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Jan. 11th, 2003 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
holliFINALLY got around to writing up winter vacation. Here's Day One; more to follow.
DAY ONE
Slept lateish, since I was staying home from school and we didn't have to leave for the airport 'til noon. When we got to the airport (National, which I refuse to call Reagan National on moral grounds, plus Joey Ramone National Airport has a much better ring to it) we were pleasantly surprised to find no line at check-in.
About thirty seconds after we got there, 82 members of the Russian Ballet turned up. No lie.
We headed for the security checkpoint, where the Lassie lunchbox in my backpack was misinterpreted as a weapon of mass destrustion by the X-ray machine people. Once that little misunderstanding was cleared up, my sister's bag was searched and the really sharp pair of scissors she'd packed were confiscated. Dunno what the seven-year-old needed them for, but whatever. We made it to the gate mostly unharmed... until the plance arrived, and we were pulled out of the boarding line for a random search. Had to take off our shoes and everything, and all our carry-on luggage was hand-seached. But we eventually got on the actually place, and the flight to Logan was uneventful. Oh. Did I mention the part where all this drama was just to get us to the airport where we'd catch the plane that would take us to Italy? Yeah.
Anyway, from Boston we got on Plane #2 (Alitalia, the official airline of Italy) and headed out over the Atlantic. It was dinnertime at this point, and we found out that European airline food was no less sucky than the other kind. Also, Alitalia won't let passengers listen to CD players AT ALL. The whole flight. Fuckers.
I slept through the first movie ("Signs") and dozed through the second ("Serving Sara," and may I say that Matthew Perry better hang on to his TV career for dear life). We arrived in Milan around 8:30 local time... which was two in the morning to our bleary-eyed selves.
We sat around the Milan airport for a while, occasionally wandering around to look at the remarkably upscale duty-free shops. Much joy was had upon our discovery of Kinder Eggs, not sold in the States bacause they're a choking hazard to small children. At long last, we made it to the plane for Genoa, which was unbelievably tiny. It had propellors, which is not the kind of thing you expect from an international airline. Somehow, the Littlest Plane in the World made it to Genoa.
We didn't see a whole lot of Genoa, since there was only a two-hour window between us arriving and the Costa Europa embarking on our ten-day cruise. What we did see was qiute cool-- fountains, statues, narrow alleyways lined with itty-bitty shops, giant birthday cakes constructed of pinkish-gray stone (technically this was a building, but it didn't look that way). I dragged the family to an exhibtion of Italian modern art, mostly the Futurists but some other stuff too. It was quite cool to see so many names I recognized from my art history book, and interiors ofthe museum itself were the most gorgeous rooms I had ever seen until I got to Rome.
At this point, we headed back to the docks, where we got on the boat. It wasn't too spectacular, and anyway I didn't really form much of an imression of it when we first got there, because at that point I had slept for two of the previous twenty-four hours and was on the verge of collapse. Middle sister and I went right to bed; younger sister, who was somehow full of energy and who I am now frankly quite suspicious of, went to dinner with my parents. And that was it for Day One.
DAY ONE
Slept lateish, since I was staying home from school and we didn't have to leave for the airport 'til noon. When we got to the airport (National, which I refuse to call Reagan National on moral grounds, plus Joey Ramone National Airport has a much better ring to it) we were pleasantly surprised to find no line at check-in.
About thirty seconds after we got there, 82 members of the Russian Ballet turned up. No lie.
We headed for the security checkpoint, where the Lassie lunchbox in my backpack was misinterpreted as a weapon of mass destrustion by the X-ray machine people. Once that little misunderstanding was cleared up, my sister's bag was searched and the really sharp pair of scissors she'd packed were confiscated. Dunno what the seven-year-old needed them for, but whatever. We made it to the gate mostly unharmed... until the plance arrived, and we were pulled out of the boarding line for a random search. Had to take off our shoes and everything, and all our carry-on luggage was hand-seached. But we eventually got on the actually place, and the flight to Logan was uneventful. Oh. Did I mention the part where all this drama was just to get us to the airport where we'd catch the plane that would take us to Italy? Yeah.
Anyway, from Boston we got on Plane #2 (Alitalia, the official airline of Italy) and headed out over the Atlantic. It was dinnertime at this point, and we found out that European airline food was no less sucky than the other kind. Also, Alitalia won't let passengers listen to CD players AT ALL. The whole flight. Fuckers.
I slept through the first movie ("Signs") and dozed through the second ("Serving Sara," and may I say that Matthew Perry better hang on to his TV career for dear life). We arrived in Milan around 8:30 local time... which was two in the morning to our bleary-eyed selves.
We sat around the Milan airport for a while, occasionally wandering around to look at the remarkably upscale duty-free shops. Much joy was had upon our discovery of Kinder Eggs, not sold in the States bacause they're a choking hazard to small children. At long last, we made it to the plane for Genoa, which was unbelievably tiny. It had propellors, which is not the kind of thing you expect from an international airline. Somehow, the Littlest Plane in the World made it to Genoa.
We didn't see a whole lot of Genoa, since there was only a two-hour window between us arriving and the Costa Europa embarking on our ten-day cruise. What we did see was qiute cool-- fountains, statues, narrow alleyways lined with itty-bitty shops, giant birthday cakes constructed of pinkish-gray stone (technically this was a building, but it didn't look that way). I dragged the family to an exhibtion of Italian modern art, mostly the Futurists but some other stuff too. It was quite cool to see so many names I recognized from my art history book, and interiors ofthe museum itself were the most gorgeous rooms I had ever seen until I got to Rome.
At this point, we headed back to the docks, where we got on the boat. It wasn't too spectacular, and anyway I didn't really form much of an imression of it when we first got there, because at that point I had slept for two of the previous twenty-four hours and was on the verge of collapse. Middle sister and I went right to bed; younger sister, who was somehow full of energy and who I am now frankly quite suspicious of, went to dinner with my parents. And that was it for Day One.
