A Long Day and a Cold Beer

There's a famous scene, in Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence emerges from the desert and orders a glass of lemonade at the officers' parlor. On the worst day of my travels, when I lost all motivation to keep going on, I thought about that scene. I thought that if I finally got to my hostel, at the end of the day, I'd order a single, cold beer and just sit back and relax with it.

My miserable day, of course, is far too long to describe in a blog, and there are of course parts of it that aren't worth going into detail. Some memories, like the check-in clerk who ignored me and two other Americans for 35 minutes before ushering five Italians through the gate just before the day's last flight to Venice took off, are simply too recent and bitter to relive. Others, like the question of where my bag was or how I could get it, the small plane that crashed on the sole runway just as we were ready to leave Sardinia behind (nobody was hurt), or the extended journey from Verona airport to my hostel in Venice (only took 3.5 hours!), are just too outright traumatic. Just know that during a single 24 hour period, I was treated like dirt by the baggage handlers, check-in clerks, customer service reps, claims officers, and pilots of Alitalia, all on separate occasions. My journey, which originially should have been no more than 4 hours door-to-door, ended up taking 16, most of which was spent in one of Italy's smallest airports.

So, did I handle myself with restraint during this time period? It depends on how you look at it. Click on the video above and you can see my general behavior toward pretty much every Italian at that moment. I think, actually, that my failure to kill anyone was indicative of remarkable restraint.

In any case, when I finally did get to my hostel at 12:45 AM and ordered that beer, I enjoyed it to the fullest. Mentally and physically exhausted, my anger had run out. A whole day in Europe had been wasted by incompetency at every level of Italy's social pyramid (more on that in a future post). But at that moment, as I felt the coldness against my fingers and in my throat, and realized there were no more connections to run to save for the inviting bed to sleep in, life was good. And that's how the worst non-tragic day of my life ended on a high note.