The story with the poles takes its beginning already somewhere in 2004. My mama was staying with my sister in Denmark and our Danish son-in-law, the wonderful Jakob, made Mama a gift — he bought special poles for so-called Nordic walking. When Mama was returning to Kiev, she checked the poles as luggage at Copenhagen airport. My mama speaks no foreign language. She can only say “Hello.” Her flight was with a transfer in Prague. And I was meeting her at Boryspil. She was supposed to arrive in the daytime at 14:00.
My sister saw her off in Copenhagen, rang on the mobile that “everything is in order,” meet her. Well, I met her…. everyone had already gone through, and no Mama. I turn to “Information,” which does not give information! They said to wait, “perhaps the passenger was held at customs inspection.” I met Mama for four hours, practically without leaving the meeting stand. All the taxi drivers, who usually meet everyone “first,” already remembered me.
Around six in the evening I again went to information and begged with tears that I had lost Mama! “Information” decided to send me quickly to the second floor to the office of “Czech Airlines.” To the second floor I flew like a bird, almost got a refusal, because “they are already closing and have switched off the computers.” But I said that “I have lost Mama” and they quickly switched on the computer and said: “Your mama is flying…. Austrian Airlines from Vienna, which will land at 20:30.”
Having waited another more than two hours, I noticed a special liveliness by the meeting stand: correspondents, film cameras, cameras. On the same flight a team of hockey players was arriving. They came out with bags and covered sticks and were at once surrounded by correspondents. Well at last my mama also came out… with covered poles, which look exactly like covered hockey sticks!
And a comic situation arose for Mama when she was waiting for her luggage on the “belt,” saw her approaching poles, grabbed them, and then some wardrobe-like sportsman began “taking them from her,” trying to explain that this was his equipment. For some time they both “clung” to one and the same equipment. The sportsman turned out to be right, it was his stick. Then everything “cleared up” and Mama safely received her Scandinavian poles, with which she still walks in the mornings.
And she had to fly three flights, since the plane from Copenhagen was late, Mama was transferred to a plane flying to Vienna, and then there was already a transfer to a plane to Kiev.