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 ...