Flying Lessons, Italian Style

Having just flown from Brussels to  Amarillo, via my favorite transitional airport, for now at least, Newark Liberty, I remembered a piece I wrote a few years ago about my least favorite airport experiences traveling back to Italy from the UK.

Hope you enjoy. (Remember, it only hurts when you laugh):

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And so we come to a very brief lesson in Italian physics. This law is best defined by the experience of riding Italian trains. The law that we will discuss today in Italian Dynamics (ID) is that of the anti-matter law. In normal three dimensional space, it is impossible to have two bodies which contain mass occupying the same space at the same time. In ID, this law does not exist. Whereas normal physical phenomenon resist being turned into anti-matter, ID requires it. In other words, as a law: Two or more objects containing significant mass are required to fill the same place at the same time.

This law can be seen on a daily basis at the train station, or any other place that requires a line in Italy. Requires is a big word. However, we must first digress on the concept, or rather the lack of the concept of a line before we return to the issue of trains. A well-known textbook axiom taught in school in geometry is that in Euclidean space, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Italians were absent on that day.

I was in Dublin recently and saw a very curious thing. There was a bus stop and the bus had not yet arrived, but there was this odd event. People were standing in single file. The bus came, they stayed in line. They boarded the bus, the bus left, and a new line eventually formed. I was in shock. I cursed myself for not having my camera with me. People back in Bologna would never believe this. I tried to remember if I had ever seen anything like it. Misty images of standing in line at movie theaters in America drifted by, but it seemed like a dream. Did people really stand in lines?

Wondering if the world was coming to an end, I was relieved to be back at the airport a few days later for my flight to Forlì with Ryanair. Ryanair is the Irish answer to Southwest Airlines. You can buy very cheap tickets and change them (with a rather large fee) and go to exciting airports like Forlì, or Stansted and spend another hour actually getting to the city you want to go by bus or train, in these cases Bologna and London. However, the main thing that Ryanair learned from Southwest Airlines is what is affectionately called “the cattle call” by those who have experienced it. As you know, that means no assigned seats and general admission. Obviously these people have not been to a Who concert or lived in Italy.

So, Ryanair adopted this same procedure. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Italians do general admission on any airline, regardless of the boarding procedure. Now, they are encouraged to do this. At Stansted, they have a horribly underexplained system of queuing that the Brits seem to figure out in their typical Brit-logic, the Americans just wonder aloud until an annoyed Brit clues them in on what is going on just to shut them up, and then there are the Italians.

The queuing is like this. Numbers 1-64 on the inside of a cordoned passage, 65 and above on the outside which wraps around so that the two lines begin at the same place. When 1-64 are in, they readjust the cordon, and voila, the second line goes in. Simple enough, right? I arrived from Dublin and got to the Forli gate in Stansted. There were more or less 50 or so people. I was number 118 on the card, so I had to go on the outside. People continued to file behind the first line. Much more than 64. Finally, a Ryanair person announces, only in English, the queue system and that people with 65 and above need to move. No one moves. Then, the employee announced how to look at the card to find your number. No one looks. Meanwhile, there is an Italian-speaking employee looking around bored. Now, since the flight was ninety percent Italian, you would think that the Italian employee could help clear things up, but instead, there is a sudden angst among the big line. “Are they letting us through?” As such, there began a condensation of matter. Now, everyone wanted to be at the front of the line.

While I was still standing alone on the outside, beginning to feel quite lonely, the Ryanair British employee who had made the announcements assured me that I would be first in the second group. I smiled politely. As the push from behind increased, an Italian-speaking Brit began to try to explain to the crowd the system. He pointed to where their number was and explained that most of them needed to move. Now, they got angry. Now they had no excuse. Several of them obviously understood the English, but in a way that only Italians can do, completely ignored it. They had become invisible. Nobody could see that they were number 130 and in the front of the line. Telling a couple of ladies six or seven times that they needed to move, the Brit finally began to give up. They ladies looked at him wondering, “Whom are you talking to? We are invisible.”

Finally, some started to give a hint that maybe they would act like they happened to hear this Brit. And then, the Ryanair employee started saying several times in English that those with 65 and above needed to move to the other line. This only caused everyone with 65 and above to start pointing their fingers at me and laughing. I smiled politely.

And then, showtime. There were two Ryanair employees who were going to start taking tickets, one of them was the Italian. The exasperated third employee who had tried to assure me that she would be able to control this began to mentally think about career changes to an alligator wrestle in Louisiana as she announced that we would begin boarding only those numbers 1-64. All others would have to move. She removed the cordon and the madness began. The other Brit who was one of the ones taking tickets was desperately searching for the number, handing her the boarding cards as she checked off the numbers 1-64 while Francesco was letting anyone go by with a cheerful “Buona Sera.” The cordon was placed back. Francesco was told again what he was supposed to be doing and the announcement was made again that only 1-64 could board. The Italians looked at her in amazement, “Whom is that strange British woman talking to? We are invisible.”

The cordon was removed. Repeat. Cordon replaced. Now, instead of having Francesco explain this in Italian over the intercom, he was given the task of checking off the numbers and two Brits would take the boarding cards. So, then, those with 65 and above didn’t move to the other line, they just stood there, making it nearly impossible for people with 64 and below to get by. Meanwhile, I had become quite a sideshow attraction standing there by myself on the other side of the rope. I smiled politely as my lower lip quivered.

After fifteen minutes of this, the now frazzled woman employee turned and asked Francesco if 1-64 had passed, but he was nowhere to be seen. Then, she found him singing with a group of Neopolitans at the next gate and so bringing him back, they counted the cards and yes, 1-64 and 25 others had boarded. So, in a defiant act, she removed the cordon on my row, and I mean my row as it was just me and two Japanese tourists who had gotten lost, and I was able to board. I thanked her. She smiled politely as a tear squeezed from her eye and she was wondering if her psychiatrist would still be up at this hour.

The plane ride is another story.