Because We Can — Bilbao, Spain| November 2001
“Life is a matter of living: Egészségére! ”
I’m at “pintxo tavern” Irrintzi on the main street of old-town Bilbao. On the bar in front of me, there’s an array of delicious looking pintxos, tapas-like snacks of the Basque country. I pick up a piece of marinated salmon with asparagus mousse and try to rationalise how I got to be here, staying in a five-star hotel, having a casual snack in one of the world’s most exciting food capitals. How different everything looked just over a month ago.
“Mum, I’ll be home next Tuesday,” I said without much enthusiasm as I stood, talking into the dirty orange horn of a phone booth, on a lonely street in rainy New Orleans. After eight months on the road, travelling through East Africa, Southeast Asia and North America, my money had finally run out. It was time for the final leg of the journey, back to Schiphol Airport (AMS) in Amsterdam.
When I had confirmed my ticket earlier that day, I was struck by a thought that hadn’t come to my mind ever since I’d left for Kenya last March: I’m going home. But what is home? When I get back to Holland, I don’t have a place to live, no job, no money, no plan at all! What was I going to do!?
The following Tuesday I flew from New Orleans (MSY) via Memphis (MEM) to Amsterdam (AMS). I felt as nervous as I had been on that March flight to Nairobi (NBO), but not quite in the same excited way, more a feeling of dread.
During the what seemed a never-ending flight, however, it slowly dawned on me that I really had no reason to be so worried. Sure, I had less than a hundred guilders left in my bank account and less than twenty dollars in my pocket, but I was going home to familiar surroundings. I had just been around the world by myself: I had been robbed and shot at in Africa, barely missed a bomb explosion in Indonesia and I had become a face of Diplomat cigarettes in Pakistan. [Read: Magic Carpet Ride — Bogor, Indonesia | August 2001] So many amazing things had happened the past months, good and bad experiences, and I had survived them all. It was silly to be so worried about going home.
Back in Holland, I stayed with my mother in Zoetermeer (maybe not my own place, but I’m one of those lucky enough to always have a home — dankjewel mama) and went on a serious job hunt. At my first visit to the “vacancy bank” at the local employment office, I came across an opening for an Operations Officer at Denim Air, a small airline located in the southern city of Eindhoven but operating flights for Spanish airline Air Nostrum. I wasn’t at all qualified for the job, but it sounded like fun and so I applied.
To my surprise, I was invited for a first interview. I spent the days before the interview buried in the local library, trying to learn as much as possible about the aviation industry. On the day of the interview, I borrowed a jacket and tie from my mother’s husband and took a train to Eindhoven. The interview went surprisingly well and I was invited back for a second round.
The second interview went even better than the first. No idea where all this self-confidence came from! I sat there talking about aeroplanes and flight planning as if I’d been in the business forever. I could see the interviewers were impressed. As I sat on the train back home, my mobile rang: I got the job.
They called my bluff, now I had to make sure I lived up to it. Difficult, so much to learn, but it also guaranteed there wasn’t a dull moment in my first weeks on the job. Together with five other operations officers, I had to fix any unexpected problems that came up. Technical problems, sometimes pilots who’d gotten sick, the weather (!) or occasionally a strike of the French air traffic control. Some days hardly anything happened, other days I’d find myself talking on three phones simultaneously, very aware that every minute a flight was delayed cost the company thousands of dollars. Days of extremes, but never a dull moment!
Denim Air’s Delta-Mike-Romeo Dash-8 turboprop, flying for Air Nostrum in Spain
One of the perks of this job is that one of us is flown to Spain every week. The official reason for this is that we have to update the Jeppesen flight maps on our Dash-8 turboprops, but it’s really an opportunity to bond with the pilots. As operation officers, we habitually mess up our pilots’ schedules to keep the planes in the air, so it’s essential we have good relationships with them. We’ve got five days to catch all the planes of the Denim Air fleet, update their maps and have a chat with the crew. We stay in the same five-star hotels as the captains and first-officers and regularly meet up with them for dinner and drinks.
This is why I’m here in Bilbao, the end of an enervating week. Just today, I’ve been to Air Nostrum’s Controllo Vuelos (Flight Control) in Valencia, had lunch in Almería, a quick stop-over in Madrid and now I’m in Bilbao, meeting up with some of our Hungarian pilots. My life went from an amazing adventure to dread, then back to amazing, all in a matter of weeks. No wonder my sister wearily exclaimed, “How the f@#k do you do that!?” when she learnt I was going off to Spain, so soon after returning from a trip around the world.
As I take a sip from my glass of Txakoli wine and bite into the salmon pintxo, my mind wanders to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who once remarked that “Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.” I think that’s the trick dear sister, success in life is just a matter of living: Egészségére!
Fatboy Slim – Because We Can on Moulin Rouge OST [CD]. Burbank (Ca), USA: Warner Bros. Records. (2001)
This autobiographical sketch comes from my bundle In the Moment: A Disjointed Audiobiography which is available at Amazon.com. (USD 9.50 for a paperback or USD 4.50 for the Kindle version)
