(Written December 7th 2008)
I’ll start off my story by telling you where I currently am…ummm let see…Bergamo, Italy?! Was this my final destination…ahhh, no! To be honest I have absolutely no clue where I am or how to get where I am meant to be.
I am on my way to Venice. How romantic one would think, but flying Ryan Air from Stanstead is not the most glamorous adventure in the world. I journey up to Stanstead via Victoria Station to Tottomham Hale…where I then caught a half hour train to the airport. On arriving, I was immediately pulled into the stressful rush and zoo of airport life. Unlike other major airports, Stanstead is one of the homes to cheep flights…thus NOTHING is convenient here. After checking in on a machine, I was sent to a ‘so-called queue’ to check in my baggage. This was more like an entire mass of a few hundred people standing (and pushing their way) to unmarked desks. Then, once this and the stress of security was over, I was safely surrounded by Duty Free shops, magazine stands and Starbucks.
My flight was leaving at 7pm for Treviso, Italy (just outside of Venice), but about 10min before boarding I looked up at the gate sign and the destination has been changed to Trieste?! I initially thought my gate might have changed, but then an announcement was made saying that due to fog and bad weather we had to land in another city. Well, here I go…I sensed an adventure was on its way and had no choice but to go along for the ride. I quickly texted my friend Kristina who I was going to meet and we made very quick plans for her to drive to the new airport which was an hour away in the opposite direction. Later, on the plane and 10 min before we landed, another announcement was made (completely in Italian)…saying that we weren’t able to land in Trieste either…so here we are Bergamo, which I have been told is somewhere outside of Milan. I was thinking…Milan, isn’t that the city full of beautiful designers and fashion…cool, but not exactly where I want to be at 10pm! I got off the plane, feeling totally helpless…my dear friend and her husband were in a completely different airport hours away! I had no phone, no currency and no friends to keep me company either. On the plane, we were told a bus would be sent to take us back to our destination (a 3 hour ride away), so once through customs our entire flight crowded outside to find the bus. We waited…and waited but soon the cold night air was crippling and everyone pushed their way back inside the tiny airport. I got up the nerve to ask a stranger if I could borrow her phone, allowing me to let Kristina know where I was and that the bus should come any minute. Well I continued to wait and then another announcement came on (in Italian) and I found out from the woman standing by me that the buses were not due to arrive until midnight!…it was now about 10:30pm and so I borrowed another phone to touch base with Kristina…she said she wished should could just come and pick me up but they were 4 hours away (!) so it just made sense to wait for the bus, and meet her in Treviso in the early hours of the morning!
So here I am, sitting on the cement floor, of a European airport that I have never been to… me and my faithful computer. I keep looking around trying to see if I recognize anyone from my flight…as I would hate the bus to come and for me to miss it. To be honest I would have expected this journey in Africa…but in Europe, this has certainly been a surprise. Thankfully I’m safe…have my luggage and am supposedly heading in the right direction.
(Written the following day)
I wish I could say the bus came and all was well, but our bus never showed up! I sat, rather uncomfortably on that cement floor for approximately 3 ½ more hours!! A few more flights were diverted to Bergamo, so soon all the floor space had people sleeping and waiting on it. It was rather refreshing to hear a few American voices of some foreign exchange students, amidst the Italian company…but I was too tired to strike up conversation and so just listened to a variety of conversations around me. It’s amazing what you do when you are waiting…study faces, eavesdrop, read every sign you can see, fiddle with junk in your purse…and even hum some Christmas songs. I was startled at about 1:30am when I heard a man walk around and ask in Italian who was going to Treviso, I was worried that I might miss my bus so got up and found this ‘man in a blue scarf’…turns out he was a fellow passenger doing a head count. I told him to make sure the bus doesn’t leave me, ‘the girl in the green coat’. Well, finally at 2am, I saw a small group of people walk out the doors…I jumped up and followed them outside…Yahh our bus was here! I quickly got on, found a window seat and was looking forward to some sleep. Soon my dear friend ‘the man in the blue scarf’ came on and said he had been looking for me in the airport…ahh sweet, so glad someone was looking out for me. We pulled into Treviso around 5am and I was met by my smiling friend Kristina (who went to bed at midnight, after driving an hour to a different airport, woke up at 2:30am, drove an hour to this airport and then had been sleeping in her car, in a sleeping bag until the bus arrived!). She told me later that she would have been really worried if it was any other friend, but knew I was a veteran to travel adventures (or ‘nightmares’, as she called them). We pulled into her house at 6am…and both jumped into bed and slept til the afternoon. What a long day…reminded me a bit of Uganda, but I won’t go into that story…you can reread that on a past blog!
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