In case you do not know I´m spending a year abroad in Corte, France. It is a fairly small town in the middle of Corsica. At first I thought oooh, in the middle that's nice because I can go everywhere and it wouldn't take too long but as I soon learned the hard way that the transport here is pretty crap and that kind of destroyed all my big plans of travelling around the island.
But from the start: How I got here:
Last Saturday I was in Manchester enjoying the last days before the big adventure. My flight was due to leave 7.10AM Sunday and the gate closed at 6.40 meaning I should be there 5AM. This time I had a big suitcase too to drop off so I couldn't just walz in and go straight to security. Looked at the train times to the airport and guess what: the first train left at 5AM and got there 25mins later. Not too bad right? Is it? technically that would've left me about an hour to stand in the bag drop off queue, the security and actually finding my gate. My flight was in terminal 1, that made it worse because I have never flown from there so I don't know how big it is or how long the queues could be etc. Checked the bus times just in case but that took 46 mins so I decided to take the chance - yeah yeah some would say I'm worried about nothing as it's still 1h45min before my flight leaves. I just like to freak out a bit when everything does not go according to my plan. It was around 10PM, i had just bought a proper on-board suitcase and was worried that it wouldn't fit as much in as my previous bag had. As I glanced at my phone I noticed I had 2 new messages, from Easyjet. Guess what they said! The Manchester Airport will be working on its full capacity and I should allow more time to get to my gate, basically freaking me out more and saying that I should get there as early as possible while I had planned to get there a bit later than 2h before. And in my defense I must say again that I did not know the terminal and had to stand in 2 queues. After a lot of stressing I decided fudge it, I'm going with the 5 o'clock train, what's the worst that can happen, I'm only 15min later than the suggested 2h before the flight departure.
When I got to the airport the sihgt I saw was a surprise - there wasn't a huge mass of people everywhere, just a normal flow of people in the airport in my opinion and the first queue moed rather fast so after that I could breath easily. It's not as bad as they deemed it to be. The security queue took a while but not a ridiculous amount of time as well so when I got through there my flight's gate wasn't even announced yet, so early no need to worry anymore. The check-in lady from the bag drop off desk said that my gate is 15 so I decided to go there immediately and not wait in the lounge as the screens told people to. I got to gate 12 and that was the end of the hall! What??? I can't be that stupid that I can't follow signs that definitely said gate 11-15 this way, but no gate 12 was the last one and full of people waiting to board their flight so I tried to squeeze past them to see if I'm just being blind and stupid and can't see the corridor leading to gates 13-15 but no there wasnt one. What the heck? This can't be true. Retraced my steps back to the last sign and it definitely said gates 11-15 pointing to the way I just came from. Oukay... well the gate number was displayed on a screen so maybe it's the same gate but the gate number just changes, what I think is a bit stupid, why can't it be just gate 12???? And I was right the number shortly changed and became 15. Meanwhile I saw how people actually ran to their flights and the crew got a bit anxious because everyone wasn't there yet though they had checked in and passed through security etc.
The flight went alright, but when we got off and had to enter the airport I got stuck in the security gate. What a stupid system. I got stuck between the door and the gate. So me. Luckily a guy next to me got stuck too so we were both like oh well... The security guy game in a couple of minutes and got the guy out, I was still stuck there. Finally I figured out why neither the door or the gate opened - it was because my bag was just in front of the gate and the sensor must've thought that it was someone trying to go through the wrong way and voila as soon as I pushed my bag out of the sensors the gate opened, thanks for nothing useless security guy - you should be familiar with your system.
Got my big suitcase too and went to the information desk to ask how to get to the train station at Bastia. I already knew we had to wait like 4 hours for the next train but thought it wouldn't be a big deal as Bastia was a big town so I could eat and drink something while waiting. The receptionist said that the next train would actually go in 10 minutes and we should take the taxi to the nearest station which is only 5 mins from the airpot. I was happy like wow yes I can get to my room quicker than I thought. We raced to the station and guess what, never trust stupid people, the receptionist had told us the train time for weekdays but we were there on a Sunday so the next one was the one I had been planning to take anyway and in that station we had to wait 5 hours now. And when I say station I mean just a station in the middle of freaking nowhere!!!!!!!!!!! I hate people so much!!!! I didn't have anything to eat or drink and the taxi here was already 20 euros so I wasn't going to spend more money on that + I had a ticket from that station now and I didn't know any taxi numbers even if I wanted to. So yeah a great start isn't it?
Ttyl ;)
Jazzz...
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