Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all! (corny I know, but it had to be done).
One problem with living abroad is that you cannot easily avoid travelling at one of the worst times of the year – Christmas (that is if you want to spend it with your family). Not only is it busy, but the weather (in northern Europe) is often a problem and it’s ridiculously expensive to boot!
So, it all started a bit stressfully. Getting the last available flight before Christmas began with a rush-hour bus journey from hell – everyone and their cousins were on this one bus and the traffic was slow. Finally, after much bodily contact with Italian strangers, we got to the train station which takes us to the airport. Things were looking better, the train was on-time and not too busy. On arrival to the airport, we needed to get a bus to transfer us to another terminal. There were many people waiting for this bus, including an irrate American girl who was effing and blinding about how rude people are (she did not like the fact that people had “got in line” – this was apparently rude because she wanted to get on the bus first). Actually, there was no queue, you just position yourself near to where a bus door may be and you get on quickly. The American was not first on, despite her aggressive tongue.
Bearing in mind that there had been a lot of snow in Europe at this time, many flights had been cancelled due to the weather. We only had a 15 minute delay (or so it seemed). It was time to board the plane and the slow queueing ensued, always a pain for this budget airline. A nonsensical approach to boarding which never works well. While waiting in line, the woman in front of us started falling like a felled tree and landed on us (I think we saved her life by breaking her fall onto the marble floor). After lowering the woman gently to the floor, my medical knowledge was exhausted. Thankfully, some bilingual ladies sorted her out and got her back on her feet – I am glad someone knew what they were doing!
On the plane, 15 minutes late as advertised. But what’s this? The airport staff have got their paperwork wrong and there is a further delay. In the end, we were over an hour late and it was nothing to do with the adverse weather conditions, but just some bad paperwork! This was made painful by a looping soundtrack of the same 2 Christmas jingles being played over and over again for an hour!
Despite all that, once I had arrived at my destination, all was forgotten and the eating and drinking could commence.
