The trip story

(This was written while suffering from jet lag. I think its understandable...)

Of all of my trips throughout the world (aka North and South America), I’ve never had an issue with visas. Actually, I’ve never had to mess around with visas or any other kind of legal documents. My closest legal document travel issue was in the 9^th grade when I realized that my Argentine passport was about to expire, thus potentially trapping me in Bolivia. I had to start my break a week early to renew the passport.

After my sister Sara dropped me off at O’Hare I happily went to the electronic kiosks to retreat my tickets and commence my trip to Frankfurt. When my turn came to have my passport examined, the man in charge noticed that my tickets were scheduled to allow me to be in Lithuania for five months. The law is that any U.S. citizen can be in Lithuania without any problem. If any additional time is wanted then a visa is needed. My student visa was waiting for me in Lithuania, which is what I told the questioning worker. No luck. He made a few phone calls to see if I could go without any proof of a visa but it appears that all of his superiors told him not to let me on the plane. As time passed and he made more and more phone calls I started getting a bit nervous. The United Airlines worker told me that I had two options, either cancel my trip or change my return flight to April (thus shortening my stay by two months). His reasoning was that I could change my return flight back to June once I received my student visa. Of course this came with a fee and I had to depart with $200. Ah, the price for education. Sadly though, if I am going to finish up the whole semester I will have to change my ticket again, for another $200. Natalija is going to try to get in contact with United to see if she can get my money back, or at least prevent me from having to change my ticket a second time. With this loss of money my total spending power will be lowered from $1 a day to .50 cents a day during my summer outings.

Because of my delay at the ticket counter I came extremely close to missing my flight. Once on though, I had a very pleasant flight and was able to watch a few movies. In Frankfurt I got laughed at by a McDonalds worker when I asked for a cup of water. After some Lufthansa workers scanned my ticket for Vilnius it tuned out that United had cancelled my ticket. Weird situation, but it got worked out. While I was about to walk up the steps into the small aircraft that was going to take us to Vilnius I noticed that both of my bags were sitting alone on the grown bellow the plane. I sneaked out of line and walked up to the two workers who were trying to scan the tags on my bags. For some reason when United cancelled my ticket to Vilnius it caused some problems with the id tags. I tried to explain in English that I was Mr. Joshua Greenman and that those were my bags. “See? That’s my name on the bags. Look at my ticket…same name!” For some reason they couldn’t understand me so I finally had a stewardess assist me. Yay my bags got on.

End of travel story. Not too stressful, but yucky to lose that money and thus screw up my travel plans for the summer.