31 July 2016
Today is the day I head home. At 11:30 I was driven to Kasane Airport,
which is really small. When I checked in, the agent asked where I wanted my
luggage ticketed to. I asked if she
could send it thru to New York. I was
surprised when she said yes. I landed in
JoBerg and a wheel chair was waiting for me.
I was taken to the central location where wheel chairs are taken. Despite being right near the “out of Africa”
store, I didn’t do any shopping.
My layover was about 3 hours. About an hour before boarding,
they came and took me to the proper gate.
The flight to Paris was not bad.
The kosher meal came via the Bet Din of Johannesberg. In Paris, they took me to the gate where my
plane was supposed to leave in about 11 hours.
I sat and waited. When I got
hungry, I couldn’t buy anything because I didn’t have any Euros, but
fortunately I had my granola bars. I
became quite upset when I realized that the gate I was left at was NOT where my
plane was leaving from. I found an Air
France employee at a nearby gate and asked about getting moved to the correct
gate. Initially I was told that they
couldn’t get a wheel chair for me, but I insisted that a chair had brought me
to that location; consequently they had to get me a chair. The young man spoke to someone and said that
a chair would come for me at that location.
As the time approached, I saw two men with chairs. When asked, they said they had not come for
me. I saw a man in appropriate uniform
and asked him. All of a sudden, one of
the two men asked if my name was Finkelstein and yes he was supposed to take me
to my plane. He did and got me aboard my
flight to New York. A wheel chair was
waiting for me upon landing me in New York.
He got me from the plane into a taxi in 20 minutes!
