Geneva; Switzerland

I woke up at 10am in Bucharest, still knackered from last nights late night, and the night shift the day before. Unfortunately this was also check-out time at the hostel, and my flight departed at 12:15. Realising that my plans for early-morning exploring had gone right down the shitter and there was no time to be experimenting with Romanian trams to get to the airport, I hopped in an Uber and arrived at the gate to be confronted with one of life’s most baffling mysteries: why do people clamour to get on a plane first? You already know what seat you’ll be in; it’s not like the good ones will be gone by the time you get there, and unless you’re in a window seat you’ll have to get up to let other people on anyway. Why would you opt to spend more time in an even less comfortable environment than the departure lounge? We all take off at the same time!

The flight to Switzerland flew over Lake Geneva (impressive) and was far less eventful than yesterday’s. My Franglais has improved just enough so I can walk into a shop to buy postcards and stamps and shopkeepers hesitantly respond in French, and don’t just roll their eyes and speak in their perfect English, so that’s something. As I was writing the postcards it occurred to me that a crack habit may well be a cheaper hobby than dicking around in foreign countries and spending a fortune on international stamps.

In other news, I’ve handed my notice in at work. Mentally and physically I just can’t do it any more. It’s no co-incidence I’m getting so many UTIs/kidney infections/kidney stones: it’s because I often don’t have time to use the bathroom during a 12.5 hour shift, or re-fill my 750ml water bottle. Every single day I’ll be asked “do you have kids?” by a couple, and the urge to reply with “no, and I swallow every time so I don't know what's going on” or “yes, but social services took them off me” gets stronger each time. It’s probably best to resign before I say that and get fired. 

Love Emily x

Bucharest; Romania

If ‘Jeremy Kyle on a Plane’ existed, then I’ve just had a front row seat at a live recording.

My day started quite badly: I finished a night shift, went home for 90 minutes sleep before heading to Luton to fly to Bucharest, and realised (after I slept through my alarm for 2 solid hours) that 90 minutes in ~24 hours was obviously not enough sleep. Best case scenario was I could get a train which arrived at the airport at 15:03 for a 15:30 take off... worth a roll of the dice, surely? I expect many things from WizzAir but punctuality is not one of them, the flight was predictably delayed by over an hour, and my gamble paid off.

After I (finally) boarded the plane a bit of a kerfuffle kicked off because some passengers needed re-seating to “balance the aircraft” (I don’t know much about aerophysics, but I’d hope there’s a little more to it than moving some fat people around?), but they’d paid to reserve their seats so they were having none of it. The argument with the steward was in Romanian but the bilingual guy next to me very kindly gave me a running translation. Eventually there was a re-jiggle of a fair few people on the plane, and everything was “balanced”. Problem solved!

Wrong.

The initial people who were asked to move didn’t like their new seats and asked to get off the plane. The steward looked really stressed out by this, and I assumed this was because he’d need to arrange for their luggage to come out of the hold and delay things even more. Whilst that turned out to be part of his problem, the far larger issue was the re-re-balancing of the plane, and then checking EVERY SINGLE PERSON’S BAGS to make sure the deserters hadn’t left anything potentially dodgy on board. By the time this was sorted we’d been sat on tarmac for over an hour, long missed the take-off slot, and the pilot advised us of a further hour delay.

I thought the drama was over when we eventually landed the wrong side of midnight, but then some fuckwit tried lighting up a fag on the way to the terminal, received a lot of disbelieving glances from other passengers, decided against smoking the fag, chucked it on the (oil covered) ground, and got arrested. 

The flight delays meant I arrived at my hotel well after the check-in desk closed so, barely able to keep my eyes open and willing to accept any (unoccupied) bed, I found a hostel and crashed there. It could well have been shite, but I was so exhausted that I didn’t notice or care.

Love Emily x