When we arrived yesterday afternoon at the airport in Caglari, I was a bit bemused when we were told to wait because our flight was not ready to check in, and that we would have to use boarding passes on our cellphones unless we wanted to pay an exorbitant price for printing them out (which became more problematic when my cell phone charger stopped working in the evening and I had to save that remaining battery power for at least another day). This, however, allowed us the chance to have a bit of lunch, where I had a chicken caesar salad and a fruit salad with water and my mother had a fruit drink. When we were finally able to check-in for the flight we were told to wait in the handicapped lounge, which was not adequate preparation for what we found there.

We walked over the short distance to the lounge and found a madcap scene. There was a crowd of people waiting, some in wheelchairs and some obviously frail. One man seemed a bit overwhelmed by the calls he was receiving about absent people working or the ancient dot matrix printer spitting out paper, and we waited a bit for him to calm down enough to be able to let us know that since we had requested special assistance and were on the list and sent there by the check-in that we should just find a place to sit and wait for more information, and so we did. For most of the time we were in the lounge, the tv had on a mildly entertaining Spanish telenovela that was dubbed into Italian [1] and this, along with the occasional scenes in the lounge, provided all of the entertainment that we needed.

Among the more entertaining scenes to be found was when a bunch of workers for the airport dealing with mobility came in and disregarded the paperwork and talked in a furious fashion on phones and with the people waiting about who was responsible for getting various people to the right gates. The scene was straight out of a comedy show, with a lot of chaos ending up in all of the workers and most of the people sitting leaving the room and leaving only three people needing help. As it happened, one of the other ones was an older gentleman who at first appeared to be rather unfriendly and unhappy, but who ended up being a nice guy, who was traveling with his wife and two granddaughters who were a bit catty with each other but shy in talking with strangers, as seems to be pretty common in these parts. During one interlude the man’s wife explained to me that she had been from the area of Rome but that she and her husband lived in Catania now and that his daughter–who was not hers–had married a guy from Cagliari and moved there. The mother tried sorting out things with the kids–her husband was nowhere to be seen at the airport–but it was only the two older people and the two girls who ended up on the flight after the mother kissed them all goodbye. Finally, after all the drama on the tv and in the room, it was time for us to head to our flight, which of course involved the drama of racing through security, which proved to be entertaining, and then getting on the lift truck and having to wait for someone who had surrepetitiously taken a snack break and showed up with a panini trying to finish it as he moved us to the plane.

Nor did the comedy stop there. Our taxi driver in Catania who took us from the airport to the hotel gave us an informal tour of the city and its locations, as we were staying in the center part of town near some famous statues and buildings and plazas that were overflowing with pedestrians. The evening traffic in the city, which the driver stated was normal, was evaded by the taxi driver in a curious fashion, by driving through the port of the city. This led to a furious conversation between the taxi driver, who could show his amused and obviously not dangerous American passengers to the person responsible for allowing traffic into the port area, who seemed to think that a taxi driver trying to get his fares to their destination as fast as possible was not a valid reason to enter the port area. But before too long we were able to put our suitcases down and unwind a bit and head to a lovely dinner before crashing asleep as is proper after a crazy day, I suppose.

[1] Bonus content: When we were watching the show, called Sei Sorelle, it seemed as if the show was going for a 1910’s Edwardian vibe, given most of the female costumes and hairdos, which my mother picked up on pretty quickly. The men’s clothing was less accurate though, with one of the male characters looking like something out of a 1950s Mad Max with a dark gray pinstripe suit that was wholly unsuited for the 1910’s. In one dramatic scene towards the end of the episode, a young woman shows her anachronistic nylons as she tries, ultimately successfully, to seduce a reluctant man who was not wise enough to depart the scene, and my mother found that to be pretty ridiculous given the time period as well. The set design was trash tier as well, with some of the scenes looking relatively authentic, but then a postwar fridge ruining one scene, and a bizarre wagon wheel looking strangely futuristic, and a bar that looks out of the 1960’s or 1970’s or something. I’m not sure where the budget for the show went, but the sets were particularly bad at setting the mood properly.