MARHABA TO MY BLOG!
I wrote this first post just after NOT leaving Rome succesfully...then got paranoid about posting it before actually arriving..so there's lots to catch up with already. I've been here in Israel and Palestine for 3 days and have been shouted up for lack of updates..so here we go!
11/01/11 - not a great day
What a great way to start my blog on my new adventure!
At this point in time I should be in Ramallah, West Bank meeting up with the people of Seeds of Peace, the human rights NGO I will be interning for, for the next 3 months.
Anyway I suppose this blog would be boring if everything would run smoothly, and you would stop reading it right away! So, yesterday bright and early I went to Rome Fiumicino airport to catch my flight all very nervous and super excited. For once I had called up the embassy and the airline to make sure everything would run smoothly. I haven't bought a return flight from Tel Aviv yet as I'm planning to travel a bit around the Middle East to neighbouring countries like Egypt and Jordan, and I was worried Israeli security would send me back.
Both the Embassy and Meridiana airlines told me you don't need a return flight
However, once I got to check in I was told I needed some kind of free, fake return ticket booking or else I would be sent back home on the spot! I had to run to the ticket office after all the queue and then set off to security!
Treasure hunt and the bin man
So my first experince going through security at FCO was nothing special at all. The usual talian look at teh passport with a bored face: - "Where are you off to?" - "Tel Aviv" - "Buon Viaggio!".
So far so good...got to the gate, decided to buy a bottle of wine for my host at duty free...when I found out the purse was GONE!
I ran up to the hostess and she told me they'd wait for me for 20 minutes for me to see if I'd dropped it in the Terminal shuttle. In those 20 minutes I managed to ran all over the airport with all sorts of security and police officers suggesting I do something different, lettign me go through forbidden routes and even letting me run through the metal detector scan with my phone in my hand.
After a rush that resembled the bureaucratic mess portrayed in the film 'Brazil', including security telling me to "take it easy, you've got all the time, go to office 1", which sent me to office 2, I got sent straight back to gate 2...where the plane was taking off!
Purse lost, flight lost...I went back to ticket office after asking ANYONE if they'd seen my purse, determined to buy ANY ticket that would get me out of Italy and to Tel Aviv (even if it menat flyign to London or Istanbul). Nothing left for less than 1000 euros for that day, so as I decided to give up and go for Israeli low cost airline Israir arriving at midnight in Tel Aviv :(
Finally, as I was about to pay, the cleaner in charge of those 200 metres I'd run through from check in to Meridiana ticket office for that fake return (yes bin men in Italy have a very precise domain delimited by an imaginary but knwn line, I learnt, after which they do not clean or pick up anything from), told me to go talk to the lady cleaners standing outside of a toilet which I'd never seen. Magically after hours of frantic running around my purse was right ontop of the hand towels' bin. Money gone but cards and documents all there. Presumption of innocence is of course there, but I suspect Mr bin man knew something about it....
Well now at least I'm going to a place where civil crime rate is extremely low.
not so serious *TIPS FOR THE TRAVELLER* learnt so far:
1. keep your purse/wallet safe in FCO and in Rome generally
2. if it is stolen ask the bin men: it is common policy for occasional thieves to steal the money and then throw your purse/wallet in the trash in order not to be accused of said crime. Moreover, bin men have a tacit conduct code and an unsuspected level of "organizatio", so its worth asking them, because they might have known where your wallet's gone all the way ;)
INSHALLAH flight attempt number 2 will be successful!
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Tomorrow's update will be on my second tragi-comic experience getting to Tel Aviv on an Israeli airline.... Ciao!
