Fun & Famous

PART 1

The pain of missing your flight

Before you start reading this story, there are a few things you need to know. 1. I absolutely hate being late and am usually an hour early instead of two minutes late. 2. Rushing is definitely not my middle name. That’s why I always stick to point 1. 3. I hadn’t exercised for half a year, so my fitness is terrible. 4. I’m actually always very good at planning, so I really wonder what went so incredibly wrong.

4:30 PM – Packing the suitcases. Hand luggage. So, packing.

Here we go. Because something went horribly wrong. Lilian and I had just spent an amazing few days in London. It was a few hysterically busy days, and we ended them hysterically as well. After a visit to Jo Malone Regent Street, we received an AMAZING gift to take home. Two perfumes that you can only get on Regent Street and also two body creams. The next point (damn): we only had hand luggage and the gifts were full-size packages. Luckily, there was someone in the same hotel (this was our lucky guy, this gentleman really goes through life as a lucky charm) who was also going to Amsterdam. Same flight and with a checked suitcase. So we put our body creams in his suitcase. But we had more. We shopped a lot at Victoria's Secret for example, where we also went wild with beauty products. Okay, and maybe sometimes a bit more than 100 milliliters, but we weren’t thinking about that in a moment of insanity when pulling out the credit card. And we didn’t think about it when we put our Jo Malone favorites in Mr. Lucky Guy's suitcase.

And so we were in the middle of the lobby of Citizen M packing our suitcases. Hand luggage suitcases. And two empty Jo Malone boxes had to fit in there (they are just so incredibly Instagrammable and interior material). This took about 25 minutes. Quite a long time. We decided to put the boxes and all the beauty stuff (read: Victoria’s Secret souvenirs, read: Lil’s toiletry bag, read: Jos’s toiletry bag) in Lil’s suitcase, and I became the electronics chief with all the cords and two laptops in my suitcase. Seemed wise to split it up like that.

5:05 PM – Metro

Okay, let’s continue. We took the metro for two stops before getting on the train. Now you need to know that we left the hotel half an hour later than planned and were therefore a bit rushed. You also need to know that it didn’t help that we had to walk twenty minutes from the metro to the train. Twenty minutes that weren’t calculated. Furthermore, you should know that we were traveling with a three-day pass, which was missing one pound. We had to recharge that thing as well. You read it: thirty minutes delay at this moment. Plus those thirty minutes packing delay in the hotel: we are now at an hour.

Oh yes. For the record: the flight departs at 7:55 PM.

5:40 PM – Biting nails on the train

Good. We ran (at a pace of about thirty kilometers per hour, which made us suddenly think we had Kenyan blood in us). Caught the train. But we weren’t very calm in the train. Because that train was moving at a snail's pace where we would have been faster crawling. And with that snail's pace, we would miss that flight. Problematic point. We just couldn’t get out anymore and were stuck on a train. We kept telling each other to breathe calmly and that we ’couldn’t do anything about it anymore’, but in the meantime, we were nibbling on the polish off our nails and we downed an entire box of Tic Tacs in one go.

7:10 PM – Hello airport!

After an hour and a half, we arrived at the airport. Normally, the ride would take about 45 minutes, but we had spent double that time. A Chinese lady next to us told us that, and then we knew for sure that something had really gone wrong. But we were there. Phew, phew, sigh, sigh. We had 1.5 hours to catch our breath from our marathon in three minutes, so we were ready for a fresh sprint.

The doors had just opened, we ran out of the train and saw a completely empty hall. Okay, not completely empty, because we saw exactly one lady sitting. “Oh sorry! You’re in the wrong terminal. You have to go to the south.”

7:18 PM – The shuttle

We were in the shuttle to the south terminal. It took two minutes. Perhaps the most stressful two minutes of our lives. The announcer was blaring in our ears about how fast the shuttle train was going and then we heard a calming tune, but none of that worked at all. We were already standing like ostriches at the entrance to run even harder to the departure hall.

7:20 PM – From shuttle to departure hall

Hell yeah. We found that very very quickly. We ran very hard to customs where we were first messing around with the boarding passes. We hadn’t printed them and had to show the passes on one phone. That didn’t work at the same time, so we had to do it one after the other, and we had already wasted two minutes.

7:23 PM – Customs

And now I think it’s better that I continue this tomorrow. Because this is just becoming a long story where there are still a lot of cliffhangers to come. We are still only at customs. You now know that we have a suitcase full of full-size beauty products, and if you do a bit of simple math, you also know that this will cause some problems. So tomorrow I will tell you more. Until then!

(imagine a cliffhanger here, a thrilling tune, and two overheated, red-faced ladies, and it surpasses all summer cliffhangers of Goede Tijden Slechte Tijden combined).