Submitted by Samantha Minatti on the 2017 spring semester program in Barcelona, Spain…
My flight was out of Boston to Portugal. I arrived at the airport early and waited for the other UD students to arrive to meet up with them. Everything was going very smoothly. I had been packed for an entire week and made sure I had everything. My suitcase just fit under the weight limit and I was excited and ready to leave the country for the first time. I had done everything right so I didn’t expect anything to go wrong. That’s why I was completely caught off guard when we nearly missed our connecting flight and our luggage was sent on a flight a day later.
For my first time ever on an overnight flight, I didn’t expect to not be able to sleep. I was so excited I couldn’t eat or sleep which led to a very interesting connecting flight. When we landed in Portugal, I was in a haze. I hadn’t ever experienced jet-lag, but this was jet-lag. When we landed, our flight was an hour late and we had thirty minutes before the gate opened on our flight. When we got to customs, the line was nearly a hundred people and we were almost certain we weren’t going to make our flight. We started looking up other flights later in the day and panicking. It wasn’t until we saw a line on the side of the room that we decided we weren’t going to give up just yet. We had a girl run over and ask what the line was for and found out it was a rush line for late flights. We were cutting it really close when we finally got to customs and I was so tired and nauseous that I was sitting on my bag. We ended up literally running through the airport to get on our flight to Barcelona. We were shocked when we arrived that they were still letting us on. I was so exhausted, I slept through the entire flight and woke up feeling a lot better. It wasn’t until we got to the baggage claim that we realized that our bags were placed on a different flight because they assumed we missed ours. This began the struggle of my first three days abroad without my luggage.
I was lucky that I had other people with me on the flight going through the same thing. Going to another country is hard enough not knowing anyone, but knowing that the few personal belongings you have might not make it there with you causes a lot of stress and made it hard to settle. Luckily, I came prepared and had an extra outfit in my carry on. An outfit I would wear for the next three days.
The airline told us that if we gave them our address, they would drop off our stuff at our apartment when It came. When it came was the problem. The number the airline gave us bounced back and all of the numbers we found online let us to an endless loop of people who had very little information on my flight, not to mention my phone bill was going to be through the roof with all of the international calls I had to make. All of us were worried we would have to miss our day long orientation meeting with everyone on our program because we had to be home to wait for our luggage. It was a mess, but I decided to make the best out of a bad situation.
On day two, I decided to put off my luggage and go explore Barcelona. I had a new friend offer to let me borrow sneakers for our hike and had some incredible tapas at a restaurant afterwards. A couple of girls had gotten their luggage that night and I was beginning to get worried since mine still hadn’t come. It was then I realized that they had my address wrong on the website. I had heard of some of the girls having their luggage delivered to the office so that they could be notified when it came and not have to wait so I immediately sent them an email and decided that I would focus the next day on getting my bag, whatever it takes. I was sad to miss a day of exploring waiting for my bag, but I ended up hanging around the area getting lunch and shopping with another girl who had lost her bag the day before and understood how stressful it was. It was nice to get my mind off of it and after lunch I got a call saying the bag was coming.
I waited all day and the bag didn’t come and it wasn’t until I was about to leave that we got hold of the airline and they said that the bag was being delivered to my apartment on the night shift. I rushed back to the apartment and found out I had a faulty key. A neighbor with a spare let me in after I had body slammed the door. My two roommates thought someone was trying to break into our apartment, I was banging so hard. Finally, my bag came and I ran down the stairs with no shoes. I was so excited that I nearly hugged the man.
The moral of the story is that you will survive. It was very stressful, but it brought me a lot closer to people on my program because of it. I was able to laugh it off and make the best of it and I really did survive the worst case scenario while traveling.
