was the default airport. This was a relatively tiny airport. Like Gatwick, they did not have a room for us unaccompanied minors. Unlike Gatwick, they didn’t even have a staff room.

I and a boy a few years younger than me, obsessed with drawing dragons in his sketchbook, were sat on the floor behind a desk at a gate while the flight attendant charged with our care manned the desk. (To be clear, neither of us was taking this flight. We sat on the floor behind the gate until a flight attendant from our connecting flight came to collect one of us and take us to our gate.)

Adding to all of this, nearly every time I was handed from one flight attendant to the next, they’d eye me strangely and ask, “You’re a minor? Really?” To which I or the previous flight attendant would say that I was fourteen and be met with shock.

To put it simply, I was not happy that I had to travel as an unaccompanied minor. Since it was a service that my parents had to request, the first time when it was a round trip, I begged them not to request it on the return trip.

“I look plenty old enough,” I argued. “I’ll be fine.”

They begged to differ, and I was again an unaccompanied minor.

On the one-way trip to India, I again begged them not to request the service, and again they decided that it was necessary. As usual, flight attendants were incredulous to hear that I was an unaccompanied minor.

From London to Doha, I was flying with 3 other, much younger children as unaccompanied minors. We were put on the plane early, and then told to wait at the front of the plane without disembarking after it landed. I did as I was told. The other children disembarked one by one as their parents showed up accompanied by flight attendants.

I stood there, waiting to be led to my connecting flight. The flight attendants kept eyeing me in a way that seemed a lot like annoyance. After the last child left and I found myself still locked in a staring match with a flight attendant, I realized that they did not remember that I had been one of the unaccompanied minors handed over to them. They were waiting for me to disembark, no doubt wondering why I’d been idly standing near the children.

I didn’t say a word and disembarked.

I revelled in getting to walk around Doha airport, going where I pleased and sitting in actual chairs, wherever I wanted.

When I arrived in Hyderabad, my father was surprised when I emerged without any escort. I explained that the airline had forgotten that I was an unaccompanied minor in Doha, but everything worked out, see? This was why there was no point sending me as an unaccompanied minor.

It was a moot point by then, but they never sent me as an unaccompanied minor again.

The Living Murphy’s Law of Transportation: Introduction

Posted on by Kai Raine

For about a decade from my early teens into my early twenties, I was the living embodiment of Murphy’s law when it came to transportation. Though I traveled a great deal in those years, I rarely had any trips that simply went as planned. It came to a point where my sisters would flat out refuse to travel with me, citing the fact that somehow my travel was always characterized by delays, cancellations and a great deal of unplanned inconvenience.

During these years, this was a routine icebreaker and dinner table conversation. The stories always made for great stories and a lot of laughter, and I had more than I could count. Many times, people told me I should write down the stories. I never did. A part of me was convinced that it was more or less a routine part of travel, and people who didn’t encounter these problems probably simply weren’t traveling enough.

Of course, my travel was frequently intercontinental. The longest stories came from journeys going home or to university before and after vacations. This was always a very convoluted trip, because the cheapest way was to fly across 3 continents in a minimum of 5 flights. Yet even when this was no longer the case, when I lived in Europe and would be visiting family only one or two countries away, odd complications continued to plague my travel for a few years.

At one point, I remember thinking that I really should write some of the stories down. I looked back on the recent trips I’d had and trying to work out which to begin telling. Then, suddenly, a thought occurred to me and I changed my mind. Instead, I started filtering through my memory for a single trip that had gone relatively smoothly—something that wasn’t any worse than a delay, I thought. I couldn’t remember any such trip recently.

People would talk about the annoyances of a one-hour delay that caused them to miss a flight, and I’d bite my tongue and wonder how they could possibly have been so confident in their flights being on time as to book a layover so tight that a one-hour delay would cause them to miss the connection. (At this point in my life, my minimum layover time was three hours.)

In the end, I didn’t write any of the stories down. I kept on coming up with new stories, and I told them so frequently that I didn’t see why I’d ever need them to be written down.

Then, three or four years ago, things suddenly settled down and I stopped having such problems. Now I book my flights with one- or two-hour layovers and hope for the best—and I haven’t missed a flight yet. (Excepting the one time that I misplaced my passport…)

But now I find myself thinking back to those stories and realizing that all the chaos and all the inconvenience really was very much out of the ordinary. The sheer frequency with which I wound up stuck in places where I had not intended to end up at all is, in retrospect, funnier than ever.

So now that I’m blogging about travel stories, I created a series focusing on these stories. I’m certain that I won’t be able to remember them all. But I’ll start telling the stories as best I can remember.

If you have your own crazy travel story, do post it in the comments! I love hearing other people’s travel stories even more than I enjoy telling my own!

The Quirky Hostel Manager (Pt. 3)

Posted on by Kai Raine

On the last day of the conference, a few fellow conference goers asked me about where I was staying. We were talking over lunch at an affordable Chinese place not too far from the fancy hotel that served as the conference venue.

“It’s a hostel that’s filthy and smells like pot,” I responded. “And it’s a mile downhill from here. And for a floor of twenty plus rooms, there’s one shower, one toilet, and one bathroom whose lights don’t work, making it useless. The only way I ever shower or use the bathroom is if I’m up at an odd hour of night. Which I am. Because I’m still jetlagged.”

“Ugh,” one of them grimaced. “Sounds awful.”

“It’s not, really,” I shrugged. “It was the cheapest private room I could find, so I wasn’t expecting much. And the guy who runs the place? He’s awesome and makes it all worth it. I love talking to him.”

“Sounds like someone has a crush,” one of them teased. I rolled my eyes.

“The dude’s like sixty.”

“An old man crush, then.”

I struggled to explain, then, how much I relish it when I meet another person able to have random conversations unbound by the tethers of reality and preexisting social constructs. I tried to demonstrate by starting to talk about dragons. One of my companions joined that conversation briefly before it devolved into a discussion of whether a dragon would melt Elsa (from Disney’s Frozen) or Elsa would freeze the dragon. (I maintain that the dragon would melt Elsa.)

I was really looking forward to talking with Ricardo* again. Every conversation we’d had had been so much fun.

So, of course, the day that I left, all our interactions were run of the mill. I took my suitcase down to check out and store it in the office just as it was opening. I had gone to sleep too early the day before and had woken up at midnight and been unable to go back to sleep. I probably looked a bit like a zombie.

By the time I came back from the post-conference class to reclaim my suitcase, I was feeling lightheaded with exhaustion and weak with hunger. I think we may have had a short discussion in which the suitcase was a hostage, but I don’t quite remember.

It was an underwhelming goodbye to what had been a very entertaining acquaintanceship.

*Not his real name.

The Quirky Hostel Manager (Pt. 2)

Posted on by Kai Raine

On day 2 of the conference, I walked up the hill through the rain to attend the 6am coffee session. After that, still pretty damp, I attended panel after panel. I’d forgotten my phone in the hostel, so after lunch (just as I was starting to feel dry) I rushed back to the hostel to grab it, and then back to the hotel. By 3pm, I was feeling exhausted and exceedingly chilled. By 4pm, I was just sitting working on editing my manuscript in the hope that I would feel refreshed after a little writing. It didn’t work, and by 5pm I could taste the sleep in my mouth. Even though I’d just started to feel dry again, I decided it was time to go back to the hostel.

The walk through the cold and the rain woke me up, but not enough. The walk made me feel manic with excess energy, yet I was ready to go straight to bed. I remembered that I had an upcoming conundrum: I wanted to attend a class on Monday that went from 9am to noon, but I had to check out by 11 that morning. I remembered that there had been a guy who left his suitcase in the office on the day I’d arrived and was wondering if I might do the same.

I climbed up the staircase to the first storey. I looked down the hallway and saw that that the man from the hostel was at the desk behind the window. I darted over.

“I have a question!” I announced.

“I may have an answer,” said the man.

“It’s a very dramatic question.”

“Then I’ll have a very dramatic answer.”

“Can I leave my suitcase with you after I check out on Monday?”

“Ooh!” he said, waving his hand in the air and practically bouncing in his chair. “I know the answer! Pick me! Pick Ricardo*!” He briefly stopped waving his hand in the air to explain to me, “That’s me, I’m Ricardo.”

“I’m picking Janine,” I said flatly.

“Aww,” he pouted, crossing his arms. “You always pick Janine. She doesn’t know anything.”

“Janine,” I said anyway.

Ricardo pitched up his voice. “I don’t know, ask Ricardo!” Then, back to his regular voice, “See? Told you so.”

“Fine,” I sighed. “Ricardo, then.”

“Yes, you can leave you suitcase here,” he said. “For the bargain price of five dollars.”

“Gasp,” I said. “That’s practically robbery.”

He laughed, but I was already moving on to thinking further logistics.

“So can I come back for the suitcase at any point during the day?” I asked.

“You can, but not after 11:30, for the simple reason that I’ll be asleep.”

“11:30 at night,” I checked.

“Yes, 11:30 at night.”

“That’s not a problem, I’ll be back before then.”

“Great! Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Nope, that’s it. Thank you so much!”

“No problem. Have a good one!”

“You too!”

I ambled up the stairs. By the time I reached the top, I was once again ready to climb into bed and fall straight to sleep.

*Name is changed for reasons of privacy.

The Quirky Hostel Manager (Pt. 1)

Posted on by Kai Raine

I dragged my larger-than-necessary suitcase from Powell Station to the hostel on 6th. I’d just flown in from Tokyo for the San Francisco Writer’s Conference that started the next day. I was exhausted and my phone was not making my day any easier: the battery would lose charge like sand through a sieve, and it would intermittently decide that it had no data capabilities. So I’d memorized the way as best I could and hoped for the best.

When I reached the intersection where the hostel was supposed to be, I saw that the building on the corner was under construction. I felt a little anxious—was this the wrong place, after all?—but was too tired to worry too much. I walked around the construction site and there it was: an unassuming townhouse painted in red accented with yellow and a small sign over the door that said “Europa Hostel.”

There was just a door and an intercom, so I rang the bell. A muffled man’s voice responded, but I couldn’t understand what he’d said.

“Hi,” I said instead. “Is this the Eur-”

“Pull the door towards you,” said the man’s voice, slowly this time. “And turn the handle.”

The door buzzed and I did as I was told. The door opened to a steep, narrow staircase. I struggled up the stairs with my suitcase, turning 2 corners just to reach the first floor. At the landing, the staircase continued on my left, so I looked down the hallway to my right. At the end of the hallway was a window that seemed to be the reception. Two young men with German(-ish*) accents were checking in, a process that was made extra complicated by the fact that they could not remember which name the booking had been under.

I stood in line behind them.

The man behind the window finished checking them in and handed them their card keys. He gave them the run down of the place, which was fairly standard.

“I don’t care what you smoke,” he finished. “But smoke it outside.”

The men gave a startled laugh and thanked him. Just as I stepped forward, another man came up the staircase behind me.

“You here for your bag?” asked the man behind the window, ducking out of the room.

“Yes,” said the new man, with an Indian(-ish) accent. “And can you call me a taxi?”

The door next to the window opened and the man from the hostel brought out a black suitcase.

“You’re a taxi,” he said very seriously as he handed the suitcase over.

The guest took his bag and looked a little confused.

“Can you call me a taxi?” he repeated.

“Yes,” sighed the man from the hostel. “It’ll arrive out front.”

“Thank you,” said the guest and left.

The man from the hostel ducked back inside and emerged momentarily back at the desk behind the window.

“People just don’t get American humor,” he lamented to me as he pushed buttons on the phone without looking.

It took me a good ten minutes to check in after that, because we kept getting side-tracked with conversation.

*My recognition of accents is highly unreliable. Take my accent-approximations with many grains of salt.