My flight left Sydney at 22:10 on Sunday night and after taking a Temazepam on boarding and an Endone with the meal I managed to get a couple of periods of reasonable sleep between meals and grizzly children. 15 hours later we landed in Doha and I had 3 hours to ponder the bizarre creepy giant teddy bear... I had to laugh at one point. I went to the help desk to find out my gate number as it wasn't listed and when the woman was giving me directions she said "The gate is in that direction [points behind her]. You see the teddy bear? Go past that and keep going...". Honestly, you couldn't miss the teddy bear. It was all you could see because she was right under it... and almost the entire airport is past that! (I should have said something extremely witty like "No? What bear?". I'm sure she's never heard that before!
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| My view when asked if I could see the bear... |
Then onwards from Doha to Rome... a six hour flight. And the woman I was sitting beside had me thinking that I would rather fly with an entire plane full of children than one of her.... She wriggled, she squirmed, she got up to the toilet multiple times (and never at the same time as her husband) and kept trying to climb over me instead of waiting for me to get up, she had NO sense of personal space... The flight was 6 hours of misery.
But then we landed in Rome and all my annoyance at this woman seemed irrelevant. I'M IN ROME! WHAT ELSE MATTERS??? Ever since I was young I have dreamed of going to Europe and I had never made it happen - until now. I am here for a month and am spending between 2 and 4 nights at as many places as I could fit into the month. For me it's the trip of a lifetime (hopefully the first of many). I have been saving and planning and dreaming for months now and it has finally happened.
So after an hour of queueing at Immigration I was finally let loose and caught the Express train into the city. Look out Rome!
