I wasn’t sure I would publish this…After re-reading it, it does seem a bit silly…more like something I might write for Facebook…
But I am too jetlagged to do any serious research or even write a funny piece…so here goes!
I arrived in Florence on Wednesday afternoon. The Boston-Zurich-Florence trip was, thankfully, uneventful…No customs problems in Zurich (on the contrary, my customs official couldn’t have been nicer)…No lost or damaged luggage…Everything went smoothly, except for a bit of turbulence over Nova Scotia, undoubtedly triggered by what was left of Hurricane Igor…
However, since complaints are sometimes a bit more fun to read than praise, I do have a short list of those, as follows…
1: there was almost no space at all between seat rows on this particular aircraft, so the flight was quite uncomfortable, especially for my long legs (I should note that I was in Economy class, though I guess that is obvious!). I wonder how anyone taller than I am can, er, stand it…? Long flights should really provide comfortable seats with plenty of legroom. It wouldn’t take much, really. I mean, this was ridiculous…I was so squished against the man sitting in front of me that my TV screen ended up being just a few inches from my nose, making it almost impossible to watch the movie (=that might actually have been a good thing…see point number three 😉 ).
2: dinner. The choice was between chicken and pasta. I chose pasta, since I am VERY MUCH opposed, for a variety of VERY good reasons!, to battery-farm-raised/tortured chickens. I don’t know how the chicken dish tasted, obviously, but I can assure you that my tortellini looked so revolting that I almost took a photo of ‘em. A tiny, useless amount of tomato sauce stared at me unappealingly from the bottom of the dish, which meant that the sauceless tortellini had completely dried out in the process of being reheated….Oh, and a few of the tortellini in the center of the dish were covered by a couple of withered strands of spinach. My dinner ended up being a roll with some cheese…
3: the movie selection. I confess that I watched “Sex and the City, Part II” on the flight to the U.S. (two weeks ago). Avoid that movie at all costs if, like me, you hated…no, let me correct that…if, like me, you loathed Part I, which, at the time I saw it (coincidentally, during a flight to the U.S., two years ago…), zoomed to the top of my “worst movie on the planet” list. I got through Part II only because the movie selection wasn’t very exciting…I should instead have read my book. Compared to Part I, Part II was even dumber…even more unbearably pointless, annoying and offensive on many levels. And it was just plain boring…For these reasons, it has replaced Part I as THE WORST movie ever made. Just my opinion, of course…
Still under 3. The movie that I watched a few nights ago, on my return flight, was titled “Letters to Juliet.” Another gem has been added to my “worst movie on the planet” list. Okay, it was not as bad as the above-mentioned disaster, thanks to a couple of interesting scenes, which I will get to in a moment… Let’s see. The basic idea was a good one…And yes, seeing fabulous Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero together was somewhat enjoyable. Oh, and of course (!) the snippets of scenery were incredibly fabulous: the lovely cities of Verona and Siena, and the rolling, cypress-covered hills of my Tuscany. But the best part of the movie was the brief, alas!, focus on a group of VERY talented Italian actresses, including Luisa Ranieri and Marina Massironi. For me, those were the most compelling scenes in the entire movie…
If only the plot had built on that promising beginning, that is, the intriguing letter-writing role played by the group of Italian women…if only it had expanded on the background and lives of those dedicated women…perhaps throwing in, for colour, a bit of wonderful traditional Italian cooking, barely mentioned in a couple of scenes that overly concentrated on the oh-so-very-annoying exclamations of delight uttered by the oh-so-very-annoying fiancé/chef…
If only the story had focused on those two aspects, I am convinced that “Letters to Juliet” would have turned into a spendid movie. But no, the plot took a wrong turn and ended up in a simply dreadful cul-de-sac…It was utterly unconvincing, completely stupid, totally predictable and unbelievably boring. Oh, and don’t get me started on the two main characters…that obnoxious young couple that ends up falling in love…Assurdo! Okay, I will stop here and go on to a more important topic…
4: sick, germy people. Of course, it isn’t the airline’s fault if sick passengers board an airplane. Still, it would be nice for airlines to have a “mask” policy for visibly ill passengers. If I were ill, I wouldn’t mind wearing a mask, so why should anyone else? Case in point: a man sitting two rows behind me coughed (a deep, throaty cough) throughout the flight…almost seven hours without stopping. He should have been wearing a mask. I just hope he didn’t contaminate me and anyone else with a compromised immune system…eeek! But so far, so good…
Okay, enough complaining! Now for some positive stuff.
Getting home from the airport. As soon as I opened the front door, I was greeted by our five excited cats (they had all been taking their usual nap, of course, but I guess that somehow they knew that I had returned…). They aren’t letting me out of their eyesight now. If I go out on the terrace to hang out some laundry, they watch me from the door and scold me for having been out too long when I come back inside. So cute! 🙂 And Pinga, my one-year-old baby, has been sleeping on my shoulder for the past couple of nights…She is getting a bit too heavy for that, but I don’t mind.
But, as happy as the cats were to see me, it was the happiest man in Italy who hugged me at the airport…
Yes, it’s good to be home! 🙂