We returned to the Embassy Suites hotel to find that the EZ Car Rental desk wasn’t open yet. We stood there looking around, but no one was showing up. The Goddess asked the Concierge about when EZ would show up, and he offered to take the keys for us. We decided to eat breakfast in the restaurant at the Embassy Suites.
This is one of those hotels that has a free made-to-order breakfast as part of the room rate. If you’re not a guest, you have to pay for the breakfast. No problem. So we go to the reception desk, and say we want to pay for breakfast. Our request threw the clerk into a tailspin. She didn’t know how to do that. I mean her job is checking people in and out, how the hell is she supposed to take payment for breakfast. She asked her co-worker for help. Of course, the co-worker had to ask us all the same questions the clerk has just asked us even though the co-worker was standing right there. Now, I’ll bet if I had been talking about Ashton Kutcher, she would have heard it all! Anyway, we paid for the breakfast and went to eat. They gave us an entire hotel print-out for a receipt.
We arrived at MIA (ironic name, no?) with time to spare. One thing I noticed in Miami is that if you don’t yell at the person you’re trying to ask a question, they will ignore you. We couldn’t find the right line to get in for checking our bags. I asked one American Airlines woman who was helping to get people into the correct line two times where we were supposed to go. But, I wasn’t shouting, so she just ignored me. I swear I was no more than two feet from her! We pried the information out of another woman, but what she said was half-intelligible, and we had to ask someone else. Oh my!
We waited our turn through the line and got cleared. The desk clerk told us to turn our bags in to the TSA guys at the big X-ray machine. We stepped over there, but they were all talking amongst themselves, and the completely ignored us. Then, I shouted, “What do we do here?” Let me tell ya, they wait until you get mad in Miami before they do anything to help. We were there the day after a Federal Air Marshall shot and killed a bi-polar man who had gone off of his medicine. The guy was yelling that he had a bomb. Probably he was just trying to get someone to tell him where the bathroom was.
We went through the metal detectors along with about 500 close friends, and found our gate. Fortunately it was not all the way to the end of the concourse. We took off on time and arrived in Curaçao on time. By the way, in Curaçao they don’t incessant ringing schoolbells in the jetways. That’s because they don’t have jetways. They have stairs. And you don’t have to yell at someone for them to stop ignoring you. Life is just simpler there.
In the shuttle on the way to the hotel the driver told us that people in Curaçao have a saying – it’s “poco poco”. That means take it easy, if we don’t get to it today we will tomorrow. Now, that attitude I can live with.
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