Ok, so I am going to do something new over the next few days. I know it has been quite some time since I have posted anything, that is because I have been working on a really long piece describing my surprise filled trip to Torino a couple of weeks ago. In fact its so long I am going to post it in installments over the next few days. So the idea is today I will begin the story and continue telling it over the next few days so stay posted!!!
Everyone has witnessed those poor souls wildly sprinting through the airport. We all understand they are desperately try to catch a flight and secretly we are glad we are not in their shoes (or lack there of, as you will soon learn).One might indulge in a muffled chuckled at the spectacle. It’s sick but you know its true. I know have. However, after this past weekend I am quite certain I can never allow myself the enjoyment of such cheap entertainment again. Empathy does not have a sense of humor and my heart goes out to those sprinting souls because I was one of them for a day and it was enough to make me want to irrationally grab the nearest Italian bureaucrat by the collar and scream some hysterical stream of profanities into his face. Something to the tune of, “Don’t you see that there could not possibly be a less efficient way to do what your whole country is doing and the criminal truth is you have been doing it for a thousands years.” I digress. Allow me to retrace my sprinting steps to the start.
Ryan Air offers European travelers incredible deals on cheap flights within the continent. Their secret to such discounted prices is they quietly attach small clauses to the ticket contracts, which place the bulk of the work, basically everything aside form actually flying the plane on the customer. One such catch is the traveler is required to print of his or boarding pass no less than four hours before their scheduled flight. Admittently, this is by no means an outlandish request and even appears pedestrian in nature to the most casual of readers. However, if one lives in a foreign country and has less than limited access to a printer and his flight leaves the next morning, it may actually prove to by quite the prickly thorn. I dearly wish this was not a biography but the truth is in my case it was a great big stake through my heart.
I awoke Friday morning with a jump in my step and a song on my lips. I had two hours to catch a train to Rome and then a flight north to go snowboarding for the weekend in the infamous Italian Alps. I was ecstatic because not only is snowboarding one of my favorites activities, but I was going with three of my friends and we had booked a nice cheap hotel in Torino. It was the infallible weekend. Oh, not so fast buster. One major obstacle was keeping us from jumping directly on the morning train. As previously mentioned, I had to print out my boarding pass for the flight. Two of my other friends had to also. It is worth noting that we do not possess printers here and if we want to print something off we have to go to an Italian Internet point in the city. The only such internet point I was aware of opened at 9:00 am, so I had the two other girls, Maddie and Ellie, meet me outside ten minutes before open. I should also mention that Italians are never on time and that includes business hours. This morning I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that they would not actually going open at 9:00 and we would be hung out to dry. Sadly, my gut was right. 8:50 quickly turned into 9:25 with neither sight nor sound of the shopkeeper. My nerves were beginning to fray and our journey yet to even begin. Time pressed down on us with the foreboding knowledge that our train left at 9:50 and our flight departed from Rome at 1:30. Desperate people make irrational decisions and so I bailed on the Internet point, if they didn’t want our business it was their loss, or so I told myself. Evidently not all nonsense is folly especially when fortune stretches out a helping hand as it did to us, revealing a formerly unnoticed hole-in-the-wall printer-fax point right down the street. I howled aloud for I saw our fortune taking a turn for the better. (I must have been blind or just painfully naive.) We pilled through the door and with broken Italian asked the only women present if we could print something off of the Internet. She said we could be we had to wait till she finished working on some brochures. Meanwhile, the clock spun past 9:30. This has more significance than just the fact that we had twenty minutes to catch our train, which was on the other side of the city. I will expound shortly. Eventually, Ellie got on the computer and printed off her boarding pass without a issue. By this time you may be tuning into the stories reacquiring theme and you should ask yourself was there a catch? Of course there was. The website would only print off our return passes. Frustrated, we could not understand why. Then the tragic realization dawned upon us. As previously mentioned, Ryan Air requires its clueless passengers to print off their boarding passes four hours before their flight. No less. It was 9:35 and the flight was at 1:30. I will spare you any patronization; the math is not difficult. I was livid, but had no time to fret so we paid the indifferent Italian women and bolted out the door, pass-less.
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