The Rumpus Room: Ret the Rumpus Recommense!

I intended to kick off this composition last night after dinner while I was listening to a Finnish reporter on Sveriges Radio speak his strangely-accented variety of Swedish. But I had to buy some groceries so instead I walked down to the Coop and by the time I got back it was eight o’clock and I fell asleep instead. Now it’s around midnight and instead of sleeping I’m writing…(to indicate temporal discontinuity). The truth of the matter is that I probably wouldn’t be writing this at all, and and my multintudinous promises of “blog-updates” from Östersund would have remained unfulfilled for sheer indolence if not for the circumstances of my trip up to this point, among other consequences whereof is that I finished my journal so I’ve got no place else t’ write!

To explain, a skeletal account: bright-eyed at Ted Stevens International on Sunday, having deliberately cleared up all thitherto unresolved matters and properly made all my farewells, I could not have been more ready to start my “adventure.” PSYCH! The flight to Europe is cancelled because somwhere a stewardess pulled a level and broke an airpline. After five hours standing in queue, I have this message to show for it: “come back tomorrow” with this corollary: “be four hours early.”

After “wandering around like a graveyard ghost” during the awkward interrim, my stint as a temporal refugee was concluded. So, in “the same procedure as yesterday,” I stood in a five-hour line. This time instead of ending in the Baja, I found myself on a jumbo-jet sitting next to a very friendly Schwizerdeutscherin named “Alessandra.” Another key difference was that instead of Frankfurt, this flight was to Zürich. This is significant, among the obvious reasons such as the fact that the two metropolii (Nicky, do you do Greek plurals—I’m unsure on this one!) lie in different countries, Frankfurt was only to be an intermediate stop for me, as I had further flights that would take my first to Stockholm and finally to Östersund. And I though I the sayd flights could have been useful even after your average Verspätung, and still even after such a prodigious one as seven hours (such was my scheduled layover in Frankfurt), twenty-six hours were enough to compell their forfeiture. So instead of arriving in Frankfurt on Monday with a clear route to my destination, I arrove in Zürich on Tuesday with no clear prospects. Upon learning the details of the flight to Frankfurt for us that Condor had arranged, "the huddled masses," I was in a position to buy tickets to Sweden...again. Even now, my streak of fortune continued to manifest itself. For example, there was one payphone in the entire terminal that accepted my international calling-card. I determined this fact through a methodical process of trial and error (even this phone didn't warm up to me until the second try).

I realise this is becoming tedious. One more observation before I wrap this up: it's funny how such experiences cultivate so distinct a sense of comraderie among the individuals involved, as though one randomly becomes friend with everyone involved simply by default. I exchanged emails with about half a dozen fellow travellers, including a Notz-like German family, several other Germans, and a Switzer. But my favorite instance of this sort of thing was in relation to a group of elderly Slovenian couples. They were very nice, and thought it was especially funny that I had been to Slovenia and could remember a handful of words. I particularly hit it off with several of the older men, one of which so well and literally that we were slapping each other on the back with every occasion thereafter. I was extremely fond of that fellow.

In short, I made it to Östersund only one day late, with all my parts and it is very nice to be "alive" instead of "travelling."