On the Fist of Dominic

So it turns out it was totally a bad idea to begin the last post with "barring any major cock-ups". Because there were at least two. In order from greatest to least: when I got to the airport, I presented my passport and my itinerary from the online travel agent, only to be told that despite the fact that I fucking set it up as an e-ticket the travel agent had, without informing me of this, done a paper ticket (which you have to have in your hot little hand to get on the plane) and UPS-ed it to TAC, where, despite the fact that I left a perfectly valid forwarding address, they decided to bin the tickets without telling anyone. They're BASTARD people, that's what they are. Luckily, my parents were there. I was about to give up and start crying because of the monumental and unsolvable unfairness of fucking grown-ups, when my Dad put on his shining armor and got on the case. At one point he was on both his and my mom's cellphones at once, one in one ear and one in the other. Finally, "Fuck this. These people are turnips." my dad says as he hangs up on the internet travel people. "It's a lawyer saying, hon, you can't get blood out of a turnip," my mom explains. So my dad called up his travel agent and got me a ticket for that evening. I love him so much. So what lessons did we learn from this, kids? 1. Lowe's Travel is BASTARD PEOPLE. Never deal with them. 2. Never rely on TAC not FUCKING THINGS RIGHT UP, because they will. 3. I'm not allowed to complain about my parents ever again.

Cockup number two means that I'm now in Prague with 2 backpacks and 1 t-shirt plus the clothes I stood up in...the rest of my baggage got left in Amsterdam by the kind baggage workers. Oh well, I guess I'll be washing my one pair of underwear in the sink at night for a while.

Anyway, more on how Prague actually is later, this internet session is costing me a fortune. Suffice it to say that miraculously I made it to mass this morning, at St. Jilji. As luck would have it, it was the Polish mass, and at the beginning, the priest said a few sentences in English. In his thick Slavic accent, he welcomed us to the church, "especially on this day, the fist of St. Dominic." Indeed.