I've only got a couple of vacation posts left, but every time I sit down to do this I quickly get bored. Also, I've been putting in a lot of extra time at work, so when I get home I'm not really in the mood to sit in front of the computer. Maybe I'll finish tomorrow. I really had fun in Prague, but I didn't write much about it so the editing should be quick.
Historical note: Italy in general has redeemed itself in my eyes (though I haven't been back to Rome, and Pisa was questionable). CDG (Paris) has joined FCO (Rome) as an airport that I will never re-visit, for the same "your luggage is a tiny bit overweight so pay me money" reason. Air France is also a terrible airline, but that's irrelevant here. This historical note is getting a bit off topic.
Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
Well, I'm back on a plane. My luggage arrived late last night, and I picked it up this morning when I got to the airport. The airport here really isn't equipped for that sort of thing; I had to go backwards through customs via the employee entrance to get to the baggage claim area, then deal with more rude people to get my luggage, then go back through customs, outside, upstairs, and back inside to check in. The check-in desk for my flight was actually in another building, which I had to ask someone at an information desk to find out, so back outside, walk past two buildings, into the right one. Then I had to walk back to the original building to go through security. What a stupid airport.
Ever since I left Australia, in every airport I've been at I've been told that my luggage was 8kg overweight, and that I'd have to pay some sort of fee for overweight luggage - and then the person would let it slide and I wouldn't have to pay anything. Not here: the Alitalia ticket agent's "Christmas gift to me" was to knock 3kg off the overweight bill, so I only had to pay 15 Euros/kg for 5 kg overweight. Gee, thanks. It was Rome's last jab, I guess. Oh, I did get an exit stamp in my passport, but the asshole stamped directly over an existing stamp (Singapore) instead of flipping a few pages to find an empty space. I mean come the hell on, why would you do that? Yeesh.
Anyway, I'm really excited about Prague. Just an hour or so ...
Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
Does everyone in Rome pay $15 for a pair of underwear? I don't want Dolce & Gabbana underwear. Seriously. This country is so stupid.
Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
Rome is about like yesterday. Still no word on my luggage. Tomorrow is my last day here.
Historical note: I may not have mentioned this earlier but while I was in Australia, I got really terrible sunburn, and the whole time I was in Italy my skin was peeling like crazy. So my clothes, which I had been wearing for several days at this point, in addition to being stinky were covered in flakes of dead skin. It was pretty awesome.
Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
More of the same. Still no luggage, and I leave in the morning. I'm going to have to buy clothes tonight.
Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
Rome is not as fun as Milan was. People here are definitely more rude, and the staff at stores and restaurants all seem annoyed to have customers. In other places I've been, I would say that it's because I look like a tourist, but I think I blend in pretty well here, and everybody starts talking to me in Italian. I can get through basic transactions in Italian, and people do seem to speak good enough English that I can get things done, so I don't know what the deal is. Anyway, my luggage was supposed to arrive this morning at 10am and nothing has arrived yet. The (only slightly rude) person at the hotel desk assured me that usually luggage comes in the middle of the night, if it's going to come at all, so maybe they meant 10pm.
Aside from the rudeness from people I've interacted with, people drive like assholes and the road configuration is somewhat poorly defined. I'd definitely have trouble driving here if I rented a car. It's not as bad as Bulgaria, but definitely bad. I see a lot of the selfish, mean-spirited driving that I associate with Atlanta.
Another annoying thing is the fact that the sidewalk is filled with people selling random junk, and beggars doing odd things. As in Sydney, beggars on the street never approach people directly to ask for money, which is nice. But in Sydney, they would sit out of the way and look pathetic, and it seemed to work OK for them. Here, people would lie prostrate in the middle of the sidewalk, or in doorways (until they get shooed off), or in curl up as if praying on the ground in parking spots. I'm not sure if they're just doing it to be annoying, or if they're hoping someone will trip over them or run them over so they can pretend to be injured. Either way, it's annoying.
The people selling random junk are equally annoying, and they do accost you on the sidewalk. When it's raining, they're selling umbrellas (they offer you an umbrella even if you're obviously carrying one); when it's sunny they have sunglasses; when it's dark they have trinkets that light up. An especially irritating thing they have are these little disks that you shoot up off of a stick, and as they whiz through the air they whistle and light up. That's fine, and if you do it right the disk goes straight up and then straight back down and you can catch it on the same stick you tossed it up from. But instead they shoot them up at a slight angle, so that they land on people, and then the tosser (har!) starts yelling at the person like they're going to steal the disk.
Milan wasn't like this at all. I liked northern Italy much better. If I come back to Italy, I'll try Venice; maybe that's different. Or Sicily.
Historical note: I did not succeed in my goal to fill all of the pages in my passport with stamps, though I got reasonably close.
Note: I wrote this while I was still on the trip, but didn't get around to posting it until now.
Rome! Finally! After deplaning, we all trudged off to baggage claim, where about 10 bags came off the carousel for the entire 767 full of people. So I moved off to the huge line of people at the missing baggage desk. Like any airport line, about 95% of the people were civil about the whole thing, and a few people got really worked up and belligerent. The people at the desk handled it pretty well, considering. I was told that my baggage was still in Moscow, which was only a little surprising. My flight into Moscow was delayed, so I arrived at Sheremetyevo International Airport about 10 minutes after my flight to Rome took off. The surprising part about that was the fact that a new ticket for the next flight to Rome (only a couple of hours after my original one) was waiting for me at the passport control desk. I gave them my passport, they gave me a new ticket, and then read my luggage tag numbers to someone over the phone. I was a bit surprised at the efficiency, but when the bags didn't arrive I wasn't shocked or anything.
Anyway, I got around to leaving the airport around midnight, so I had to get an unlicensed taxi to take me to the hotel. Not a huge deal, and he didn't fleece me (as far as I can tell) but the receipt he gave me was printed on receipt stock for what appears to be a strip club. Good thing I'm not expensing this! That one would be hard to explain to the people at the office ...
One thing that annoyed me slightly was that I didn't get a stamp in my passport when I entered Italy. I have a goal of filling all of the pages in my passport with stamps before it expires (January 2010), so when I don't get the stamp it slows the process down. Also, aside from the people at the lost luggage desk, and the unlicensed taxi driver, all of the people I've had to deal with have been kind of rude. Maybe it's just the night shift.
Anyway, I'm off to bed. More later.
I have a couple more posts, for Rome and Prague, but posts written on the Tablet PC require a certain amount of editing to account for poor handwriting and bouncy planes. The Tablet does remarkably well at recognizing my handwriting, but there are a lot of spacing issues and things like "I" being replaced with "¥". I spent a bunch of time yesterday putting up photos and the first few posts, so I'm going to step away from the computer for a while and do other stuff, like clean up the apartment.