when we arrived in dallas, we had to go through customs first. we had to fill out that customs forms to declare the value of the goods. well since they lost my luggage i should just put $0! but i filled it out as if i still had my luggage. once i got to the worker, he asked me how's it going or something like that. i said they lost my luggage so maybe i won't have to declare anything at all. i don't know if he even chuckled but he let me go after i said that.

we waited at the luggage carousel just in case my bag turned up there. amazingly, i did see my bag! i checked the tags and the lady at check-in in buenos aires had switched the bags! so this means they actually lost twiddle thumbs's bag and not mine! now i'm the one consoling her on lost material goods. we had to change terminals to catch our next flight so we couldn't start the complaining process at dallas or wait around until every last bag went by on the carousel. it was only about 90 minutes inbetween flights and we didn't want to miss the flight back home because this journey has been long enough.

once we got to LAX, it was a painful process to file a claim. the lady at the counter wouldn't let us begin the process until every bag had gone through on the carousel so we had to wait. nope, the bag never showed up so now we can return to the counter to file a claim. then the lady just couldn't understand our story because we explained about the bag and tag switcharoo. once she understood, we didn't understand her about it's your bag but the other person files a claim or something or other. it should have made sense but i swear she wasn't making sense. all i understood was that we cannot file a claim with our final destination carrier american airlines because the bag was never checked in with them. you fucking bitch!!! we must be insistent and fight back. finally she started to take the luggage tags and walk back to speak to a supervisor. it took her forever to come back and others started to appear, equally pissed about lost luggage. when she returned, she started to take down our info but didn't give me back all our tags. i had to wait for her to go get it. it was so frustrating but we can't just walk out of there--we need our stuff! she then gave us a paper with a number to call to continue the process.

we left and i decided that she's probably not going to really do anything and we can't trust the airline to deal with another airline so we better find the tam counter at LAX and deal with them too. only, there is no counter at LAX! we went to an info booth and the lady said she never heard of tam. i gave our sob story and she said that she used to work at an airline and it is the final destination carrier's responsibility to find the lost luggage and that we must just be very persistent. ok, thanks for the advice. there's obviously nothing more we can do about it here at the airport so let's go home.

by this point, we were starving and my mom took us to have lunch together. then we had some more energy to deal with these airlines and twiddle thumbs started to call around. we got the claim number from american airlines. with this, i could do something. the luggage plastic wrapping service also slaps a sticker with a tracking number on it and you can file lost luggage claims with them once you have a claim number from your airline. so i submitted the claim online. in america, tam is based in miami and twiddle thumbs was bitching at the worker in spanish. someone is going to find that bag! i don't know who lost it or where but we've now started the hunting process with 3 companies.

then of course it's time to take a shower and start to feel normal again. it's too much to go over the things in my suitcase to then realize which things were in the lost bag but i need to do laundry. and of course, as always, once returning from abroad we need to eat at native foods so we went there for dinner.

later i'll post my post-trip thoughts on the overall ups and downs. curiously, during this trip i didn't take any pictures of the places we stayed at.