Quick Break

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, one of the highlights of living in Algeria is how gosh darn easy it is to get to Western Europe. After a number of not unstressful weeks working on a whole host of things (plus that S visit thrown in there too), international labor day provided me with a long weekend at just the right time!

May 1st is a holiday in more than 80 countries, including Algeria, so yay! I decided to celebrate workers by going to Vienna, meeting friends from my foreign service orientation class (A-100), eating pork and drinking beer. I think workers everywhere would approve.

I decided to put on my big girl pants and drive myself to the airport. Traffic and parking can be intimidating, to say the least, but I had been assured that airport parking was easy and plentiful, and I figured the morning of a national holiday would be a good time to brave the highway. Correct on both counts. Easy peasy drive to the airport, easy peasy parking, easy peasy check-in, at the gate 2.5 hours before my flight left. Which was OK, because my bid list for my next tour JUST came out, so I had plenty to do! More on that in a separate post. Also more on how it actually turned out to be a really bad idea to drive to the airport.

Finally boarding time came, which meant more security checks (the Algiers airport loves its security). It was made more entertaining this time when I arrived at the final checkpoint before boarding the plane. In the gangway, security guys do one last manual search through your bags (even though they’ve already been scanned twice by this point). My guy was rifling through all my stuff when he landed on some feminine hygiene products one cannot generally find in Algeria. Use your powers of deduction on that one. After a good amount of scrutiny, he apparently determined that they were not harmful to the plane or its passengers, and he let me proceed.

Flight number one from Algiers to Frankfurt went well except for the FIVE screaming children in the row in front of me (noise canceling headphones are the best invention ever). Flight number two from Frankfurt to Algiers had significantly fewer screaming children. Both flights (Lufthansa) were on time. Let’s hear it for German punctuality!

So I made it. Stay tuned for more details on our Austrian getaway.