Chaos at Rome Airport

Here's a detailed look at my day in the Rome airport trying to get back to Stuttgart:

Had to leave the cruise ship Sunday morning at 6:45 to catch our shuttle bus to the airport so Greg would be there in plenty of time for his 11:50am flight. His US Airways flight was out of terminal 5 but my German Wings flight left at 5:05pm from terminal 3. We thought we'd be able to spend a few hours together waiting so I went with him on the shuttle bus to terminal 5. I waited in a chair in the back of this warehouse-looking terminal talking to another woman who had been on our cruise. After about 15 minutes, Greg came rushing over and said he'd been done for 10 minutes but they wouldn't let him out of the checked-in passenger area to come tell me and he couldn't get my attention from across the room. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go any farther than that without my own ticket in hand, so we had to part ways about 8:15am.

I had some trouble figuring out how to get to terminal 3 because I don't understand Italian and the signage wasn't great in general, but I finally made it. On the way to the airport, our tour guide said the shopping was better at the main terminal so I tried to waste some time going there as well, but found out most of the shops were beyond the security checkpoint, which I couldn't go through without a boarding pass. Bummer.

While I was waiting, I read a lot from this great book an international transition specialist gave me called something like "I'm a Stranger Here Too" (sorry I can't remember the title now), which is about a guy who lived in England for 20 years before returning to his home country, the States. I also listened to some music, did lots of people watching and even took a 30-minute nap leaning on my suitcase at one point. There was a LOT of time to kill and the airport's too far away from town to get a taxi for a quick tour.

I kept my eyes on the flight status monitors and when I saw desk number 224 pop up for my flight , I got in line and waited with the other people, who didn't speak German or English, but nodded when I asked if that line was for Stuttgart. Of course, it wasn't, which I realized after 40 or so minutes. So I waited elsewhere for a bit until I saw a new line forming in the same area, which was indeed for the Stuttgart flight according to the English and German speaking folks there, and I was third from the front.

While the TV screen in front of the line still showed the details from a flight to Russia (where those other folks were going), me and my fellow line-holders were confident the electronic board had put us in the right place, until we saw a monitor three desks down pop up the German Wings logo. By the time we knew what hit us, we were joining a new line somewhere in the 25th to 30th position. On the up side, I met a cool Norweigen man and his 15-year-old son, who both spoke great English and entertained me for a while with details of all their travels around the world.

After a long wait in that line, I finally got my boarding pass, which took about 30 seconds, then I skated through the security check with no beeps, although I'm not sure anyone was actually paying attention to my bags or anything else anyway. Quite a laissez-faire style of monitoring if you ask me.

I walked down lots of halls wasting time by checking every shop that wasn't a designer brand and bought a cute little mug shaped like a Vespa scooter in the colors of the Italian flag with the word Italia on the side. It's kind of cartoony, but will be a great addition to my cup/glass collection during my European travels.

I found my way to gate D10 and snagged an empty seat, but when I got up to check the flight status after our boarding time had passed, I unfortunately lost that great seat and was sentenced to life on the cold, hard floor until the flight before ours (a Paris flight already more then two hours delayed) was ready to queue.

Our flight was set back 30 minutes according to the monitor, but based on all the disgruntled Paris waiters around me, my optimism that it would only be a 30-minute delay was non-existent.

While I was on the floor, there was one announcement after another that flights were delayed or moved to other gates. It was like the operators were forced to list a gate, but whenever a plane actually came in, they just said, hmmmmm....where can we put it? And tons of people were sitting on the floor, which wasn't the cleanest airport floor I had seen before, and I kept thinking to myself, this could never happen in Germany. The structure and proper communication methods were less than stellar.

Thank goodness I had met that Norweigen guy earlier, because I saw him walk up to the counter, then quickly grab his bags and head elsewhere. I asked another Stuttgart passenger what was going on and word was quickly spreading that our gate number had changed...with no announcement! Just as we all made it down the long hallway to the gate D1, they were lining up to board just after 5pm.

Boarding wasn't so bad, but once the door of the plane was closed, the pilot came over the loudspeaker to announce that air traffic control was having some trouble getting us into the take-off schedule, so we had to wait another 10 minutes before even pulling away from our gate. Ugh.

From that point on, things were pretty smooth, but I'll certainly think twice before booking any future flights though Italy, especially ones with connections!