an open letter to United Airlines

A lament about flying – I know I’m just adding my little voice to the chorus of millions, but it must be done. I’m not going to complain about the cost (even though this time I paid more to travel to Washington than I did to travel to Bangkok with Air Emirates), or even about the fact that these days you have to pay for every single amenity (though it doesn’t seem sound to me to encourage people to cram even MORE stuff into the overhead bins). If I can pay less for a ticket by bringing onboard my own Subway sandwich and Coke, I’m all for it. Mostly I’m here to complain about one airline in particular.

 

 

Dear United Airlines,

United, I fell in love with you years ago at the tender young age of five or six years old, when the highlight of my year was our trip to Des Moines, Iowa, with United Airlines. I loved the Rhapsody in Blue that would play as the plane was taxiing to the runway (what happened to that, by the way?). I loved the little stick-on pilot’s wings that your cheerful and chipper flight attendants would give me. I loved the shiny white plane with orange, red, and blue stripe down its side. I loved the way you would say, “We realize you have a choice, so we’d like to thank you for flying the friendly skies.” I truly believed that you were The Friendly Skies.

Now I do have a choice, and I’m not flying with you. In fact, I’ve even gone out of my way to not fly with you. I have miles with you that are too few to do anything with yet, but I could have added more, and seeing as my home airport is your hub, I could have almost certainly benefited from those miles. I even paid a little extra to not fly with you. Instead, I have chosen to connect in Charles De Gaulle airport, which is actually (interesting trivia here) Hell on Earth: the Secret Portal. (CDG, my next letter is to you unless you see fit my transfer this year particularly smooth.) I have done all of this because, despite their hub being tainted by evil, Air France is a sweet ride and you are not.

Last time I flew the friendly skies, United, I flew in Seat D. My consort, gallantly, flew in Seat E. Your seating arrangement looked more or less like this, if I remember correctly:

A  B  C          D  E  F  G           H   I

(There might have been three seats on each side, I don’t remember. It is irrelevant to my argument.)

Who invented this arrangement? What’s wrong with the traditional 3 – 3 – 3? Or even better, the 2 – 4 – 2? Yes, you cram one extra person onto your plane, but nobody wants to be that person. Nobody wants to be Seat E. Some people would rather dig their eyes out with their plastic dinner forks than be Seat E. Fortunately Riccardo was not one of them, but Riccardo is of the opinion that on a long plane trip, the trick is to never stand up to go to the bathroom, not even once. We are not all Riccardo.

To add insult to injury, you offer us Economy Plus, which awards an extra, what, three inches of leg room, allowing your knees just barely touch the seat in front of you when reclined instead of being mashed up against them. Do you think we’re morons? Do you think we’ve never flown on any other airline, where “Economy Plus” conditions are called just plain “Economy?” Do you really expect us to pay into your Mafia-esque scheme to get us to pay extra or use up precious miles just to obtain minimally humane conditions? I thought about it, and then decided that I’d rather fly Air France where those crucial three inches of leg room are considered not “plus” but “décent.”

(The advantage, by the way, to the close quarters is that when the person in front of you reclines 5 minutes into the 8-hour voyage and you happen to sneeze just a little harder than necessary, they realize quickly how close their head is to your snarling face.) (I have not had the balls to try this, though I hear it works.)

Finally, a point which is not nearly as crucial as the first two but something which has been my personal bugbear since first flying from Washington to Bangkok are the headrests. I am five foot five inches, 165 centimeters for my European readers. I am not a particularly tall or short woman; I am exactly average. And yet the curve head rest, which I presume is curved in hopes of providing a nice neck rest for 6′1 frequent flyers out there (who then have other even more pressing issues, see above), protrudes exactly where the back of my head should go. Raising the headrest (designed for whom, 6′6 frequent flyers??) provides relief only if I then slouch to avoid riding the entire flight with my head pressed forward at an uncomfortable angle. Why, United, why?

I’m afraid that my reasons for paying $70 more for Air France must now be clear to you, dear United. I am sorry to have had to resorted to such measures as flying through Charles de Gaulle simply to avoid you and forgoing your ever-so-tempting frequent flyer miles. But I fear I have no other option if the reclining person in front of me and other people in my immediate vicinity are to arrive in Washington Dulles entire and intact. I hope you understand.

With a heart heavy with regret,
Miss Anna C. Murray

update

I PROMISE I’ll post pictures soon…ish. I’ve taken some, I just need to post them. We keep changing things around, so it already looks a bit different. So they won’t be quite “before” pictures, but more like, “not before before, in the middle, after we moved in and after we finished buying all the furniture.”

Otherwise, not much to report. Classes start next week at Anglo American, which means I’ve been puttering around without much to do other than a few private lessons here and there which keep getting canceled. It’s nice because I have free time; it sucks because my October paycheck will be even worse than my September one, which was already distinctly unimpressive. I have most of my schedule though – I only have one late-evening course (9 pm-10:15), and at the moment no 9:30-in-the-morning classes – except for Saturday morning, in Casalecchio, again. Oh well, it beats going there in the evening twice a week. So I personally can’t really complain,

Tt’s finally gotten chilly, which is nice because the summery weather was starting to freak me out, and I love crisp autumn air. Also now I live around trees again and dammit I want to see them change colors. I missed that last year.

Still no internet. Riccardo is as “mad as a panther,” as they say here. We submitted for it back in September and they still haven’t even installed the line. So we’re telling Fastweb “no thanks” and going with Alice. Who might not be any faster at installation, and are a bit more expensive, but at least we aren’t giving any of our very small income to that breathtakingly incompetent company. At the moment I’m at Riccardo’s work (the architect isn’t in this afternoon) and borrowing their internet.

The other disadvantage to living on a brand new street – last night when Riccardo got home we didn’t feel like hiking to the nearest grocery store, so we ordered pizza from the brochure that a pizza place had slipped into our mailbox. Riccardo had to spell the name of the street for them a couple times and tell them where it was, and they told us about 30-40 minutes. Forty-five minutes later, no pizza. He called again. The lady said sorry, the delivery guy had had trouble with his motorino, it was Via Mazzetti, right? No no, Cencetti – he spelled it again, and very carefully described its location and appearance, and how to get to the front door. Half an hour later – by now we’re at about an hour and a half after we had ordered – he called back and the lady said that they had called him but he hadn’t responded. So sorry, goodnight. (His phone hadn’t rung once.) So no pizza at home for Anna and Riccardo. We threw the brochure away.

The cat spends his nights making Riccardo’s life miserable by walking on him, purring on his face, playing with his feet, and washing himself loudly, making the mattress bounce as he does so. Tossing him to the floor has the same effect as tossing a rubber bouncy ball to the floor.

That’s all!

quickie

I only have a minute, so this is going to be brief, but I am mostly moved in to the new apartment. I love it. We still need the doors to the shower, the hood over the stove, a gas hookup, washing machine, and a faucet for the kitchen sink, but otherwise it’s beginning to feel like home. The cat, after protesting loudly in the car and all the way up the elevator, promptly hid under the couch, and then by the next morning declared that the new place would do by throwing up on the floor. By now he parades around like he owns the place.

whew

Okay, there is now a kitchen (though no gas or faucet), a bed (complete with mattress!), four chairs, two bookshelves (in the bathroom?), a couch, and working lights and electrical outlets.  These are ten things that weren’t there yesterday.  In addition my apartment is finally starting to look satisfyingly empty, and tomorrow I don’t have to teach at all, I can just take care of everything.  I feel better.  Now we just have to wait and see how Fattycat reacts to it all.

In related news, because Fastweb is notoriously slow at getting anything done, particularly if it involves installing modems, I probably won’t be online much for the next week or two.

uh oh

It is Monday night at 1:20 in the morning (well, Tuesday morning).  My lease ends in exactly 48 hours.  We just went over to the new apartment and one wall still needs to be whitewashed (so there are still supplies and tools on the floor), two out of four of the lights need to be wired correctly, most of the outlets are still open holes in the wall, the kitchen is yet to be installed and in pieces in the main room (though no longer in the garage, thanks to Riccardo and friends), and the only piece of furniture put together is one (1) chair.

Be still my heart.

Cicileo

For exactly one more week, I will have the privilege of living down the street from the Cicileo.  Of all the aspects of my so-called “dolce vita,” this is one thing that is unquestionably picture-perfect.  If you were to take a second to imagine living on a narrow little Italian street, complete with green wooden shutters and flagstones and people on bicycles, and if you were to imagine what kind of cafè might be on this sort of dream via, the Cicileo is that place.

It is the kind of bar that belongs in a whimsical European art house film about the funny and strange twists and turns of life and love and the quirky personalities that you encounter.  The kind that has no real plot or protagonist yet is so irresistibly charming that it makes it straight to the top of your Amazon shopping cart after you rented it on Netflix (not the kind that comes out in most Hoyts Cinemas).

It’s tiny, probably about forty square meters, if that.  The floors are black with splashes of bright green and sparkly flecks of micah under the varnish.  The walls are painted bright yellow and covered in all sorts of idiosyncratic art, including but not limited to a painting of Frank Zappa and a digital photo frame that pages through photos of beautifully arranged finger food on a black background.  The bathroom might best be described as startling – behind the doorway is a beaded curtain, and it’s lit by a disco light that flashes bright pink, green, and blue shapes on the walls.

The food during the day is standard though superior bar fare – pastries in the morning, sandwiches and salads at lunch – but that changes around 7:00, when it’s time for aperitivo and the real artistry comes out.  At €6 for a plate of snacks and a glass of wine, Claudio prepares the kind of aperitivo food that you never saw coming.  Little bits of toasted bread get topped by any number of carefully selected ingredients – parsley pesto, slices of pear topped by reduced balsamic vinegar, combinations you would never expect, Pugliese specialties among them.  Later come the tartlets, equally inventive and unbelievably delectable.  If you’re not in the mood for a spritz, the staff might suggest which wine to try.

And the staff.  There seem to be exactly three of them; and two of them, Claudio and Elisa, are there almost all of the time.  They’re friendly, chipper, and a little offbeat.  In fact, Claudio bears an eerie resemblance to Frank Zappa hanging on the wall behind him, which prompts the question – is Zappa really dead, or is he hiding out Elvis-style? (Because if he were, he’d probably be here.)  They recognize you, they greet you cheerfully at 8 in the morning (even when you know that you saw them there at 1 the night before), they remember what you usually get, if they see you often enough they’ll treat you to the occasional coffee or two.  We run into them all around Bologna, in the grocery stores, at other bars on their night off, in the street.

In fact, ten minutes ago I ran into Claudio on my way home – he was heading home himself.  I commented how much I love their place, and how much work it must be for them.  “About twelve hours a day,” he said cheerfully.  But when I expressed astonishment, he added hurriedly, “But it’s not actually work, not really.  You see so many people, it’s like you’re standing still watching all of life go by you.  In fact, the other day we saw a young woman come in who looked so sad – maybe she had had a fight with her boyfriend, who knows.  Her eyes glistened.  So we tweaked the music a bit – just somber enough to suit her mood – and she started to cry right there.  Later we saw her on the street with her eyes all red, laughing.

It’s amazing how you can affect people.”

Ikea is a dirty rotten liar

1) couch which is cat proof with replaceable cushion covers, but which might be too big for the apartment, or

2) couch which would fit well in the apartment, but which we would have to carry whole up two flights of stairs and which happens to be the one sofa for which Ikea doesn’t sell any replaceable slip cover, risking that the cat will destroy it within the week.
(And I’m not nearly handy enough to make one myself sans sewing machine.  or hell, even with a sewing machine.)

The bottom line, is, Ikea lies; they don’t provide solutions.  At least not good ones.

unfinished projects and Bolognese (not the pasta)

I hate starting a big new project (like organizing all my teaching photocopies and materials) and then being either interrupted or blocked from being to finish it (for instance by lack of vital paper clips and plastic sleeves) so that it’s all over your floor and you’re not quite sure what to do with it, because you can’t finish it properly but neither can you pack it up because the System will be ruined.

But neither can you just leave it there, because when you live with Evil Incarnate it tends to run around and wreak havoc on any neat paper piles that might be sitting around.

In other news, I’ve begun teaching myself as much as I can of the Bolognese dialect.  Just because I decided that Italian wasn’t useless enough.  So far I know how to say, “Piutost che gnìnt l’è mei piutost” (Better to have something than nothing); “Strichè la camîsa!” (Button your shirt!), “Eh, bän bän…” (mamma mia…) “Socc’mel!” (Holy shit!)

Basically, I’ve learned Grandma Bolognese.  Profane Grandma Bolognese.

aftermath

The aftermath of yesterday’s events:

1) Apparently eating a massive lunch a week or so after finally recovering from mysterious Asian gastrointestinal virus = much suffering 12 hours later.

2) While I was suffering, the cat, either thrilled or freaked out by all the new space opened up by the repositioning of the bed, raced back and forth and all around the apartment all night long.

Sigh.

food

Today I did two things: helped turn my massive ceiling bed-cabinet structure back against the wall (or rather, supervised as Riccardo did it), and ate my weight in food.

A couple months after moving in, Riccardo and Natalie and I turned my bed-wardrobe around so that the back of it would block off my room from the front door – while contributing greatly to my privacy, it also revealed a very quirky but slightly ugly painting on the back.  Now Natalie’s gone and with it the need to block off my room, and the proprietor is bringing by people nearly every day, and he’s been trying to nicely say that the way the room is set up now is unsightly (though I maintain that it might even be attractive to the pairs of people coming to see it – it DOES provide privacy).  So today Riccardo finally turned it back around for me.  It’s really heavy, and has a tendency to catch on the floor.  Fortunately it can’t fall over because the ceiling blocks any rocking motion, but it was a pretty tough anyway.  Thank you, Riccardo!!!

Secondly, Giorgio hosted a lunch at his house in Lugo, in the eastern Romagna near Ravenna (he lives in Bologna though; it was his grandparents’ house).  There were twenty-one of us, and it was an AMAZING lunch, but such a massive amount of food that we almost all died.  First there were piadinas with salumi (sliced cured meats – prosciutto, pancetta, porchetta, etc) and squacquerone. Then there were THREE pasta dishes – spaghetti with lemon and speck, penne with a kind of mushroom sauce, and tortellini with prosciutto cotto and peas.  Then there were the secondi – meatballs in tomato sauce, a tuna thing, and a kind of quiche.  Then came the tenerina – chocolate cake.  I mean – NOBODY managed to eat a sizable amount of anything, I don’t think.  It was a massive amount of food, all of it delicious.  Afterwards we were all about to fall asleep because of all the food and wine at 1 pm.

But it was marvelous.