I could understand the predicament of my teammate Michelle. She was without the bare minimum of her necessities. The Monday morning I offered her my company. She was wondering whether she should attempt going to the airport and start pestering the authorities or she should go shopping and get her stuff sorted. I recommended that she should get her stuff sorted because going to the airport might not be worth it. At least with the essentials shopped she would be able to function for the rest of the 4 days even if she wasn’t able to recover her lost luggage. She seemed convinced with the rationale. We had some breakfast at the hotel and then went ahead to go to the nearest mall. For me it was quite an experience. I had ventured on the trip expecting 3.75 days at office. But here I was with a team mate making my way to a mall. As with any foreign city, the sights and sounds were new and different. It was quite an experience noticing how things functioned, how people were going about their business and how daily life was.
At the mall, Michelle went about doing her shopping and I spent time going around noticing stuff. Once she was satisfied with the stuff she had purchased we made our way to the hotel. We got in touch with our other colleagues and went for lunch with them. It was a warm and windy day. It was brilliant sitting in the sun and chatting about random stuff.
Suddenly Michelle received a call from the airport lost baggage office. It seems they had been contacted by the person who had mistakenly taken her luggage. He was willing to have Michelle come over and collect her luggage from their place. The airport authorities gave the contact number of the other party to Michelle. What ensued then was a nightmare of conversation and translation. The person who had picked the luggage couldn’t speak English. So he in turn gave her the contact of his relative in UK who acted as a mediator. So the baggage collector spoke to his relative, his relative spoke to Michelle and the conversation happened in reverse order to communicate from Michelle to the baggage collector. It must have been pure torture for Michelle to engage in this communication, but the summary was as follows : The person wasn’t willing to travel all the way to Cluj since he lived nearly 3 hours away. He was happy for Michelle to come over and collect from his house. Since the distance was so great and it was an unknown place, Michelle asked to meet half way. He was ok to do that, but the location he sent as the meet up point ended up being some random railway station. It seemed a bit suspicious. One of our team mates recommended that Michelle ask someone from the Cluj office who was conversant in Romanian to accompany him. Michelle did so and one person was more than happy to accompany her when the data and time was fixed.
This seemed good enough progress for a Monday. Our band of colleagues decided to call it an early day since we had travelled over night and meet up for lunch in the foyer of the hotel. We had some delicious food at a Greek restaurant and called it a day.
Coming back to my hotel room I missed my kids. I have never travelled by myself. I have always the girls clamouring for my attention. Coming back into the quiet hotel room was a different experience. I got on a call with the girls since it was 1900 in the UK. They filled me in with all the details of what happened at school and back home. After spending nearly an hour chatting with the darlings I asked them to get off to bed. I proceeded to prepare for the next day at work :) The day sure was most unexpected, filled with an impromptu trip for shopping, developments to secure the lost luggage, lot of help from colleagues at Cluj and some chilled interaction with colleagues. Next day was to be a new day :)
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