[KimOH]

I think Marjo "wins" -- ick! how scary...

Here's mine though. Now, five years later, it's more of a bad sit-com... but at the time it was stressful. This account is taken from my "one year ago today" journal.
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The flight out of Moscow was the most difficult one. We had been told by our travel agent that they can’t pre-assign seats on that flight because there are so many "lap children" that they have to be able to adjust seating assignments to make sure there are enough oxygen masks in each row. (This flight from Moscow is known as the "Baby Flight" because it’s often full of adoptive parents and their children, so that sounded reasonable to me.)

We got to the check-in counter at the airport (almost three hours in advance of our flight) and were told that seats had already been assigned by most travel agents (!?!!?), the flight was full, and that all they had were single seats left. We had purchased a ticket for A to ride in his car seat…and the seat they assigned him was FOUR ROWS from the closest one of us. The desk attendant said "maybe they can help you at the gate, but there’s nothing I can do."

We went ahead to the gate and waited for the attendant to arrive. I was frantically looking through my Russian-English dictionary to see if I could figure out how to say, "Will you trade seats with me?" I did find "trade" and "chair" and hoped that would work.

The gate agent did manage to get me and A seats together, for which I was thankful…But 10-1/2 hours of handling him all alone didn’t sound like fun to me, nor did sitting alone for that whole time sound fun to Mom and Mike. Fortunately, there were some nice Russians who did understand "Trade. Chair" sitting near me and A. They traded seats so Mom sat on the other side of A and Mike sat directly behind me.

A was so good on the flight. He hardly fussed at all, although he did want to walk up and down the aisles (he’d taken his first steps two days before in our Moscow hotel room) but the "fasten seatbelt" sign was hardly off for the whole trip.

Unfortunately, we got some "interesting people" around us. Seated on the other side of the aisle from me was an American guy in a slick suit, gold cufflinks the whole bit. In front of him, there was another American (New Yorker) who was not nearly as slick, but you could tell he wanted to be. He was traveling with his girlfriend who didn’t speak English (maybe Italian) and was dressed like a total bimbo. Who wears a mini-skirt, tube top, and 4" heels on an international flight. Diagonally behind me were a couple of very large women with a baby. In front of me was an old Russian guy who started drinking while we were still on the tarmac.

Slick was also very loud. He announced that he was a "man of God" and that he’d been in Russia doing missionary work. He may have likely been telling the truth, but I’ll tell you that there’s no way that I would want him representing my church or my beliefs. He was obnoxious. New York guy spent a lot of the trip hanging over the back of the seat asking him all sorts of questions. Slick reclined his seat all the way, squashing the baby that was sitting on the lap of the lady behind him. She was not very happy. Slick put his chair back up.

After a while, "Slick" turned to me. He asked about our adoption. How old was A? Which region was he from? Then I noticed him looking at my hands. "What does your husband think about all this?" he asked. (I had left my diamond ring at home for our trip and was instead wearing just a thin gold band that I bought for $20 at Wal-Mart. I realized he was really asking "Do you have a husband?") I said, "He thinks it’s great. That’s him right behind me." Slick seemed satisfied with that answer.

After a minute or so, he leaned back across the aisle and said, "Did you know that Russia allows single mothers and even lesbians to adopt?" I said that I did know. He started on this whole rampage about how he thought it was "sick, sick, sick" that lesbians were allowed to adopt and how wrong that was. The lady behind him jumped up and started screaming at him—I guess I hadn’t put two-and-two together before, but I guess they were a lesbian couple who had adopted a little girl. They were really mad. The flight attendant had to come over and tell everyone to simmer down.

After that they served lunch. I don’t think I got much chance to eat mine, but they brought A a baby meal. Four huge jars of Russian baby food. It was on that flight that we found the first thing that A refused to eat. One of the jars of baby food was a white paste (kind of the color of rice cereal). All the writing was in Russian but it had pictures of different vegetables on it, so I assumed it was mixed vegetables. However, as soon as you opened it, it smelled like sauerkraut. A took one bite, spit it out and wouldn’t touch another bite. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have eaten that stuff either!

As the flight dragged on, several people got really drunk. The bimbo girl kept getting in and out of her seat and wiggling her way up and down the aisle. Then she bent over to get something from her bag under her seat. I could see it happen in almost slow motion. While bimbo girl was standing in the aisle bending over, drunk Russian man reached out and pinched her on the bottom (gasp!). Bimbo squealed in protest. New York jumped up and was ready to take it to blows right there in the aisle. Slick was egging him on. The flight attendants had to come again and said if they had to come back there one more time, they were going to have the cops meet the flight in New York. They also cut the Russian guy off from the free bar.

I was really worried about getting into JFK because we only had an hour layover before our next flight took off and we had to go through passport control, immigration, and customs. They came on the speaker and said that we were going to have to circle for 20 minutes before we could land because there weren’t any gates available. Argh!! I’m not sure if I was more frustrated worrying about our connecting flight, or more frustrated knowing I was going to have to sit near Slick and New York for another 20 minutes! We finally did land though (The police did not come).