Travelling is always fun

At current trip I already had a few incidents – like the online ticket ordering fun mentioned before. There were more.

Lithuanian airlines (flylal) decided instead of using proper plane to use some chartered one. That plane used to be chartered to ferry livestock.. ergh.. tourists to warm countries, but this time it was the one carrying me. The only real trouble about this was simply that they… had 20% less legroom. Maybe it is slight inconvenience for regular traveller, but it has somewhat more serious implications for anyone who is 2m tall. What saved mine (and possibly their) nerves was that I had no neighbors around. I just stretched my legs on next two seats and crashed sleeping (though woke up with unhappy backbone ;-).

Today I had some “happy hours” too. This morning we were going to Bologne, and to save our time we decided to use self-serve ticketing machines. Everything went smooth, we selected our train, class, no-discount tickets (one has to get a special card if wants to use junior rates), did feed all 52EUR where it simply hanged. The screen was showing that 50EUR were given, 2EUR coin was not accounted, coin gates were closed, and… ‘Cancel’ did not work. Some random railroad worker could not help us at all, as we had our interface in ‘English’, but finally, after some running and shouting we got few technicians coming, writing down papers, asking us to sign and finally giving money back. Of course, as just 10 minutes were left until departure of our train we had to whine about it, so we had our tickets without any queues from a human afterwards. Yay for ticket machines!

This was the bestest top-quality train (Eurostar!), where one has to extend the table, in order to place his legs somewhere, so for backwards journey I decided to take first class – it should deal with it. Indeed it did, the table had much better design, there seemed to be more space, and the chairs were ergonomic. Now the problem with ergonomic chairs is that they’re very comfortable for people they are designed to be comfortable. Anyone taller is surely excluded, so the huge head support system (it has to have a fancy name) was somewhere behind and below my shoulders. That is the constant problem with any ergonomic chairs, and I’m still in progress of finding a new chair for my home-office, but at least I can choose to sit on a chair that is not that irritating. Maybe I should’ve travelled second class, as all normal people. :)