To jump to the punchline, the dogs made it through the seventeen hour flight just fine. Grover whined a lot when she saw us again at the Manila airport, and again when we left the house for pancakes with Nonoy and Edith (our current hosts), but I think that eventually she will calm down and see that we are in fact NOT abandoning her (or her brother, either, for that matter, but maybe that she wouldn't find so offensive).I was definitely more nervous about this trip than the previous one. The folks at Philippine Airlines were friendly and efficient, but not quite the same level of dog people as at Logan. The TSA even checked the crates for explosives—a good policy, but Grover was rather miffed that once again her reputation seems to precede her. Canine terrorist, my ass.
It did not help matters much that once Stephen dragged me away from staring at the crates just sitting behind the check in counter, and we were just relaxing after passing through security, when out on the loud speaker came the call: “Passenger Jennifer Wallace of Philippine Airlines please return to the ticket counter please.” My immediate thought was that someone let one of the dogs out, there was a problem with their paperwork, or worse. Stephen grabbed my carry-on, gave me all the documentation for the dogs, and made sure I had my passport and ticket so I could return through security (which, yes, I might have forgotten), and off I bolted back to the ticket counter, cutting everyone in line, shouting frantically, “You paged me?”
Well, they had paged me, but it had nothing to do with the dogs. It seems that our Cabela's duffel bag had gotten caught on the conveyor belt, and it was, in fact, still stuck. The belt had torn a gaping hole in the bag and chewed open the bag of Canidae dog food we were taking with us (and given the kind of snooty dog food we buy, it may have cost more than the bag itself). There were pellets of kibble everywhere and the remnants of our brown duffel was vomiting up our belongings. All in all, though, I was enormously relieved. Eh, whatever. The dogs were fine.
The PAL attendant reassured me that they would pack up my stuff in another bag, but after a brief word with Stephen, I decided to stick around and make sure they did it in front of me, especially since they did not seem to be in a big hurry about it. They didn't even offer to pay for the bag, which would have been a nice thing to do, but I did not want to be a pain in the ass because of course they were still the custodians of my dogs. I then offered to repack our stuff in a box, like most of the rest of my fellow travelers. They rustled up some employee's empty Balikbayan box (which he was not happy to relinquish), and offered it to me.
Allow me to digress on this subject briefly. The Philippines gains a significant part of its national income through the remittances of overseas contract workers. Filipinos take jobs all around the world, from low skilled construction work to higher skilled labor such as in the medical professions. In order to accommodate this important way of life—since almost everyone has a family member who lives abroad and supports those at home—they have come up with a system for sending belongings home at a flat rate and with little to no interference from customs.
It's called “Balikbayan,” for “returning to country,” which refers to these OCWs who eventually come back home with a sizable nest egg. For $75 from the States, one can send a television-sized box worth of anything to anywhere in the Philippines. Most passengers returning to the Philippines skip the burden of actually packing anything in luggage and simply tape their Balikbayan boxes tightly, label them clearly, and check them on the plane. The amount of excess baggage Filipinos use is astounding, but it all looks like it has come straight from the UPS store. A few sophisticated types even have fancy canvas covers to go over the box, which provides another layer of protection while still retaining its convenient form factor. The ridiculous amounts of boxed luggage is one of the reasons our plane had to stop mid-flight in Honolulu to refuel. It just could not make the whole trip with headwinds and the kind of cargo load it was tasked to carry.
So there I am, in the middle of a full swarm of passengers checking in for the flight with their stacks of boxes, and everyone watched as I pulled out my dainties from the mangled canvas bag, brushing the dog food crumbs off of them, and repacking them in my very first Balikbayan box. Despite the audience, the box made me feel like I was already fitting in with my future peeps.
The flight was fine, though I was pretty worried about the dogs until the landing at Honolulu was so smooth I figured the pilots probably knew what they were doing. Then we got to Manila and my father-in-law's wife Tess proved that she still has very good connections in the Philippines. We were met at the plane, escorted right through customs, and guided by the head supervisor of ground crew operations to meet our dogs. Had we not had any other luggage to wait for, we would have been from gate to car in less than a half an hour. Pretty darn impressive, and all for the pooches. Mabuhay dalawang aso!
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