Ryanair, and the Beginning of the End

After the past ten days of roaming around Spain and Italy, I am over the moon to be curled up on the couch in my apartment with tea and my journal, going back over all of our adventures. There's hot water in the kettle, clothes in the wash, and socks in the trash. There was no way of resurrecting them after the abuse they'd been through these past few days. So I tossed 'em.

Where to begin? Last Friday morning, I caught a cab at 4:30 with Carmen and Lexi, my companions for the first leg of the journey. Drowsy but excited, we headed out to Dublin Airport to catch our flight to Barcelona.
We flew Ryanair this fall break, which was an absolute experience in itself. Dirt cheap flights --- I don't think we paid more than 35 Euro, or about $50, for any of our three flights. In fact, going from Barcelona to Pisa was 11 Euro, taxes included. But here's the thing about Ryanair. It's awful. In a really entertaining way, of course, when you're a student backpacking on a budget, but it's just terrible. The plane's decorated in banana yellow and navy blue, the flight attendants are grumpy, and you have to pay for your own barf bags. But hey! If the plane can get on and off the ground when necessary, I'm a happy camper. The flights make for great blog fodder, at least.

Every Ryanair trip's a mixture of a gypsy caravan and a Tupperware party. There's complete anarchy as you board the plane, because there are no assigned seats, no first class or business class. Everyone scrambles for a seat, they strap you in, and we're off. No fuss. Until the official Ryanair jingle comes on! This is when things get exciting. You didn't think you paid 11 Euro to sleep on the flight, did you? Not a chance. The flight attendants, wan and smelling like Lysol, troll up and down the aisles for the entirety of the journey, hawking wares. Not the cool gadgetry you sometimes see in the catalogues on American Airlines planes. Ryanair sells discount makeup, phone cards, scratch-off tickets, generic corn-based snack products. It's like an infomercial without the charm, Chinatown in a culture vacuum. It is appalling and amazing, and you should try it at least once.