We arrived back in Moscow late last night. Our flight from Milan was an hour late and they didn’t make up much of the lost time. By the time we dropped other AAS faculty off at their residences, we didn’t get in the door until nine pm. That old expression, ‘getting there is half the fun,’ needs to be retired, especially when talking about flying.
We departed Cremona on Thursday afternoon, taking a train from there to Milan central station and connecting seamlessly with a bus that took us to Malpensa airport where we connected with another bus to take us to the Crowne Plaza hotel. All in all it took about three and a half hours and by the time we arrived we were very hungry and thirsty. Luckily the bar served a nice salad and two cold glasses of wine set us up for a lovely nap. During out post-nap walk around the neighborhood - this hotel is about a mile from the terminal and in a residential area - we found a trattoria that looked promising. We headed there about eight pm for a drink and a look around and decided it would be fine, and it was. The décor was nothing to talk about, brightly lit and mostly plastic, but the food was delicious and the wine half the price of the wine we’d had at the hotel.
The next morning we took the shuttle bus to the terminal to check in for the flight. We allowed three hours for this process and we used almost all of it just trying to navigate Malpensa. This has to be one of the worst airports in the world. Like many things Italian, the focus was on design, not function. Think Italian plumbing and Italian cars: very pretty to look at, but they really don’t work well. We had to walk to a far end of the terminal, which is really long, to check in. After waiting there for forty minutes and then finally checking in, we had to walk all the way to the other end of the terminal to get into a line for security that took an hour and a half to get through. Not once did we see any staff trying to speed things up or stop people from jumping the line. There are huge pictures of what you have to do to pass security: take off your jacket, take out your phones and computers, take off your belt, etc., and yet to a person, everyone forgot to do one or more things resulting in them having to go back and forth through the metal detector. Finally we got through and were in a short line for immigration and passport control only to find that the woman ahead of us was taking out papers to show the officer. That is always a horrible thing – separate pieces of paper mean that their passport isn’t good and it takes forever - so we had to change to another line. Finally through, we were blocked by Asian tourists, mostly Japanese, in a tangle to get their VAT refunded.
We now had only about twenty minutes before boarding and we headed to the Alitalia lounge for a coffee for Cindy and a drink for me. The lounge lady was lovely and told us our flight would be delayed and then she got us better seats and blocked the middle seat for us, which was a godsend given how packed the flight was. The lounge offered beer and Prosecco and there must have been a promotion on Gordon’s gin since there were rows and rows of the little travel-size bottles on the counter. It made me wish I drank gin!
We had to take a bus to the plane because Malpensa wasn’t designed for the number of flights it now has so they employ gates for almost all flights less than four hours. Just before they closed the doors to the plane, in comes a woman with two kids and sits right behind us. We must be rotten-kid magnets since our inbound flight had a woman with two rotten kids also, and now this. She, like the other woman, was young and attractive and she most likely never thought that finding and marrying Mr. Right would involve having kids and sitting in coach. Neither part of that situation suited her, and the kids were just horrid. It was a very, very long flight, punctuated by two girls getting caught smoking in the bathroom. Man oh man, you should have seen the Alitalia crew in action, they were fast and furious and those young ladies, who at first were smiling and thinking it was all a game, were really in big trouble and were met at the gate by security. I would imagine they are somewhere in the bowels of the former KGB building by now.
Moscow is much as we left it but with much less snow. This morning was a lovely 44° and bright sun. I went for a quick walk around the block and two people asked me for directions! In Italy, no one asked me for directions; I just think Russians get lost a lot. The Russians seem to have embraced spring by drinking lots and lots of beer. There were three clusters of people, mostly men, who were drinking huge amounts of beer and smoking cigarettes at 9 am. Not a tradition you read much about in tourist magazines. In between doing four loads of laundry we managed a nice long walk around a new neighborhood that had lots of lovely old and stately homes, and it was quite nice to be walking without hats, gloves and scarves.
Italy was lovely. We were in the Milan area with our friends for five meals, all of them wonderful and one of them spectacular. Cremona was a delight and I almost got Cindy a Stradivarius but the guards were watching. More details on Italy tomorrow.
Ciao, Cindy and Wm
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