Italy: Act One (Part
One)
I am calling this Day One of my travels,
when in actual fact it encompasses about 48 hours. But I was awake for that
entire 48 hours, so to me it felt like one long (LONG) day. After packing what
I thought I would need, and grabbing both my travel documents and my passport I
said goodbye to Helen and my children and made my way to the Hobart airport for
my short hop to Melbourne.
I arrived at Melbourne’s newly christened
Terminal 4 (which is rather large and impressive), collected my luggage, and
made my way over to the Etihad Airlines check-in desk. I arrived rather early,
so after a bit of waiting I was able to check-in for my international flight.
After handing over my ticket and my passport I could tell that the check-in
staff member (named Sofia) was having a bit of difficulty checking me in. She
informed me that my passport was having a strange issue. After a
process of trial and error Sofia discovered that the issue was due to my
traveling on a newly reissued American passport. I had my passport renewed in
September and supposedly my Australian visa information had not been properly
transferred to my new passport. Just as I thought I wasn’t going to be allowed
to leave the country, a sneaky call to the passport control gods in the sky
fixed up the issue and I received my boarding passes. I then stocked up on
carbs at Nando’s, breezed through security and immigration and found myself
making my way toward my window seat on the Boeing 777 aircraft.
Yes, that’s right, a window seat. I tend to
vacillate between a window and aisle seat. I’m never sure whether I should
choose the window, so I can hole up against the side of the plane, watch my
movies and sleep in peace without some rube tapping me every hour to get up out
of their seat to make their way to the toilet. But the great benefit
of the aisle seat is that I can stick one of my long leg out the side of the aisle and
be that very same rube that gets up every hour to use the toilet without waking the
person next to him. Let’s just say that my choice of a window seat for this
flight was a poor one. The Etihad seats on this 777 were very tightly packed
together, so that I felt like a sausage trying to burst out of its casing. And,
of course, the couple sitting next to me didn’t MOVE the entire trip. This is a
FOURTEEN HOUR flight. I have no idea what they did with the waste that naturally
beckons forth from your regularly functioning human adult. Did they somehow
release it through their pores?!?! It is certainly a mystery. But after eight
hours of sitting in my seat the size of a postage stamp, pressed up against the
window, with the food tray always curiously pressed against my bladder (even
when it was raised) I realized the flaccid couple sleeping peacefully next to
me weren’t going to be getting up any time soon. And any attempt at rustling
them out of their seats proved to have no greater effect than a contented grunt
in response. I was becoming rather anxious about the whole situation, but it is in these moments
that the enlightened brain will plumb its depths and out of necessity is born
something akin to genius. I took one of the empty water bottles I had been
endlessly swilling (I get dehydrated on flights!), twisted off the cap, inched
down my zipper and did what every man was born to do.
Yes, that’s right… I urinated into a bottle
on the 4th of March on Etihad flight 461 from Melbourne to Abu
Dhabi. So, for any of the six of you that will actually read this blog, if you
happen to be the gentleman who sat in row 40, seat B then you had panic
stricken father of four young children depositing over half a liter of sweet
amber colored human waste back into the bottle it originally came from. All I
can say to you sir, Mr. Row Forty Seat B., is that YOU SHOULD HAVE RESPONDED TO
MY COURTEOUS PRODDING!
Anyway, enough about that. The rest of the
flight was uneventful. The entertainment selection was rather impressive. I
plugged in my recently purchased noise-cancelling headphones (best investment
in years) and watched about six new movies (and by new I mean released in the
last two years. Let’s remember I AM a father of four children). I must mention
that as an American (read: xenophobic) it was certainly interesting traveling
with Etihad, which is the national airline of the United Arab Emirates. This
means that all announcements were first in Arabic, and then in English. And
every time the captain came on to tell us about the weather, or what beautiful
sights we can see on the left side of the aircraft, he spoke in Arabic. One
can’t help thinking of 9/11 at a time like this, but all in all, it just made
things more exciting! Oh, and there was a camera attached just under the nose
of the plane and I could look at the camera’s view of things from my
entertainment screen. In a word, epic.
Tomorrow: Act One, Part Due; Mozzarella
Bars at the airport, sneaky Michelangelo sculptures, and the streets of Rome.
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