Chapter 12
Summer in the Autumn
The next morning I had enough time to ride to Newark as the flight was at about eleven. I was a little surprised to find that the plane was an Airbus. It was a true budget flight, from the aspect of catering it could have been even in the Soviet Union: we got a glass of soda and a small bag of peanuts. I was seated in a box of four with one empty place and both men were from Florida. They gave me a thorough training in the almost three hours about everything there. One of them said Florida was like a raft: all was dry, but as you put your hand down four inches it became wet. Alas, neither of them knew how to get to my hostel.
It was a little expensive not to know where my hostel was. I had to take a minibus, but it cost me twenty five dollars. On the opposite direction the next day I rode two buses for one dollar each. Anyway, I arrived at it and there I got really fine conditions. Even my food was safe unlike in the hostel in New York, where I threw my butter and jam into the refuse bin, after I discovered that not only had it been pilfered, but the person used the same spoon for butter and jam, the butter was black with jam and I was not sure it wasn’t licked too. There were two ladies at the reception, both enchanting. We had long conversations about the attack, my home country, their children, etc.
I didn’t have too much time as in the afternoon I had to go to the building that was the venue of the ISSA program. Murphy had the helm for himself. When I reached it, the European director of the association could not be found. I sent a fax to T. from the hostel and asked him to try to get him. In the morning I was there again, but he left for home already. This way I couldn’t enter the site, the official side of my trip couldn’t realize.
However, as the previous evening I asked one of the ladies, a Hispanic woman, how to ride to the Disney World and how much it would cost me, she told me all, I took the proper bus and rode there. It is an enormous facility, there are five different worlds, I took the Animal Kingdom. Or, better to say, I wanted to. At the cashier, a young lady, I learned that the fifteen said by the woman was rather fifty – how many times I had this experience in Ethiopia. The girl must have seen the astonishment on my face, when I just wanted to utter that so much money I wasn’t ready to pay for it, because she said at once I should wait. She left her seat, soon the door near me opened, she told me to come in. She took my hand, led me through narrow corridors to another door, opened it and said: “Please, enjoy yourself.”
I really did it. It is a loose mixture of a zoo and an amusement park. There were healthy animals everywhere behind glass walls, but at the turn you always found an attraction. There were round rafts for six that went down a surging flow as at white-watering. Several other attractions waited you, but the most ingenious was the Tree of Life. From far you could see a great tree, but as you got there it became clear that it was a concrete structure, although in the shape of a tree. Where its roots must have been there was a large movie theatre. All the time the same program was repeated, about thirty minutes. It was not only interesting, it was masterful. The narrator was a huge spider, it was speaking, playing, terrifying you. At an instant it was spitting at you and you felt the drops coming to your face – water from a nozzle of course –, at another time it made it as if to go under your set and you felt your seat to rise under you. Well, at the entry you were warned that small children and persons with a weak heart are advised not to go in.
For me this afternoon was a true experience. Leaving the bus at the place where the hostel was situated I went into a supermarket just to window-shopping from the inside. All the same, I could buy things I really needed, a new battery for my video-camera and a bottle of aspirins. Also, as I was really hungry, I took my dinner in the Pizza Hut. This was my last evening in Orlando. I went to the reservoir at the back side of the hostel made by damming a small stream. I sat there in a wooden pavilion and was enjoying the mild air.
In the two days I spent there I got to know well the excellent bus service of Lynx. In the morning I took the proper bus to the airport and went to fly back. Again a small hitch: as I was standing in the long queue to get to the appropriate counter, I learned that there was no such flight that I had my ticket for. It had been cancelled. However, my problem was solved in a minute, the ground hostess booked me a place on a plane for Charlotte, North Carolina and from there on another to New York. Only instead of five o’clock I would reach the city at about eight o’clock. And on La Guardia, from where it is a long way to my hostel. All the same, I survived it and slept again in the hostel, although in another room.
Getting a bad experience with OK places on flights I visited our national airline office in the morning. It was in midtown in one of the new skyscraper buildings around Rockefeller Plaza, where I admired the summer skating. After that I made sightseeing in that place of Manhattan, at the UN building, saw the bio-market on the way to SOHO and at early afternoon I met with the publishing agent. We spoke about half an hour, made a picture about each other and gave a book to each other – mine was a small guide of Budapest, hers a novel about a woman. That was the moment when I realized I had to detach myself from that woman as soon as possible – I even didn’t know then that she would send me a bill of that ‘consultation’ later.