Travels with a wooden penguin - TheChronicleHerald.ca
It was crowded on Lan Chile flight 142 that November night in 1996. A couple hundred other passengers and I were winging our way north to Lima, Peru where we would drop in and pick up more New York-bound passengers before the long haul over the... It was even more crowded in seat 37A where I was sitting with the last minute purchase I made in Puerto Varas, a resort town 1,300 kilometres south of the Chilean capital of Santiago. Yes, fighting for room with a wooden penguin on an overbooked 12-hour flight was not my idea of a good time. The problem was the shopkeeper wrapped the critter in a way that made it look like a mummified metre-tall Homo sapiens. In my drowsy state I was convinced Mr. Wooden Penguin would make a nice icebreaker with the customs and immigration folks in New York. Sure, I had looked for newspapers and magazines at the Santiago airport and of course they were all in Spanish except for a three-month-old Playboy magazine with a $30 price tag. I passed on that but the kind, middle-aged American lady who must have detected my dilemma slipped me a dog-eared copy of the latest issue of Cosmopolitan magazine she had already read. Source: thechronicleherald.ca
