Oo, I didn’t know there was a sequel. I’m going to have to gear myself up for that, because dude, The Caliph’s House stressed me out. :p

http://bibliojunkie.wordpress.com/2009/04/18/the-battle-with-human-and-jinns/

For the sequel, read The Arabian Nights:

http://bibliojunkie.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/in-arabian-night/

😉

I rented a miniscule crumbling victorian summer-shack with a cupboard under the stairs the owner told me not to open. Not locked, but I think it had something pushed in front of it. She was a horrible woman, and though I am usually good about this kind of thing, but she was *so* horrible, and kept money that wasn’t hers, I looked. It was just old stuff. I didn’t dig through it. Some of it was gay pride memorabilia. in. the. closet.

My eyes were like saucers when I read this story. That really happened? That is terrible! That’s an awful story! I am curious about your other travel stories, so I will have to remember to write more posts about Travel. :p

I’ve never been to Paris properly, but I flew through there on my way to England one time. Absolutely awful idea. On the trip back from England, the same trip back where I broke down in Atlanta, the flight from London to Paris was delayed, and I only had a 45-minute layover in Paris anyway. So I got to Paris, whose airport is, y’know, huge, with about ten minutes before my flight left. I explained my problem reasonably calmly and in more or less comprehensible French to one of the airport ladies; she took my ticket and inspected it and went “Oo-la-la!” and giggled helplessly. Then she showed it to all her friends, and they all giggled, and I was all, “Mon avion! Eek!” and they all laughed some more. I swear I was standing there for five minutes while the airport people had a good chuckle over how late I was and how much I was going to miss my stupid plane. Meanies.

(I have since learned some really vile French curse words, which if I’d known at the time I would have said to them. :p)

In 9th grade, my Spanish class teamed up with the French class and we went on a two-week school trip to France and Spain. We didn’t sleep for like, 24 hours maybe more…and of course our sense of time was all screwy when we first arrived in Paris, but it was the middle of the afternoon and our teacher insisted we stay up so that we would adjust to the time difference quicker. So she took us to a perfume factory, where I think someone fainted because the intense fumes + utter exhaustion = light headedness. And then a restaurant, where half of us actually fell asleep sitting up at the table. Then, she decided to give us 15 minutes to wander around this famous fountain/plaza before regrouping and finally taking us to wherever it was we were staying that night.

Well. I went to the other side of this plaza with three or four of my friends, all of whom were in the Spanish portion with me (so none of us knew any french). Meanwhile, a very good friend with a bit of an anxiety issue started having a SERIOUS melt down due to stress and lack of sleep, and convinced my teacher to leave early. She left without a headcount, and my friends and I were stranded. (There were only about 15 of us on this trip total, so how she didn’t notice a full third of us gone is still a mystery).

Anyhow, we didn’t know where we were supposed to be staying that night, we hadn’t yet been given our phone cards for calling our tour guide in the case of an emergency nor did we know his number, and we had only enough money on us for ONE of us to take a one-way trip on the subway. And it was getting dark. And there was an increasingly large group of men following us around and making suggestive comments. And we couldn’t find anyone who spoke English who would spare the time to help us. We were all getting scared and angry with each other and didn’t know what to do and started fighting and it got ugly.

We learned later that the friend who’d had the panic attack continued to panic, even more severely, when she noticed we weren’t at the hotel. She told my teacher we were missing, and was told “they’ll find their way.” She yelled and cried until our teacher finally agreed, HOURS LATER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, to come back to the plaza to look for us.

On the way back to the hotel, she assured us that we “needn’t tell our parents about us wandering off”.

!

more travel stories where that came from, but seeing as how this comment is already REEEALLLy long I’ll hold off on them for now.

True! There are always so many good books to investigate, even if they aren’t exactly the ones I was after.

Same here–I like going to places I’ve already been, which makes it difficult to ever go somewhere new. If I do go to a new place, I have to be traveling with someone who knows that place and can show me around. Otherwise, I am way stressed about it all.

My plane crash story isn’t actually that interesting:

I was flying to England with Air Transat, and we were about a half hour out from Montreal when the cabin depressurized. The oxygen masks popped out of the ceiling and the pilot had to dive the plane down to 10,000 feet so our heads wouldn’t explode. (NB: my father’s oxygen mask didn’t work. They eject four at a time, just in case there’s a problem with one, but it also happened to the people sitting in front of us. They were traveling with a baby, so they really did need four. The mother had to share hers with the little one). Then we made an emergency landing in Montreal at about midnight, had to find our own way to the airline-provided hotel since they were taking forever and a day to organize shuttles, and got about two hours of sleep before we had to head back to the airport and wait for a different plane to arrive and carry us over the Atlantic.