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Published: April 20th 2010
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Directly following the final for IR (and eating some of the huge shortbread cookie our professor brought us to congratulate us for surviving) I went back home to throw a few last things in my suitcase before leaving for a whopping 19 nights! I met Allison at the train station at 6:15 Thursday evening to pick up our train tickets to Paris at 6:45 that we had ordered online.
We had the plan all worked out—go to Paris Thursday night, stay in a hotel that was listed as 0.0 km from the Charles DeGaulle Airport, take the free shuttle the next morning at 5:15 to be at the airport 2 hours early for our 7:25 flight to Catania, Sicily—allowing plenty of time for us to check in and check bags on “WindJet” the budget airline we were taking that absolutely nobody in the world had heard of and we could not figure out how to check in online or print boarding passes. We would spend a few days touring Sicily before continuing on to Rome, Athens, and a resort on the Greek island, Ios.
Picking up the tickets in Paris presented more difficulty that originally anticipated. I stood with
the luggage while Allison waited in line, only to get to the front and find out that we needed our confirmation number for the tickets—not just the credit card and name it was ordered with. (The website had said just having the credit card would be fine…) So Allison pulled out her blackberry to go through her email inbox, find the confirmation number, only to get in line again and have the French man behind the counter not understand the letters she was saying. I awkwardly moved both our suitcases to the front of the line so that Allison and I could struggle through the French alphabet together, thinking of French words that started with each letter. He finally found the reservation and we got our tickets just in time for them to assign our train a “voie” or departure track.
Before we actually arrived at our airport hotel, we encountered a few interesting people.
a.) the police man on our train who told us in broken English that it was forbidden for us to have our feet on the seats, but then he proceeded to walk by multiple times and tease us about other things that were forbidden,
like speaking in English
b.) A woman in the Paris RER station who we actually helped give directions in French!
c.) A Russian boy on the RER who handed out papers to us, pleaded for money which ended with the statement “DO NOT CRUMPLE THIS PAPER.” Originally we thought this was because it would be disrespectful then we realized it’s because he wanted them back so he could hand them out to the next unsuspecting tourists
d.) The group of Spanish basketball players? who were on our shuttle from the RER station by the airport to our hotel. I think they were singing. We predicted they would be in the room right next door to ours. Luckily, this prediction did not come true as they went to the hotel next door.
Friday morning we woke up wayyyyyy too earlier to get to the airport to fly on “WindJet” which we were hoping with all our might was a legitimate airline…we weren’t able to figure out if we could check in online because we couldn’t find the actual website of the airline since we had booked through a different website…we were just hoping that we weren’t heading to Catania on
a helicopter with a trainee pilot.
We were half asleep on the 5:15 airport shuttle, so we missed the first stop where we were supposed to get off for Terminal 3. So when we stopped at Terminal 2 I pushed my way through the sea of people to the front of the bus, desperately yelling in French to the driver how to get to Terminal 3. All he said was that it was the last stop, so I went back to Allison to report the news. He sounded kind of frustrated at our lack of listening at the first stop, but he stopped before too long and yelled back at me and Allison that we should get off here and walk down some tunnel which would take us to Terminal 3. We got off the bus and went to get our bags out of the trunk of the bus, but when I realized there were no windows in the bus, I had to run back to the front of the bus, again crying in French that we needed him to open the trunk. Pretty sure he and all the other passengers on the bus were glad to be rid
of us.
Luckily we found Terminal 3 through the pitch black of 5:30 am and the entire terminal was….empty. We had to wait for them to open the check in counter. (but we got to check our bags for free! Yay!) We miserable waited at a practically empty gate until 7 am when we were bused from the gate to our plane (which luckily looked like any other plane—yay for WindJet actually existing). The flight was smooth, and except for one of the flight attendants being on his first day and only smiling and speaking in broken English, but not understanding Allison wanting a drink in English OR French, WindJet gets the stamp of approval from us.
We landed in Catania and Allison and I were some of the first ones off the plane and got to see Etna as soon as we got off—then we were bused from the plane to the terminal where we had to wait another hour and a half for our luggage to come out (worse than PDX). Sadly, not even the small Sicilian man pulling back the flaps where the bags come out and yelling at the workers sped up the process.
After an hour of waiting, I went to the bathroom only to find a huge line and by the time I came back to meet Allison, the baggage carousel had been changed and our two bags are the only ones still going around and around.
We then moved our sleep-deprived, zombie-like selves to the buses, where we got on the bus number I had written down and had to stand on one of the most horrible bus rides of our lives, not even knowing exactly where to get off. We also realized that we never bought a bus ticket, so we were also stealing from the Sicilian public transportation system.
When we turned on the road that our hotel we started watching numbers and eventually, after falling all over each other on the stop and go bus, and worrying immensely for every person riding a motorcycle in the town (they would just weave in and out of traffic, in the wrong lanes, etc.) we just got off the bus and decided to walk the last little piece of the journey. We luckily found the hotel no problem (except it was a little strange—it was like an apartment building,
but when we walked up to the third floor, on the last little piece of stairs was a strip of red carpet leading to a closed door which turned out to be our hotel reception). We were welcomed by Salvedrore, the manager of the hotel who promptly gave us the 4 keys we needed to get from outside to our room, and then we took a quick cat nap before hitting the town.
Hitting the town consisted of walking around Catania to a pretty park, bargaining for some sweet purple sunglasses, finding the fanciest McDonald’s I’ve ever seen for Allison (who knew that McDonald’s had chandeliers?), sitting on a bench watching the beach, going in the big Duomo in town, and eating dinner at 5. (We were the ONLY people in the restaurant, but we didn’t care. Our first Italian meal of pasta was delicious!)
We were both exhausted again after dinner, and returned to the hotel to watch Pirates of the Caribbean on my laptop, but we both fell asleep by 7:30, waking up with the ending music around 10. We then watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days before REALLY going to bed at
11:30 or so—a great first day to a long vacation!
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Mom
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Beginnings
Wow! What a crazy beginning to your big trip. Good job making it all happen, despite all the obstacles you faced. Your photos are great. Thanks for those.