RyanAir: the things that went wrong

What can I say? The creek rose. Specifically, when I turned on my loyal computer last night after three longs months, my 4-year-old IBM 30 Gigabunny hard disk finally breathed its last, meaning that not only did I lose probably around 500 Megabunnies of personal writing and photos, I couldn’t even start Windows and therefore beguile you folks with the following tale like I had intended. Let this be a lesson to the wise: when your hard disk starts making grinding noise, it’s time to get a new one.

Moving right along.

RyanAir is a low-cost airline that flies around Europe. It’s dirt-cheap: $20 or so for a one-way flight anywhere on the continent. You lose amenities like drink service and free peanuts, of course, but you also save a ton of money. I flew them three times: Frankfurt to Rome, Rome to Barcelona, and Barcelona to Paris. I don’t know if a stewardess put a gypsy curse on me or what, but for whatever reason, disaster struck on each and every flight, twice in some cases. The airline itself isn’t to blame except in the first case; after that you can blame the sky – or karma, every drop of which rushed out of my body at the mere mention of the name “RyanAir” like dirty water out of a tub. I’m not making any of this up.

Frankfurt: I took a night train from Vienna into Frankfurt, arriving at 6:04 am for my 7:45 pm flight. After asking a half dozen or so people if they were sure there was only one airport in Frankfurt, I wrote down the appropriate train schedule and what time I would have to get back to the Hauptbanhof in order to catch it and make my flight, then set off to explore the city. Had a great day: saw some cathedrals; visited a flea market and haggled for used books with grizzled Fankfurter with exactly four teeth; bought the best kebab ever; went to a modern art museum whose exhibits included a stillborn child encased in a concrete block, bubbles blown with water used to wash corpses, 150 kg of confetti spread evenly across the floor of a room, and a broom closet. Finally, at around 4:30, a little over two hours before takeoff, I decided to check my email and, while I was at it, confirm the flight number and time. I’d written down all my flight information on the back of a library brochure, and I wanted to make sure I had the right confirmation number. I read over the airline’s booking confirmation email once more, and noticed that the actual point of departure was designated as “Frankfurt (Hahn)”. I frowned, pulled out my map to look for the Hahn airport, then decided to google “Frankfurt Hahn”. What came up was the website for an airport in the little town of Hahn, over an hour outside of Frankfurt, for which the last airport shuttle had left ten minutes ago. Shit. I sprinted back to the Hauptbanhof, asking strangers every few blocks “Wissen Sie wo der Hauptbanhof ist?” just in case, then found a taxi and asked if they could drive me to the Hahn airport. I figured the ride would cost around 80 Euros – a hit, but not a crushing one. Not so! I carried on awkward, halting conversation in German with the driver, watching as the meter counted off dimes once a second, climbing to 185 Euros by the time we arrived. All my precious savings from buying cheap airline tickets – and then some – flew out of my pocket faster than a greased pig covered in Teflon. I’m not sure if that’s an appropriate analogy, but you get the idea. I said to myself, “Everyone gets one major screw-up while traveling through Europe, so this will have to be mine.” I should have knocked on wood.

Rome: I had a fairly difficult time finding my hostel after touching down in Ciampino, the town outside of Rome that RyanAir flies to, but nothing catastrophic happened, certainly. Five very (meteorologically) hot days later, I was on a bus back to the same airport at 11pm, hoping to spend the night in the terminal, save money on a hostel, and catch my 6:30 am flight to Barcelona easier. I arrived at the airport and found around 20 other hostel-less kids all with the same idea as myself. I had a bunch of cream cheese left in my food bag which was already most of the way to expired, so I asked a couple of the kids waiting if they wanted it. Pretty soon we had a full-fledged picnic spread out on the floor of the terminal, with bread, cheese, jam, nutella, crackers, and a spreading knife fashioned from paper cups and tape. Before long, however, we noticed we were surrounded by uniformed police officers, around eight of them, arranged in a loose circle around our meal. “You have to leave. You have to go outside,” they told us. I thought it was a pretty harsh punishment for getting crumbs on the floor, but we weren’t about to try to negotiate. We thought we were being unfairly singled out, but as we were packing up to leave, they turned and repeated their message to the entire room: everyone had to leave, all 20 kids, and no one could re-enter the terminal until 4am. We wandered outside, found a grassy strip by a checkpoint in the parking lot, spread out towels and sleeping mats, and continued the picnic there. There were around 15 travelers stranded outside on our patch of lawn, and we stayed up talking, eating, and playing guitar for a few more hours. Periodically, police carrying assault rifles would walk slowly past, and everyone would desperately avoid eye contact. Rumors as to the real cause of our ejection flew rampant: “If there had been one person over 40 wearing a suit, they wouldn’t have kicked anyone out.” “It’s a good thing that we’re all the sort of people looking to have adventures.” Um, yeah. I really liked a couple of the kids I met, but it was doomed to a short friendship, as with most airport friends. We said an over-sad goodbye in the morning, and I caught my flight, riding on perhaps an hour and a half of sleep, without incident.

Barcelona: I arrived in Girona, the tiny airport an hour outside of Barcelona RyanAir flies to, a few hours later. Somewhere between buying a ticket for the bus to Girona and getting on that bus, someone picked my pocket. I was so sleep-deprived I must have been any easy target, and in fact I didn’t notice it was missing until after stepping off the bus in downtown Barcelona. I panicked, searched the bus, questioned people, tried to get back onto a bus to the airport and convince the driver to take me there for free, only to discover it was another bus than I’d ridden. The police came, and between their English and my Spanish, we determined that they were going to be absolutely no help. At that point, I had no idea what to do. I was exhausted; I was starving; I was scared; I had no place to stay or food eat; I had 1.60 Euro in my pocket. Then I remembered that I’d met a girl named Kyleigh in Rome at the hostel who lives in Barcelona, and we did the whole “this is what you should do and see in Barcelona” thing, and she’d written down her phone number in the city along with the list of museums and festivals and stuff. I used my last Euro to call her, she answered, we met in Plaza Catalunya, and she was an absolute angel. She bought me lunch, found me a pension, gave me money, gave me phone cards, took me to a net cafe so I could look up the numbers to cancel my credit cards. If not for her, I think I would be curled up in a gutter somewhere right now. The five hours on the phone with my bank and Visa International, most of them on hold, were a pain in the ass, but the only real loss was the 5 Euros I had in the wallet. The thief tried to withdraw $2000 from my checking account, but even if he’d had my PIN the money wouldn’t have been there. I had money wired to me for the rest of the trip, and even though I paid her back monetarily, I will be forever in Kyleigh’s debt.

Barcelona, pt. 2: Five days later, I was sleeping on Kyleigh’s couch with my cell phone set to wake me up at 2:55 to catch the 4:00 bus to the airport to catch my 6:20 flight to Paris. Yes, one of the annoying things about RyanAir is the number of steps it takes to get to the airports. At some point I woke up, looked at my watch, and saw that it was 3:48 am. The bus stop was around 40 minutes away on foot. Panicking again, I threw my belongings onto me, ran down the stairs, then down an alleyway, past puking drunks and bums, to La Rambla and hailed the first cab I saw. “52 Passeig de Sant Juan!” I ordered, climbing in the back with my huge pack and my guitar. “Y puede Ud. ir muy rapido? Tengo que estar en el autobus en cinco minutos.” To my surprise, he actually did exactly as I asked, swerving around other cars and pedestrians, flipping people the bird, the works. The bus was still there when I arrived, so no real harm done; just a scare. I tipped the driver well.

Paris: RyanAir’s tragedies end here, since technically I was flying with Lufthansa from that point on. It seems fitting to mention, nevertheless, that I lost my tiny little pocketknife, the one with my name on it that my sister bought me in Switzerland and which had been the single most useful item I brought with me to Europe, to airport security in Charles de Gaulle. I took it off my keychain and shoved it underneath my CD player in my backpack, hoping that the electronics would conceal it, but the woman running the X-Ray machine was very good at her job. All I accomplished, despite my trickery and later groveling, was holding up the line.

Given the preponderance of evidence above, one is forced to conclude, as I have, that either RyanAir is cursed or that I am. Guess which one I chose?