Lost luggage!!

It all happened when I arrived back in Belgium. I’d just spent 36 grueling hours on planes and in airports, getting back from Buenos Aires to Brussels and everything had gone smoothly, except for the unsettling fact that all the goodies I’d bought in the tax free in Argentina where taken out of my hand luggage and thrown into a big garbage bin upon arrival in Portugal. The security woman who did it, did so with a blank face but I know she was only too happy, anticipating how after I’d gone, she’d be able to fish them out of the bin and take home all those expensive crèmes (Kiehls’, la prairie, Shisheido). When I protested loudly, saying I was in transit and had only just bought them in a previous airport, she replied with a wry smile that I’d arrived in Portugal, where I could not bring anything in from outside Europe, basta!

As for the crèmes, let me tell you that it was the first time in my life I’d ever spent any money on crèmes. Most of my friends have loads of them and keep telling me how great they are. So this time, looking for a way to pass the time in the airport, I’d decided to get some. But now that this Portuguese woman had taken them all, I thought of my mum and decided to stick to her policy, which is to keep things simple: a splash of cold water and a bit of Nivea. And she may not be too wrong because everybody keeps telling me how good she still looks at 75.

Anyway, wanting to keep things simple, upon arriving in Brussels with loads of accompanying luggage , I decided to check them into a locker so that I could have my hands free to frolick around and get some shopping done before returning to Africa. After all, I’d had great expectations for shopping in Brazil and Argentina, but prices had been both shocking and choking. So now that I was in Brussels, I had to make up for that, as fast as possible. So I checked my two huge bags in and went downtown. Hours later, when I had to retrieve my luggage in order to check in for my flight to Abidjan, standing in front of the lockers I suddenly noticed that I’d lost the little piece of paper with which I was to get the automate to open up my locker. I turned my pockets inside out, a dozen times, but no luck, I’d lost the ticket. Mama mia! What was I to do?

A bit nervous, I started dialing the number advertised next to the lockers ‘in case of emergency’. The phone rang and rang, but on the other hand no one seemed interested to pick up the phone. Now what was I going to do? Leave the locker-room and just check in my hand luggage and retrieve my big bags upon my next trip to Brussels, in five months time? No, I couldn’t do that; I needed to find someone to help me. While I kept looking around frantically, a tall skinny man showed up in a uniform. When I asked if he could help me, he looked a bit puzzled. I explained him how I’d lost my ticket which had on it the number of the locker where I’d put my stuff, and a special code to open this Ali Baba’s cave. I described him that I’d forgotten the number of the locker, but that I’d put my stuff in an upper locker, vividly remembering how the ones on the ground had been full and how hard it had been to lift my heavy bags up into an upper locker.

The man kept asking me patiently where I thought I might have stored it. “Which locker do you think my dear, the one up here? Or the one next to it?”
I kept biting my lips, wondering where on earth I’d stuck my stuff but I could hardly remember anything, only that it had been in the upper compartment.
The man opened up all the upper lockers, one by one. There were about thirty of them, and it was a tedious job --he had to give in lots of numbers into the machine and often got the combinations wrong and had to start all over again. Every single locker took at least three minutes to swing open, and when that happened I was not allowed to look while he peeked inside, as I might be tempted to point and say ‘Yes, there it is, that’s mine’, whenever there was a Louis Vuiton bag or a Gucci suitcase in there. So I’d had to tell him what my luggage looked like (a plain red bag and a blue one), and each time when he’d opened a locker and peeked inside, he just turned around to face me and shook his head, “Nope, that wasn’t it.”

With each opened locker my courage sank deeper into the ground and both of us got closer to the thought that I might have lost the paper in front of the locker and that someone else had run off with it. “I’ll open up till the end of the row, but if by then we can’t find it, I will have to take you to the police office to hand in a declaration of theft” the man said.
He opened another one, and again he shook his head. Meanwhile I tried to recall the evening I’d packed my bags and my mind started scanning what exactly I had put in there. Because all of that was gone now, someone else was going to enjoy it. Bye cowhides, bye art works, bye books, bye handicrafts, bye posters, bye little robot, bye old red telephone, bye clothes, bye shoes, bye swimsuit, bye all the havaianas gifts… Bye bye to everything!
Just when I was thinking how sad it all was, the man suddenly asked “Shall we try the lockers on the ground floor?” At first I thought it was useless to do so, hadn’t I dragged the bags up in the air and remembered those movements so vividly? So why bother looking? Also, my time to catch the plane was running out, I really had to hurry up.
Because I was so hesitant, the man was not sure what to do either and decided to call his boss for advice. “Just open them one by one, make sure to check them all’, was the answer. And so he started opening each and every one of them again, the upper ones, and after that also the ones on the ground floor. And guess what? When number 14 flung open, the man turned around and looked at me “What about that, a blue and a red bag, couldn’t that be yours?”
When I stepped closer to have a look inside that locker and saw my bags, the two of them, safe and sound, I spontaneously jumped into the man’s arms. The weight and the surprise of it all almost threw the poor man to the floor, but he told me not to worry, it was his first day on the job and he was as happy as I was.

As for me, I was too happy to be embarrassed. I’d just gotten all my stuff back, and felt richer than ever before. It felt outrageous to get both of them back- I would already have been too happy to just get one of them.

Maybe you should experience that too, to have your stuff ‘disappear’, and then magically turn up. There’s no better way to appreciate what you have and make you smile all day! (A smile that is only overshadowed by my concern about what I call my ‘early stages of dementia’, because how could I so vividly remember something that clearly never took place? Aye caramba! Of course, my friends will just laugh it off, but I am really worried…)

THE END
PS- As usual, whenever you think that you overcame a hurdle, it turns out that it was only the beginning, and a benign one in comparison with what was to come. In this case, when I checked in, with my luggage!, I was told that my name was not on the list. Seemed that someone had cancelled my booking. Ahum! Luckily the flight wasn’t full and they managed to find me a seat.
Then, when you have to pass the security people, they this time did not take any of my liquids, they were by now all in the bathroom of that Portuguese woman, but it was my laptop that they wanted to take this time. They could not explain me why, but something was wrong with it. They slowly passed it back through the scanner, again and again, and just when I was about to throw a fit, or get an epileptic attack, the man at the scanner shrugged his shoulders and said ‘go ahead, you can take it.’

And that’s how I finally ended up on the plane and got to know my neighbor, a young French girl travelling to Ivory Coast to meet up with her new love, a French soldier, but that’s another story.

Bye bye!

Griet