Thousandapologies

Pfew…yesterday was a bit of an ordeal… Tally and I left at around 8.00 in the morning, already regretting the choice for Schiphol airport a bit. Although we weren’t really looking forward to it, the three hour trainride was without any events and actually quite fun. At Schiphol we found ourselves a bit puzzled about the way check-ins work there, but with a little help of some pretty stewardesses we soon found our way into the taxfree zone. However, not before my bagpack was checked first by some security dude for plastic explosives of any kind. Stupid me had forgotten to take out one bottle of water and paranoid as they are nowadays they had me take it out and throw it into the garbage container. After that, we decided to go and look for a cup of coffee, and found a grand café in Schiphol.

Following my advice we first went for a latté macchiato, ever since the Namesake introduced me to it in lovely coffee shops in Aachen (of the none Dutch kind, you actually get coffee there) I’m hooked to that. How big was our surprise when the macchiato finally arrived; Tally even shouted “what a small cup of coffee” much to the waitresses dislike and embarressment. Being used to Limburg measures one often gets disappointed in the North of the Netherlands, that’s why we went for another cup with some homebaked applepie; very nice! You can see how small the coffee was in the next pic.

Then it was time for us to leave on our first flight to Rome, with the Royal Dutch Airlines(KLM). Normally used to price fighters, I was surprised by the good service in the KLM airplane, we got food and drinks and drinks again, all for free! Almost two hours later, after an uneventful flight we arrived in Rome, where we had to wait for about an hour for our connection.

A good chance for a first pizza we thought and headed to the first “Inbiss” available. Ordering in Itally turned out to be quite an adventure; first we wanted to order at one counter but the people there pointed us to another counter, there had to order, then take the receit, we were pointed back to another one to tell someone what we ordered and then finally we got our long awaited pizza. What a disappointment that was! Only half warm and not really tasty, I was worried about keeping it inside my stomache in the next plain trip. We spend the next half an hour looking at Italian beauties and were so occupied by it that we almost forgot to go down to check in to the airplane. Then the less fun part of the journey started…

First they drove us accross the entire airstrip and left us wondering whether they decided to bring us to Ancona by bus. Then, discovering that the next flight would be by a propjet, Tally and I were split up to different rows of the airplane. After three quarters of an hour in an airplane in the burning sun, we still did not leave the airport, some person was lost and they had to go through all bagage to find his and could not leave before it was found. Finally the engines started and I thought we might finally soon take off, however, the spend the next 20 minutes taxiing around the rest of the airstrip we had not seen before. Luckily the flight after went pretty fine and I must say I really enjoyed my first flight in a propjet; you can see a lot more than from an ordinary plane.

Also I spend this flight sitting next to a beautiful Danish girl which I talked to a bit. She was wondering whether I was a participant on some social sciences conference, but I had to unfortunately tell her I had to go to a meeting for the European project MACE. We spend the flight half talking, half reading our magizines. I was reading my favourite magazine about photography, she some weird Danish magazine about psychology. This magazine, I saw, was showing a photographs of some guy putting a rope around a woman and pulling her up to the ceiling by her feet. Maybe it was the warmth in the plane driving me crazy, or the length of the journey, however, it could be just normal in Denmark; they were vikings some time after all!

One hour later, after another splendid landing, we arrived at Ancona airport. I said goodbye to my fair Danish female neighbour and the last part of the journey started. A fifteen minute taxi drive to our hotel. Twelve hours later than we started we arrived in our hotel. We took a wee shower and headed off into the city.

Our hotel turned out to be in “little Delhi”, we could not find a single Italian, only Namesake’s fellow countrymen. I was imagining the Namesake shaking his head and saying “thank you, come again” at every Indian passing by and almost could not resist the urge to shout “Namaste, keise ho!”. Little Delhi was quite far away from the city centre and we had to walk for almost half an hour to get there, involving a dangerous trip through a tunnel looking into the headlights of upcoming cars, that reminded us both of some classic 60s movies. Our first impression of Ancona was not that good, it seemed a rather modern and industrial city. When we came to one of the squares this however changed a bit. Lots of music and especially the “outside” life of the Italians was very beautiful to see. I cannot imagine this in the Netherlands on such a big scale. Also some big event was organised on one of the squares with lots of dancing and rollerskating (figure skating on rollerblades). I was a bit ashamed of seeing little kids dancing better than I probably will ever be able to. Also we enjoyed the Italian beauties carrying out the rest of the skating and dancing. By sheer coincidence, I saw Elisa with some guy that turned out to be Moritz and suddently discovered the rest of the Potsdam and Venice gang. After a wee talk with them, we both went our ways, they off to sleep, we to find some Italian Guinness. And hallelujah, it took us only five minutes to find and Irish pub with, yes, Guinness. We sat down for some hour and then decided to get back to the hotel, almost getting lost but finally guided back by the smell and the increasing number of Indians (not related I hope).