Wednesday, August 29, 2012

The One When We Got Our Passports Stolen

2 years. That's what i had been waiting for to go on this vacation. 2 years and it went all down the drain in Mexico City Airport when all of the sudden, neither me nor Dear Beloved had a passport anymore. And it happens so fast that it's literally one second, you're excitingly getting ready to do your check-in and the next, you're not going anywhere anymore cuz you cant get out of the country.

We had enough time in Mexico City to actually have arranged to meet with his family for lunch before heading to France. Oh yeah. In order not to carry around our suitcases, we decided to go check them in at the Aeromexico counter. And being the 21st century, you need to do that at the automatic check-in booth first.

I've never been a bright bulb with these machines so i asked the host to give me a hand, put all my paperwork (passport included) on the little stand under the screen and did my stuff. Dear Beloved took the screen next to me to do his thing as well. And off we were to the counter to register our suitcases. Except that i realized when we made it to the waiting line, that i had left the little case with everything on that damned little stand under the screen.

I ran like hell already picturing the host telling me, yes miss, here it is but when i got back to the check-in counters, he said that nobody reported anything.

At that particular moment, it's like the Earth is opening up under your feet and you fall and fall and fall endlessly. It was the end of the world. For me at least. Dear Beloved, of course, remained calm as a crispy lettuce which allowed me to break down completely, crying my eyes out in the middle of the airport. 

His dad, sister and uncle came to the rescue and if anything, i livened up their day. I probably cried more than they'd ever seen in their entire life. But anyways.

Changing our flights was so expensive that we were left with no other option than to cancel our trip altogether. I called my parents at 1 in the morning for them to announce them the awful news and to cry some more. Needless to say that they were so disappointed but hey, i didn't lose them on purpose. End of it all, in that worse case scenario, it happened in the best conditions. We were in Mexico City, where Dear Beloved's family lives, in a country we both live in, in a capital where there is a French Embassy and endless options to keep us busy. Might as well make the best of a bad job.

I knew one day i'd blog about it. I mean, seriously, who else has adventures like this? I knew deep down that there was a bigger reason for me not to go to France that day. Everything does happen for a reason. But at that very moment, i could have killed someone.
Now replace the first paragraph with the following:
Did you take a black case with 2 passports inside at one of Aeromexico's check-in counters in the Terminal 2 of Mexico City's airport on August 27th?
And obviously, signing my name.

Just reading this out loud already makes me feel better.