About Gustis, Metros and Euros - I

A visit to Europe has always evaded me for the past 4-5 years for some reason or the other. More than a resource crunch, I feel it was a lack of resourcefulness on my part that prevented me from realizing my dream earlier. By the end of May this year, I had decided to take up this sojourn and visit a couple of countries on this continent. It was a bit more special as it would be a honeymoon vacation for a newly wedded yours truly. Europe's diversity starts from its name as the only continent that doesn't start with the letter 'A'. The diversity continues through each country's language, culture, food and system. We had decided to spend around 10 days exploring 2 countries, Italy and France.

Now why Italy and France? I always had this yearning to visit Paris and hence France. But being in Bangalore, applying for a Schengen visa via the French consulate involves travelling to Mumbai for fingerprinting and interviews. Given my sedentary self, I tried to find out ways to get away by not going to Mumbai. The alternatives, apply to the Italian or Austrian consulates where the chances of being called for an interview are minimum, if documents were prepared meticulously and were complete. Also the Schengen visa guidelines mandate you to apply for a visa from the country where you would be staying for the most number of days on your visit. I chose Italy over Austria and after everything, I don't regret my decision a bit.

Applying through a travel agent was easy enough except for preparing the documents. They wanted everything from my voter's id to my marriage certificate and everything in between. The height was when they asked me for a no-objection certificate from my employer that it was ok for me to go to Europe on a vacation. After a week, I ended up with visas for my wife and me, a pasted paper that says "Visto" (Visa in Italian perhaps). Prior to departure we had a brief checklist of things to buy and didn't account for Europe's diversity of weather. A couple of small backpacks, sun screen, moisturiser (a must for me even if I visit the Sahara desert), cotton clothes, jackets to keep you warm, insurance, currency (Euros at 71 rupees a piece), supporting documents, some packets of MTR ready-to-eat, Maggi noodles (people had scared us about the lack of veggie options in Europe) and some contact numbers. We were all set to leave on May 26th from the new airport at Bangalore.

The new airport is pretty impressive, though the size of the airport was smaller than what I had imagined. We were flying my "favorite" (sarcasm intended) airline, Air France and as usual my love affair with this airliner continued. The flight was late by about an hour and given that he takes a full 10 hours to fly from Bangalore to Paris CDG, I was pretty certain that we would miss our connection to Rome's FCO. But the ground staff were fairly responsive and immediately changed our tickets to a later flight from CDG to FCO. Mentally, I was gearing myself up for losing my baggage, reaching Rome 24 hours late or a plethora of such disasters. But everything went smoothly.

We arrived at the Rome Fiumicino airport (FCO) also called as the Leonardo Da Vinci International airport at around 1pm after commuting via CDG. No one even bothered to place a stamp on our passports. Yes, there was no immigration/customs check at FCO and we were on the streets of Rome after gathering our baggage. I was frantically looking for a place where we could get a stamp on our passports, but there was none and we were allowed to walk out of the terminal without any interruption. We walked straight to the railway terminal at the airport. A train, the Leonardo Da Vinci express (a non-stop train) takes us from the airport to Termini, the main railway station in Rome. The journey is around 30 minutes and a first class ticket costs around 11 Euros. We had a 4-day Eurail pass that we used (no need to pay if you have a pass) and hauled all our baggage into the 1st class compartment of the Leonardo Da Vinci express. Rome was hot and sultry at 28C and the train was pretty crowded. Most tourists on board the train seemed to be Americans, many among them old couples who perhaps were there to visit the Vatican. On the way the landscape was boring flat lands with apartment buildings lining the tracks. The majority of the buildings were brick-colored and appeared to be pretty identical. It appeared as if we were moving through a communist colony. Cloth lines, window shutters without glass and TV antennas decorated these ghetto like apartments.

After half hour, the train arrived at the Roma Termini, the central station at Rome. We had booked our hotels pretty close to the station and dodged a couple of taxi solicitors to be on the streets of Rome. But which direction do we go? As we were new to the place we didn't know where to get a map from nor did we know of any public transport system. My research had told me that the hotel was walking distance from the station. We asked a couple of cops who were standing nearby and they were quite rude. Atlast, one of them pointed us the direction we should be walking. We started looking for a place called Via Del Viminale asking every Tom, Dick and Harry on the way. Tom included a cop, Dick included an Indian man (I mean a person from the sub continent) and Harry was a woman at a beauty boutique. After 15 minutes of walk with 2 bags, 2 back packs and 2 weary bodies we found Hotel Impero. The gentlemen at the concierge spoke English (we were very glad) and gave us our room keys. We took the keys and opened the room we were supposed to be in and it was already occupied!!!!! Before we could go down and complain, the bell boy came racing upstairs and pointed us to our actual rooms. The man at the concierge apparently had made a mistake. The bell boy apologized profusely and we were happy to be in our room out from the heat of Rome. If you think this incident was shocking wait to read about our hotel room experiences in Paris in the posts to come.

I will be continuing with my posts about our European adventure. Till then...

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