Philippines, Chapter I

So here's the first story of my trip. The trip was good except my luggage was missing for a week. Got there on Monday and didn't get my luggage until Saturday. What happened? Well....I still need to write Continental Airlines, but essentially it is their fault.

The dumb ass counter guy, whose name I did not get, but I would certainly remember his face, routed our luggage on different flight on a totally different airline. See our trip started in Houston from Intercontinental Airport. From there we took Continental Airlines to LA, then on China Airlines to Taipei and then to Manila. The guy at the counter printed up the baggage claim tags to go from IAH to LAX on Continental Airlines, then to Hong Kong and to Manila...on a totally different airline, Cathay Pacific. In this day and age of airport security, obviously the luggage did not match anyone on that flight so it was left in LA. Since the international airports are not as well equipped computer wise, they had no clue where our luggage was and couldn't even find it. They had to teletext IAH, LAX, Taipei, and Hong Kong, then Continental Airlines, China Airlines, and Cathay Pacific. This process took a week until they finally found our luggage and was able to call us with the good news that our luggage was at the Manila Airport.

We had to go to the airport a couple of times. Would rather speak with these people one on one, but the people at the baggage claim were no help. While "waiting for a flight to come in" they were SLEEPING ON THE JOB!!! I'm sorry, at least go to a back room if you want to sleep, but if you are working at the airport, you should not have four employees with their heads down snoozing!!! No wonder the country isn't getting any travellers, people at the airports can't even stay awake 8 hours a day.

Anyway, the baggage claim people said they would call us with updates on our luggage but they never did. However, Andrew and Christine at China Airlines were very helpful and persistent on finding our luggage. Thanks to them for all their work.

Regardless, though, we still had to go to the That doesn't make up for the black socks I had to wear with my gym shoes though =).