The High Cost of Being Cheap

Rome - There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote I love that says, “Strange travel directions are dancing lessons from God.” I have some strange travel directions to get from my home in Grand Rapids to my home in Dordrecht. I saved over $1000 on travel expenses by flying through Chicago on this trip. The way over was simple, the way back complicated (via Rome on Alitalia) but through the magic of Cheapoair.com, yours truly is suffering to save money, which I call the high cost of being cheap. I figure it easier to have a strange itinerary than to find a new $1000 donor. My trip started at 9am in Grand Rapids on Saturday and right now it is 10am in Rome on Sunday, and if everything goes well from here I will walk in the door in Dordrecht around 6 tonight. With all the time changes factored in, that’s still about 26 hours to get home, and the worst part is that I missed the extra “fall back” hour of sleep you got last night – I was losing 6 hours while you gained one.

I decided on the drive to Chicago that I would choose joy instead of orneriness and grumpiness on this trip. I decided to have as much fun as possible and see how many people I could bless along the way. My first chance came on the South Side of Chicago when I stopped to fill up my rental car before turning it in. I had to go inside to get my receipt from a rotund African-Amercan woman with the face of an angel, who was sitting in a sort of cage behind large amounts of bullet proof glass. She said, “Here you go, baby,” as she handed me the receipt, and I took a step away and then stopped and said, “Thanks for calling me baby. That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me today.” She roared and roared and was beaming as I walked out.

I found it was cheaper to rent a car at Midway Airport than O’Hare Airport, and cheaper still to ride a shuttle between the two places than to rent a car at one and return it to the other. So, on the shuttle I tried and failed to initiate a conversation with the man sitting behind me in the turban with the enormous moustache. I was so hoping I could get to the point with him where I could say, “What’s the deal with the turban and soup strainer?” but it didn’t happen. A few years ago I hosted a group of Amish people who wanted to see TimberWolf Lake and about half way through the tour I felt free enough to ask them, “What’s the deal with the neck beards?” but this wasn’t the same. (By the way, despite repeated requests, the Amish would not give me a hat.) Anyway, the man in the turban spent most of the ride on his cell phone speaking what I assumed was Hindi. It seemed ironic to me that we dropped him off at the American Airlines terminal while I was taken to the International Terminal.

Standing in a non-moving security line at O’Hare (after checking in on Alitalia, which is conveniently located between Pakistani Air and Air India), I started to study the buttons on the backpack of the Japanese young woman in line in front of me. One of the buttons said “(Heart) my body,” and that made me interested in talking to her. That last line sounds lecherous, so let me explain. I know from a lifetime of experience that body-image is often the overwhelming issue for young women. Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia” lays out powerfully how so many seemingly self-confident pre-pubescent girls wilt under the pressures of adolescence. So, I liked the button and the sentiment it proclaimed. I broke the ice and found out she was from Tokyo, attending grad school in Public Health specializing in genetics at the University of Michigan, and was heading to Mexico City for fall break to visit some friends. She seemed like a great young person, and I thought of three things I could say that might bless her.

First, I boldly told her what I do for a living. I wanted her to experience an inquisitive, friendly Christian. My hunch was verified by her response when I told her I was a minister – it seemed like the farthest possibility from her mind.

Second, I made sure I told her how impressive she was. Her English was fantastic(I couldn’t hear an accent) and I can't imagine how smart she must be to get into a great school like U of M (tough for a Spartan to admit but true) and to be doing graduate work in English.

Third, I made sure I told her that she had great eyes. She wasn’t one of the magnificent beauties of the world, but her eyes were pretty. My theory is that the reason I knew she was Japanese before we started talking was her eyes, so I decided to compliment what made her distinctive. I tried the same approach with the Muslim woman’s head covering last week and it worked both times.

We talked about a lot of things while we stood in line, like Ann Arbor, where I lived a long time ago, and my own daughter’s grad school ambitions, and all the security rules that defy logic (for example, in the US it’s take your shoes off and leave your belt on, in Europe it’s take your belt off and leave your shoes on). By the time we got to the other side of the scanners and said goodbye she had a big smile on her face and I felt she headed toward Mexico City feeling just a bit more confident and sure of herself.

On the plane I read these lines from Barbara Brown Taylor: “What we have in common is not religion but humanity…encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get…The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery.”

That’s what I am trying to do, especially while I travel. I got a few laughs out of Alitalia, we were an hour and a half late leaving and no one seemed to care or be in a hurry, as a matter of fact the pilot saw a couple he knew in the waiting area and he spent 45 minutes talking to them while all the other crew members were entering the plane. Once we were in the air after about 20 minutes they showed the safety video. I wonder what all the people who don’t know how to fasten a seat belt did? Alitalia definitely had their own way of doing things. My seat mate was from Bulgaria, and he was suffering from a bit of Eastern European-itis, which is another way of saying he was very quiet and not interested in talking and an arm chair psychologist might even say projecting a bit of shame out there for the world to encounter. There was an American couple across the aisle and I talked to them for a bit, she fell into my lap early on the flight and sadly, that wasn’t a very pleasant experience for me. She also broke her arm rest and I fixed it, being the handyman I am. They were on their way to a cruise – the 30th cruise they had taken in their lifetime and they were one trip through the Suez Canal short of having circumnavigated the globe on cruise ships. She said, “We’ve seen the whole world, well, actually, we’ve seen the coasts of the whole world, we really don’t spend much time in the interior.” She seemed to enjoy telling her husband what to do and speaking rather brutally to him, and he seemed to enjoy taking it. I told them I enjoyed the interiors of countries and actually meeting the people who live in these countries, and I could tell that seemed like a wild and crazy idea.

Now I am in Rome and exhausted, but I always wanted to post something from Rome, so here goes.

Addendum – Now it is about 8pm and I have been home for 90 minutes – nothing much eventful happened the rest of the way. I slept a lot, first in the waiting area, then on the plane to Amsterdam (where I was sitting in the same row as a Dutch woman who was also traveling home via Rome for a cheap ticket) and finally on the train to Dordrecht. It was pouring rain in Dordrecht and I let it soak me through trying to find the bus home. The whole central station is under construction and in the dark I couldn’t see where the busses are now. Finally, I did see a taxi cab and asked God to forgive me for doing something nice for myself on this trip that seemed to have a monastic self-flagellation quality to it. I spent 10 euro more on the cab than the bus would have been, and got out of the rain and home quickly. As we were approaching home the cab driver said, “You have had a long journey but relief is in sight.” Amen. That man is a true prophet.