The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

When my brother and I were kids, we would always force our parents to take us to the Rainforest Cafe. You know, that terrible fake jungle themed restaurant with stimulated animal stampedes and thunderstorms going off every half hour that make all the under five crowd shriek with fear and cry all through your entree? That's the one.

One of the reasons why my twelve year old self was so keen on going there was for the Volcano (oh yes the capitalization is needed), the most epic dessert imaginable. It had to be served by its own waiter staff and they would yell "VOOOLCANOOOOO!!!!" with sparklers going off on top of the thing and the whole nine yards before they placed it before my brother and I. The whole rest of the restaurant would stare. It was nearly as obnoxious as the stimulated tropical disasters. It was perfection.

I had no reason to think of a volcano as anything other than an ostentatious dessert until after a month ago, when Eyjafjallajökull decided to blow its top and screw up European air traffic from then until now. What does this mean for me and everyone else at LDM who is being promptly and unceremoniously kicked out of their apartments at 12pm this Saturday? Either: we are left homeless with 50+ pounds of luggage to illegally roam the streets of Florence since our visas expire that day, or, we will be stranded in the airports of Rome/Dublin/Munich/Amsterdam/London/Frankfurt with no means to leave until the ash cloud decides to wreak havouc somewhere else for a while. Whether we're staying in the airport a few extra hours or a few extra days is debatable.

Good volcano.

Bad volcano.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that any of this will happen. We've gotten quite savvy in Europe at avoiding the ash-idemic. But for someone who going from Florence by train to Rome, then flying to Dublin, then to JFK, then Buffalo in the span of 26 hours, even the thought of something going wrong is an immediate mood killer. After all, if anything is delayed even by a little there's a solid chance I'm marooned where ever it is I happen to be. Being stuck in Florence is okay, the Dublin airport probably has my favourite beer on tap (last time I was there they had free shots of whiskey at 8am. Gotta love the Irish), but Rome or JFK? Oh no. There is nothing good about those airports.

If I get stuck somewhere, it will be an ugly situation.

I already missed a flight in France and got stranded in Cinque Terre for the night this semester, isn't that enough punishment? For now, I'm just going to hope that I've had my share of travel disasters and continue studying for my finals (as you can see by my updating my blog, I'm making great strides in that field). And hopefully by this Sunday, my voicemail message will no longer say that I'm in Europe.