Voyager
In writing this, I am condemning my blog to the dubious fate of twisted chronology. It wasn't an easy decision, but since I've already put off the writing of my end-of-November trip to the south of Germany this long, the only way to catch up, it seems, is by telling some things a little backwards.
I'm back in Boston now, after a month of lovely California weather and a week of lovely-in-a-different-way Austin weather. Circumstances both in and beyond my control colluded to get me here (Boston) via the very first ever JetBlue flight on the Austin-Boston route. So on January 19th, my trusty Austin-area chauffeur dropped me off at the refreshingly laid-back Austin Bergstrom Airport, and I did all that check-in stuff and went off to look for my gate.
I was looking for Gate 19, but never actually saw the sign, it being obscured by the crowd of passengers, airline employees, reporters, cameramen, boom mike holders, and Important Persons all milling about, awaiting the press conference that would put off our departure by 20 minutes. That delay made a good opportunity to snag and eat some of the JetBlue cookies spread out on a JetBlue tablecloth, which I did. Another girl about my age started musing aloud about what kind of cookie, what kind of frosting, and what kind of edible blue writing might be constituting this particular cookie. It seemed reasonable to believe that these questions would presumably be answered by eating the cookie, but since it was the last cookie of its type (dark, not too soft base, with a smooth white frosting with "JetBlue" written in it), I figured maybe this girl, whose name was Jill, was planning on keeping the cookie for posterity, in which case she obviously couldn't eat it.
This wasn't really a good guess on my part, since nothing about Jill screamed "cookie collector," or even "probably enjoys baking." Jill, fairly small and slight and very polite to talk to, was dressed entirely in Biker Chic: studded black leather jacket, high black combat boots, black jeans, hair seriously considering a future in dredlocks, several piercings, and a neck tattoo. Jill was probably not a food spy, out to steal JetBlue's secret cookie recipe.
What Jill was was a well-spoken girl from Southie, a once Irish Boston neighborhood, now a "diverse" neighborhood most famous for producing Whitey Bulger and some long-ago riots. Jill had considered going to Harvard Law School for a while, but decided that she wouldn't like the type of people who go there. Having found a point on which we wholeheartedly agreed, Jill and I sat down to chat while she finally started eating her cookie.
Realizing that sharing the work would likely make the cookie-type-identification more accurate, Jill broke me off a piece. We quickly decided that the frosting was in fact white chocolate, and the cookie part was probably chocolate in taste, though definitely a Snap in texture. We continued to bond through a shared belief that the only good Snap-type cookies are of the Ginger variety, until Jill made a Discovery.
Jill Discovered a hair in her cookie - not on the cookie, but cemented between the white chocolate and the cookie proper. Not an insignificant hair, but a fairly long, lightish, straight hair. I was removed from suspicion, despite the visual match of the hair to those still in my posession, by the fact that the cookie had remained in its wrapper until such time as Jill and I had sat down opposite each other, and besides, how would I have gotten the hair between two firmly attached cookie parts?
Not being the litigious kind (if she truly had been, I doubt Jill would have let the prospect of four years of being near HLS students deter her), Jill decided to view the whole cookie-hair incident with humor instead of potential gain, so we proceeded to have an animated discussion of the Story of the Hair: who it belonged to, what places it had seen in its time, and how it ultimately met its sweet but untimely end. There was a near Incident when Jill showed the cookie to a woman who turned out not to be a JetBlue employee but a reporter, but the draw of several people in suits wielding a giant pair of scissors proved to be more interesting to the reporter woman than a normal hair in a nearly normal cookie.
The people with the scissors did what people with giant novelty scissors usually do: they cut the JetBlue ribbon that had been preventing us from entering the jetway, and then dispersed into the clutches of the various reporters who had clearly lost some sort of straw-drawing game during news assignments that morning. The cameramen who had arrived with those unlucky reporters (and who had seriously gummed up the security check lines) trained their equipment on the line of passengers with children or special needs, so that later in the day, the people of Austin could watch us, the lucky few, make the first step on our way to Boston, some of us digesting white chocolate and hairs.
I say the lucky few because the plane was by no means full - many people had predicted to me that it would be, and I actually thought so as well, so I can only think that so many people thought that so many other people would opt for the inagural flight that not so many people actually did opt for it themselves. So I had two seats to myself, and was nice and comfortable by the time the pilot informed us that the Austin fire department would be saluting us with "water cannons" on our way out to the runway, and so we shouldn't panic if we thought we had just seen the rain come down on a sunny day.
I don't actually know a lot about fire departments or their equipment - I've met a few firemen, and I can only assume that at some point in elementary school, my Girl Scout troop took a tour of a fire station, but there's no real suprise that I don't have a working knowledge of firefighting terminology - but the "water cannons" looked to me a lot like the normal-type water hoses that I'm comfortable assuming are standard issue on fire trucks. But despite the generous language used in announcing it, the salute was pretty cool, and probably looked even aweseomer from outside the plane. In any case, I was glad to know that Austin's fire risk is low enough that they can send their trucks out to christen things with gallons and gallons of spraying water.
The flight was otherwise normal, and we arrived in Boston early despite the various hijinks that had delayed the departure. I didn't see Jill again, but I'd like to think that she has the remains of the cookie preserved somewhere, maybe sealed in plastic, maybe on loan to one of Southie's museums of oddities. Boston itself is cold, windy, and now covered in snow, and the less that's said about that, the better.
I'm back in Boston now, after a month of lovely California weather and a week of lovely-in-a-different-way Austin weather. Circumstances both in and beyond my control colluded to get me here (Boston) via the very first ever JetBlue flight on the Austin-Boston route. So on January 19th, my trusty Austin-area chauffeur dropped me off at the refreshingly laid-back Austin Bergstrom Airport, and I did all that check-in stuff and went off to look for my gate.
I was looking for Gate 19, but never actually saw the sign, it being obscured by the crowd of passengers, airline employees, reporters, cameramen, boom mike holders, and Important Persons all milling about, awaiting the press conference that would put off our departure by 20 minutes. That delay made a good opportunity to snag and eat some of the JetBlue cookies spread out on a JetBlue tablecloth, which I did. Another girl about my age started musing aloud about what kind of cookie, what kind of frosting, and what kind of edible blue writing might be constituting this particular cookie. It seemed reasonable to believe that these questions would presumably be answered by eating the cookie, but since it was the last cookie of its type (dark, not too soft base, with a smooth white frosting with "JetBlue" written in it), I figured maybe this girl, whose name was Jill, was planning on keeping the cookie for posterity, in which case she obviously couldn't eat it.
This wasn't really a good guess on my part, since nothing about Jill screamed "cookie collector," or even "probably enjoys baking." Jill, fairly small and slight and very polite to talk to, was dressed entirely in Biker Chic: studded black leather jacket, high black combat boots, black jeans, hair seriously considering a future in dredlocks, several piercings, and a neck tattoo. Jill was probably not a food spy, out to steal JetBlue's secret cookie recipe.
What Jill was was a well-spoken girl from Southie, a once Irish Boston neighborhood, now a "diverse" neighborhood most famous for producing Whitey Bulger and some long-ago riots. Jill had considered going to Harvard Law School for a while, but decided that she wouldn't like the type of people who go there. Having found a point on which we wholeheartedly agreed, Jill and I sat down to chat while she finally started eating her cookie.
Realizing that sharing the work would likely make the cookie-type-identification more accurate, Jill broke me off a piece. We quickly decided that the frosting was in fact white chocolate, and the cookie part was probably chocolate in taste, though definitely a Snap in texture. We continued to bond through a shared belief that the only good Snap-type cookies are of the Ginger variety, until Jill made a Discovery.
Jill Discovered a hair in her cookie - not on the cookie, but cemented between the white chocolate and the cookie proper. Not an insignificant hair, but a fairly long, lightish, straight hair. I was removed from suspicion, despite the visual match of the hair to those still in my posession, by the fact that the cookie had remained in its wrapper until such time as Jill and I had sat down opposite each other, and besides, how would I have gotten the hair between two firmly attached cookie parts?
Not being the litigious kind (if she truly had been, I doubt Jill would have let the prospect of four years of being near HLS students deter her), Jill decided to view the whole cookie-hair incident with humor instead of potential gain, so we proceeded to have an animated discussion of the Story of the Hair: who it belonged to, what places it had seen in its time, and how it ultimately met its sweet but untimely end. There was a near Incident when Jill showed the cookie to a woman who turned out not to be a JetBlue employee but a reporter, but the draw of several people in suits wielding a giant pair of scissors proved to be more interesting to the reporter woman than a normal hair in a nearly normal cookie.
The people with the scissors did what people with giant novelty scissors usually do: they cut the JetBlue ribbon that had been preventing us from entering the jetway, and then dispersed into the clutches of the various reporters who had clearly lost some sort of straw-drawing game during news assignments that morning. The cameramen who had arrived with those unlucky reporters (and who had seriously gummed up the security check lines) trained their equipment on the line of passengers with children or special needs, so that later in the day, the people of Austin could watch us, the lucky few, make the first step on our way to Boston, some of us digesting white chocolate and hairs.
I say the lucky few because the plane was by no means full - many people had predicted to me that it would be, and I actually thought so as well, so I can only think that so many people thought that so many other people would opt for the inagural flight that not so many people actually did opt for it themselves. So I had two seats to myself, and was nice and comfortable by the time the pilot informed us that the Austin fire department would be saluting us with "water cannons" on our way out to the runway, and so we shouldn't panic if we thought we had just seen the rain come down on a sunny day.
I don't actually know a lot about fire departments or their equipment - I've met a few firemen, and I can only assume that at some point in elementary school, my Girl Scout troop took a tour of a fire station, but there's no real suprise that I don't have a working knowledge of firefighting terminology - but the "water cannons" looked to me a lot like the normal-type water hoses that I'm comfortable assuming are standard issue on fire trucks. But despite the generous language used in announcing it, the salute was pretty cool, and probably looked even aweseomer from outside the plane. In any case, I was glad to know that Austin's fire risk is low enough that they can send their trucks out to christen things with gallons and gallons of spraying water.
The flight was otherwise normal, and we arrived in Boston early despite the various hijinks that had delayed the departure. I didn't see Jill again, but I'd like to think that she has the remains of the cookie preserved somewhere, maybe sealed in plastic, maybe on loan to one of Southie's museums of oddities. Boston itself is cold, windy, and now covered in snow, and the less that's said about that, the better.
posted by Katherine at 12:09 PM
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