My Italian Summer - Not There Yet

I've lived in Canada for more than 1o years, and I've met less than 10 rude people. Lucky for me at the beginning of the trip I just happened to meet the rudest person ever at the Vancouver airport. For whatever reasons I couldn't remember, I lined up in the wrong line. When the ticket lady at the counter realized that she asked me in a high pitch tone if I COULD read. I usually could come up with some kind of quick combat, but this time I was simply too shocked to speak. She works for the biggest and the snobbiest Germany airline. I will make sure I will NEVER have anything to do with them.

My flight to Vienna stopped over in Dusseldorf, Germany. I don't know why I was nervous about that (the ticket lady certainly didn't help!). It might have had something to do with the Olympic drama. Germany and France topped the chart of anti-China/Chinese as always. I was so nervous, and I wasn't even a Jew! Maybe God wanted to teach me a lesson or something, and I ended up sitting beside just about the sweetest German girl. She was a beautiful girl with blond hair and blue eyes, a fresh grad with a mater degree in veterinary medicine from Cologne. After the North American trip, she was about to start her job at Beyer. We talked about everything. Once she found out my stone-age crush on Klinsmann she grabbed all the sports magazines on the plane (they were all in German, and man oh man that guy was in in almost all of them), and tried to translate everything about him for me. At the end of the trip I was almost in love with her.

Traveling with in the European Union is way easier than within North America. I didn't see any German immigration officers at the entry point, and the customs officers were too bored to even look at you. I had 4 hours to kill, so I walked my German friend to her train station. After that I spent hours struggling with the European pay phones with no luck. Dusseldorf was a gray industrial city. Mountains of people were smoking outside the arrival gate. I could feel the weather was very mainland-ish. By the time I left it started to rain.