What does a first-world enlightened white lady do when her passport is lost and then found again? Well, she writes a gratitude journal, of course! (*whommmp whommmp*)
I’m in Calgary, Canada for a trade show and last night as we were getting into the airport shuttle, I checked my pocket and found that my passport was gone. Nash the shuttle driver (who was on his last shift before a 3-week holiday in Kenya to visit family) told us to go check lost and found and he would come back for us.
No such luck. It was 11:40 at night and the lost and found / info desk had closed 10 minutes ago. An airport (or Canadian TSA equivalent?) employee radioed her other colleagues on the clock and no luck. Nothing. At this point I figured that either someone picked it up and stole it to try and sell on the black market, or someone picked it up and turned it in. Really really was super hoping it was the latter.
We finally caught the late shuttle and I spent a harrowing hour and a half furiously Googling my next steps… US embassy website, travelers help sites, etc. until I fell asleep sitting up in front of my computer at about 1:30 am. 5:30 am comes early when you want to make it to the airport ASAP after the lost and found kiosk opens at 6am.
I walked to the lost and found, described the passport, and the lady behind the counter offers a small smirk and produces the passport from behind the counter. No security questions, no nothing (though it probably helps that my picture is on it.) I was so excited and relieved that I wrote a full-page note to the unknown police officer that picked up my passport on the ground last night. If my flight had been one hour earlier, lost and found would have been open and I could have probably rescued the damned little blue book right away, got home and slept like a baby.
But as is the case with the eternally optimistic peeps like me, I’m actually kinda glad it happened this way because it gave me 6 hours to panic and go through a small, if temporary grieving process that occurs when something very important is lost, even if it’s just a document.
(I did not panic - I was in an English-speaking country full of friendly people and I now basically have the lost-passport-US-embassy-emergency-appointment process committed to memory because I almost had to go through it today, but it all it was going to be was a supreme hassle and inconvenience. I would have wasted MetaGeek travel money by spending my entire trip trying to figure out how to get across the border, and I would have necessitated an expedited passport replacement process upon returning to Boise in order to not mess with my Basque Country trip coming up, but I still would have been fine.)
So it wasn’t a life or death situation, and so to give my brain something to do, I fell back on my training (and by training I mean the teachings of my mom, and hippies, and Cheryl Strayed, and woo-woo people everywhere) and thought about how grateful I was to even have a passport in the first place, even if I had just lost it.
How many immigrant residents in Canada alone had gone through a horrible, harrowing process to get a passport so they could leave their home country and seek a better life? I thought of our shuttle driver Nash, from Kenya, and (to help fuel the gratitude train, I used my imagination to posit) how he might have escaped political instability, a depressed economy, or other shitty living conditions to seek a better life in Canada with his wife and son, who is now 18. And Nash himself is lucky compared to the many humans in war zones, the refugees trying to escape Syria these days, even Miao Miao our translator for the Oinkari Shanghai trip of 2010 that lived what seemed to be a middle-class existence but couldn’t get a passport because the Chinese gov’t has a tight hold on anyone trying to leave the country.
I thought about how fortunate I was go have gotten to travel the world, stay in nice hotels sometimes, and waltz through live never having been a victim of travel-related crime.
I also feel that when you have near misses like this (which for me, is when you almost lose things of importance like humans that I love, or important possessions, etc.) I feel like it’s the universe giving me a sanity and humility check, to bring me back to earth and help me remember my luck at having been born into the life I have. I think gratitude and humility are so important, and I felt like I needed to honor that welling of thankfulness when she handed over the passport across the counter–to give the feeling some space, and acknowledge to the universe/God/Lady Luck/happenstance that yeah, I saw what you did there, and thank you.
7:20 am • 1 June 2016
I’m in Calgary, Canada for a trade show and last night as we were getting into the airport shuttle, I checked my pocket and found that my passport was gone. Nash the shuttle driver (who was on his last shift before a 3-week holiday in Kenya to visit family) told us to go check lost and found and he would come back for us.
No such luck. It was 11:40 at night and the lost and found / info desk had closed 10 minutes ago. An airport (or Canadian TSA equivalent?) employee radioed her other colleagues on the clock and no luck. Nothing. At this point I figured that either someone picked it up and stole it to try and sell on the black market, or someone picked it up and turned it in. Really really was super hoping it was the latter.
We finally caught the late shuttle and I spent a harrowing hour and a half furiously Googling my next steps… US embassy website, travelers help sites, etc. until I fell asleep sitting up in front of my computer at about 1:30 am. 5:30 am comes early when you want to make it to the airport ASAP after the lost and found kiosk opens at 6am.
I walked to the lost and found, described the passport, and the lady behind the counter offers a small smirk and produces the passport from behind the counter. No security questions, no nothing (though it probably helps that my picture is on it.) I was so excited and relieved that I wrote a full-page note to the unknown police officer that picked up my passport on the ground last night. If my flight had been one hour earlier, lost and found would have been open and I could have probably rescued the damned little blue book right away, got home and slept like a baby.
But as is the case with the eternally optimistic peeps like me, I’m actually kinda glad it happened this way because it gave me 6 hours to panic and go through a small, if temporary grieving process that occurs when something very important is lost, even if it’s just a document.
(I did not panic - I was in an English-speaking country full of friendly people and I now basically have the lost-passport-US-embassy-emergency-appointment process committed to memory because I almost had to go through it today, but it all it was going to be was a supreme hassle and inconvenience. I would have wasted MetaGeek travel money by spending my entire trip trying to figure out how to get across the border, and I would have necessitated an expedited passport replacement process upon returning to Boise in order to not mess with my Basque Country trip coming up, but I still would have been fine.)
So it wasn’t a life or death situation, and so to give my brain something to do, I fell back on my training (and by training I mean the teachings of my mom, and hippies, and Cheryl Strayed, and woo-woo people everywhere) and thought about how grateful I was to even have a passport in the first place, even if I had just lost it.
How many immigrant residents in Canada alone had gone through a horrible, harrowing process to get a passport so they could leave their home country and seek a better life? I thought of our shuttle driver Nash, from Kenya, and (to help fuel the gratitude train, I used my imagination to posit) how he might have escaped political instability, a depressed economy, or other shitty living conditions to seek a better life in Canada with his wife and son, who is now 18. And Nash himself is lucky compared to the many humans in war zones, the refugees trying to escape Syria these days, even Miao Miao our translator for the Oinkari Shanghai trip of 2010 that lived what seemed to be a middle-class existence but couldn’t get a passport because the Chinese gov’t has a tight hold on anyone trying to leave the country.
I thought about how fortunate I was go have gotten to travel the world, stay in nice hotels sometimes, and waltz through live never having been a victim of travel-related crime.
I also feel that when you have near misses like this (which for me, is when you almost lose things of importance like humans that I love, or important possessions, etc.) I feel like it’s the universe giving me a sanity and humility check, to bring me back to earth and help me remember my luck at having been born into the life I have. I think gratitude and humility are so important, and I felt like I needed to honor that welling of thankfulness when she handed over the passport across the counter–to give the feeling some space, and acknowledge to the universe/God/Lady Luck/happenstance that yeah, I saw what you did there, and thank you.
7:20 am • 1 June 2016
