Day 53 - (Travelling to) Santa Margherita Ligure
Another travelling day
Today was a very relaxed (but long) day given its a travel day. I only had to be at the airport by for a 2:10pm flight and I was confident about getting there on public transport in under an hour. It meant that I couldn’t really do anything else and remain relaxed, but the travelling was going to be straightforward.
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The AirBNB was underneath the right-hand side of the first house on the left of the picture |
I said goodbye to Mhairi and Charlie and headed down to Krem Karamel for another breakfast. This time it was a different couple operating the shop but the coffee was just as good, I chose the Scottish Porridge this time, because Edinburgh. It was very nice but was not served with additional fluid (like milk) and so was a quite claggy experience. The berries cut that a bit, but not enough for my taste. Lesson learned.
While I had connectivity in the Krem Karamel, I brought up Google Maps and got my public transport route to the airport loaded up. The next bus was in 8 minutes, so I settled up with the shopkeeper and headed 150 feet up the road to the nearest stop. (All this detail to record just how convenient the public transport was for me in Edinburgh.) I had a short walk around a corner in New Town to reach the Airlink Bus, which was waiting to depart. Then the Airlink bus drove out to the airport with only a few stops (the ride in from the airport had stopped nearly everywhere). I captured some passing images of Edinburgh from the bus. As usual, I would see amazing passing scenes but by the time I got my camera out and able to take a photo, the scene had passed, or was now obscured by trees, or buildings, or other traffic. Then I would hold my phone ready to take a photo for 15 minutes and no interesting scenes would pass by!
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As planned, I arrived at the airport with lots of time to spare. I went airside immediately without any waiting around in lines (ridiculously quiet at the security lines). I was so early that they had not posted which gate my flight would leave from, so I tried to centre myself in the airport to wait. I stumbled across a Weatherspoons and had to go there. I’ve heard so many incidental references to Weatherspoons from British comedians that I had to try it out. In essence, for the uninitiated, it’s a lot like a TGI Friday. Same decor theme, not as many booths (in this version, anyway), and a very similar looking menu. The service was good (order and pay through QR code, like everywhere these days) and the food was fine. I wouldn’t wait in line to eat there, but I would choose it over a lot of places that show up in airports. I sat there for about an hour and a half, working on a blog post and eating my lunch.
In the fullness of time, I proceeded to my gate, boarded the ITA Airlines plane (operating as an EasyJet flight), and read the whole way to Milan. When I got to Milan, I had to pass through the new EES screening system, something I’ve avoided to date as it came into effect after I arrived in Europe in late-September. I waited in line for the automated system, as all non-Europeans were asked to do. While I waited, I noticed that lots of people using the system were failing to complete the process. When my turn came, I failed the process too. It was unable to take a photograph of me after three attempts. As an IT guy, I watched the system trying to do its thing and came to the conclusion that the system couldn’t cope with the ‘noisy’ visual environment that a busy entry terminal presented as background for the system doing face recognition. Certainly, the visual indicator of it trying to identify my face in the photo it would take was never correct. After being directed by the patient airport staff to wait in a line for manual processing (which quickly became the default approach as the system was overloaded almost immediately), I developed a pretty detailed fantasy of the testing procedures that were no doubt used for this system before it was released: quiet, sterile rooms, with only the tester in the field of view – almost exactly unlike the real-world conditions the systems faced. Importantly, even the cameras that supported the officers ‘manually’ processing arrivals were deliberately faced away from the crowd of waiting faces. Those cameras worked flawlessly and immediately (of course). I would also note, from a former immigration officer perspective, that they had one guy processing non-European passports that couldn’t be read by the dozen or so automated machines lined up at the back of the arrival hall. It goes without saying, the line to be assessed for entry very quickly filled the arrival hall space, further compromising the automated systems’ operation.
Eventually, I was lucky enough to be in a group randomly selected to join an empty queue used to process European travellers. That line was serviced by two policeman. The process of being biometrically recorded in European immigration systems was not difficult (when being served by an officer) and my entry (back) into Europe was then smooth. I headed straight for the Metro to get to the relevant train station for my train trip to SML. I’d booked a train with lots of time for transfer, not knowing whether flights might be delayed and knowing that the entry process would be complicated this time (because Brexit). In reality, I arrived at Milano Rogoredo about 45 minutes before my train was due to depart. Because I’d bought a seat on this train, I didn’t know if I could change it to an earlier train. I also didn’t know if there was an earlier train that would get me back to SML (bound to be, but I didn’t really know how to find out). I ended up standing in the slightly-warmer-than-outside tunnel under the platforms reading my book, waiting for my train. The only bad part of this train journey home was all the waiting. The train from Milan went to Rapallo (no stop at SML), where I then had to wait outside the closed station for another 25 minutes for the 3 minute train ride back to SML. (I checked, walking the 3-ish km from Rapallo to SML would be about 45 minutes, in the dark, along roads I’ve never travelled. Waiting was the best option.)
I got home about 10 pm and spent some more time reading to finish the book I had been reading all day (the latest Jack Reacher novel), so it was a late night by the time I finally went to bed.
| Daily facts: Location: Various; Santa Margherita Ligure Temp: 2 (Edinburgh) 9 (SML) Weather: Sunny and cold in Edinburgh; Raining in Milan; Overcast and cold in SML |
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