Italy welcomes me back!

Posted on 2006/04/03 16:16:21 (April 2006).

[31 March 2006]

I guess that I should have seen it coming, as Pizzaland (Italy) draws closer to the elections, anarchy seems to be always on the uprise.

The flight to Frankfurt was quite ok, nothing major to report, once arrived in Germany a nice guy from Lufthansa told me that I had to hurry to the gate to catch my connection to Milan.
As I struggled around the huge airport to get there, I stopped in front of a monitor to see that indeed my flight was CANCELLED!
After a moment of shock I put myself together again and went to complain about the whole issue, the nice staff gave all the people that were scheduled on that flight another ticket for a flight that was meant to leave 30minutes after the one that they cancelled.

No big deal, we moved to wards the gate to see that also this flight had problems, and we had to wait 1 hour before beginning boarding.

So we left for Milan, this time the bad news came during the flight, as the captain told us that there was an unauthorized strike in Malpensa, and basically all the ground personnel was absent.

This resulted in even more wait ON the plane, once we landed... The worst had to come though.

We were patiently waiting at the baggage counter, when, after 40 minutes, a nice voice told us that basically nobody was unloading the plane, therefore it had to go back to Frankfurt with all our baggage!!

Immediately 120 people rushed at the lost and found counter, to complain, to ask for explanations and to start the procedures to claim for a technically "lost" baggage...
I can't start to describe the hell of an Italian queue (basically NO queue at all), people shouting, pushing, screaming, someone called the police, some other guy wanted to pick a fight with another person who allegedly barged into him...
I had more than 20 hours of travel on my shoulders, and I was so tired that I just sat back to "enjoy" the show, though I was right in the thick and thin of the action.

After 2 hours I managed to walk away with my piece of paper and the promise that the bags were going to be delivered at home...

This is the first time that I have such a bad travel experience, maybe I have just been lucky, but surely I was well pissed off with those people back in the airport. I have also spent quite a lot of thoughts for the several foreigners that were there... They probably couldn't believe such a situation, in the minds of people Italy is still a proper country, not the third world state that we really are...

Oh well, you live and learn!

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