Red Button

Finally getting my luggage was quite a challenge.  Last sunday I called several phone numbers and rasped the ears of poor Iberia clerks with my bad spanish.  I learned, finally, that my stuff had arrived in the Santiago airport.

On monday afternoon, I called more numbers.  And more.  As some, there was someone to answer the phone, and they gave me more numbers to call.  At those numbers, no one answered.

I finally went to the Iberia office with my lost baggage receipt.  The lady there was very nice, and spent 20 minutes or so calling different numbers.  But in the end all she could do was give me another number to call when I got home.

So I called it.  The lady there had no record of my name or reference number.  So I took the advice of Señora Matos and launched into a whole tearful schpiel about how I don´t have clean clothes, how I've been wearing the same underwear for three days...  Just as I sounded as though I was about to become completely unhinged, the lady on the other end of the line miraculously found some record of me and told me that I would have to come to the airport personally to pick the bag up from customs.  This made me extremely angry, as they were the people who lost the damned things in the first place and promised to send it to my house.

The next day I took a bus to the Santiago airport, was in itself a bit of a rigamarole.  There's no sign for the bus, so you have to walk into shops you believe to be near where the bus stops and ask salespeople.  Who are invariably nice about it and point you in the right direction.

The bus was about half filled with dusty pilgrims and their sticks and rucksacks.  The other half were old men and housewives of all ages who live in the countryside that surrounds the airport.

Several older women pushed ahead of me onto the bus, shouting either at me or at each other in Gallego.

I arrived at the airport and went looking for La aduana.  I finally found a small sign with an arrow pointing towards the arrivals section.  But when I arrived, I saw only automatic doors that opened from the other side.  So I went upstairs and asked someone.  They said there was a small bell by the automatic doors that I needed to ring.

So I finally found it, a tiny red doorbell with

ADUANA

written underneath it.  I pressed it, tremendously excited at the thought of clean underwear.
But no one answered.  I rang again.  And again.  Still no one.
 
I thought of all that I´d had to do to finally arrive at this tiny red button in this tiny airport in the middle of the countryside.  I felt on the verge of tears.
 
I played the red button like an instrument, trying to convey my annoyance and desperation to the person I was hoping was on the other side.

Finally, the automatic doors opened and a short, squat man in an ill-fitting olive uniform covered with pins and badges told me that I needed to be accompanied by a member of the Iberia staff.  He reminded me a little of the Man Behind the Curtain in the Wizard of Oz.

So off I went to the Iberia office, was directed to a second, smaller office where after some probably incoherent explanation on my part, a grave woman in an Iberia uniform said something into her walkie-talkie and slowly walked with me, keys jangling, to the Aduana where the doors opened on the first ring 
All three of us walked solemly into the terminal.  The Aduana unlocked the door to a small room and beckoned me inside with a wave of his hand, as though he were a hotelier showing me a room.
 
And there it was!  My bag, finally, covered with stickers and papers.
 
After a few questions -- when did you arrive? when did your bag arrive? do you have your baggage claim stickers? -- followed by some incomprehensible mumbling between the aduana and the Iberia functionary, and I was free to wheel my bag away.