Sunday April 18, 2010

Almost everything it Utrecht was closed on Sunday. A few restaurants were open, and the transit system operated, but nothing in the mall was open, nothing on the main streets was open, nothing. Now, this was a problem because I really needed to make a few phone calls and I’d had no luck at all with the hotel phone. I figured I’d buy a pay-as-you-go cell phone instead, but nothing was open. I walked around and found a few places that looked promising, and just made note of them as places to try on Monday.

I decided to go ahead and pay for a couple of days of internet access. During the conference, I could use the university’s system for free, but that ended on Saturday. Most hotels in the US include internet access and cable TV in the price of the room, and even the cheap motel near my house in Charleston throws in HBO, but in Europe and Australia and New Zealand, my experience was that every hotel charges some exploitive fee for TV and internet. I’d been frugal, stuck to one of the few free TV channels and done all my e-mail at the conference. But, given that my communication choices were very limited at this point, I relented, paid the €9, and got on the internet.

Oddly, the great pool of information that is the internet was mostly about non-information. The Amsterdam Schipol airport was closed until further notice, airlines were listing flights as on schedule until a few hours before takeoff, and there were endless news stories about how uncertain the situation was. From what I could tell they expected planes might possibly start flying some time between tomorrow and June.

The problem with this volcanic cloud was that although it was known to be potentially dangerous to fly through, no one knew really how dense it was, where the dangerous part really was, how it was dissipating, etc. The airlines were pressuring the authorities to let them start flying again because they were losing gobs of money each day that they were grounded, but the pressure was sort of muted because no one wanted to be held responsible if they started flying too soon and a plane crashed.

I e-mailed the US state department to see if they had any information. There was nothing on their web site, and it was a couple more days before they replied to my e-mail. Their response to the situation was really minimal, and I wasn’t particularly impressed. I don’t think there’s anything specific that they should have done physically, but a bit of news, a warning to travelers, links to embassies, a cute little icon, something should have been on their web site, some acknowledgment that thousands of American citizens (=tax-payers) are stuck abroad due to a natural disaster… If this had been a more serious crisis, with more lives immediately at risk, would they have been more involved? Given that the Bush administration suffered much deserved and undeserved grief for their response to hurricane Katrina, I was saddened that here we are under the Obama administration and the state department seemed to have a bit of a bad attitude “What crisis? Not our problem…” About the only thing I saw about our government was that the president sent regrets about not being able to attend the funeral for the Polish officials that died in a recent plane crash.

Now since the president couldn’t get to Poland, I figured I had no chance of getting home any time soon. So I checked in with the math department back home at the college, gave some information about what the substitute should cover in my calculus class, sent my upper level course some homework. The really tough stuff is that there’s end-of-year activities like a calculus contest and the math club exam sale that I usually handle, and a few people knew sort of what to do but I had to write down all these details and put people in touch with each other…. I must have spent hours Sunday and Monday dealing with work-related e-mail.