1st - 3rd Oct - Venice, Italy Part 4

On 3rd Oct, we board an airport shuttle from Venice to the Treviso airport for our afternoon flight back to London Stanstead airport. We arrived in Treviso airport and proceeded to check in our luggage. Two check-in counter for our flight is opened and attended by 2 lady officers. When it’s our turn, the officer kept flipping through Bel’s passport and started asking questions. She asked where did Bel first landed in Europe, where is she going next, and the destination afterwards. Bel answered her questions and after some moments of silence, the officer consulted the officer at the next counter and then asked if Bel has a credit card. Bel passed her the credit card and they swipe it to verify something. Back to silence and more flipping of the passport with quite a serious face. We were very puzzled and asked if there is any problem. Only then the officer said with a little smile, nothing, just routine check. This is rather unusual as only they are only focused on Bel’s passport only and not mine, and we could not understand why they need the credit card, or why would a check-in counter be so detailed in checking the travel destinations of the passenger? We thought all this issue if there is any should be at the immigration custom control later on and normally it is not an issue flying out of a country.

Anyway, the officer is finally satisfied and returned us our passport. Still, lots of question marks floating on our head but no way to find out. After a short round tour, we proceed to our departure gate. Already there were quite many passengers waiting there, half of them in queue while the other half just scattered around sitting at the chairs or the floor. It’s quite a long wait, the boarding gate did not open until about 10mins to departure. Then suddenly the originally organized line were now overflowed with those sitting down suddenly pushing forward, trying to get in front. We were quite taken aback by this situation. Another interesting thing we observed is that there are 4 security officers standing guard at the boarding gate, randomly picking out the passengers for full body search and also a thorough check with their luggage. Then there is a shuttle bus taking the passengers to the airplane, which is only about 200m away. After about 30 passengers, the bus will go off to the plane and the officers ceased checking in the passengers. This act has really costs the whole boarding process significant amount of time. Bel and I were among the last batch boarding the plane.

As soon as we were on board, we heard the captain speaking asking us to quickly take our seats as we need to catch the arrival time in London to avoid long delays. The head stewardess paged for the passengers to quickly take any available seats and if there is no more space at the overhead storage, they should immediately pass their bags to the stewardess to be placed with the check in luggage. There was one male passenger got into arguments with the stewardess as he insisted he do not want his luggage to be thrown down the check-in luggage. It’s quite a chaotic mess if you asked me. Anyway, we managed to take off and arrived safely in Stansted at the estimated time. From there, its easybus back to London Victoria where Bel’s colleague is waiting for us.

Here are our last batch of photos:

Florence Sept'08

Venice Oct'08