Running on empty
When I got back from Switzerland, the local weather and clouds bummed me out a bit. People who live in Latvia often joke about the weather, even though it's not really that nightmarish here. But after the mountain beauties of the land of 🧀and ⌚, putting up with the slush and cold gets harder and harder. I immediately wanted to go somewhere warm, preferably with my 🚲. Luckily, as the saying goes, don't have a hundred rubles, have a hundred friends. I have a buddy in 🇪🇸 who has a spare room and the desire to host a guest. Why not take him up on it? Especially if I can work remotely (and I can).
As for the 🚲, I scoped things out and realized that for relatively cheap (50 euros one way), the company DPD was willing to help me out. A parcel up to 170 cm long and weighing up to 30 kg (there's also a trickier restriction, always check with the calculator on the website). Of course, packing it isn't so simple. I found a cubic-meter Big Bag at Depo, bought some bubble wrap, and wrapped the bike up as best I could. And right next to it I shoved my bags, cycling kit, tools, and everything else I wasn't afraid to lose. Only later did I find out that I overdid it with the dimensions, and the fact that my parcel was accepted and delivered was a minor miracle. I decided to carry my tea ware and my wonder-helmet with the MIPS slip-impact protection system myself.
Skipping ahead, I'll say that sending a bike by courier is a good deal and convenient. Airlines charge 30-40 euros per segment + a 🚂 ticket + the hassle of dragging the bike to Riga and the airport. But here — a courier arrived, picked it up, and in 5-8 days delivered it to the flat in Spain, plus you can pile in your accessories. The only thing is — you have to have a place to send it to. I had one — in the city of Valencia, located in the eponymous region in the east of Spain. It's roughly the middle of the country, if you're looking north to south.
I took the plunge and bought tickets for the end of October. I took a week off work so I wouldn't have to dive into it right away. I didn't buy a return ticket; who knows, maybe I'd want to bail right away, or, conversely, I'd like it so much I'd stay for good.
Of course, there are always problems: who to leave the 🐱 with, how comfortable it is to work on a 💻, how to go to the doctor, how long you can stay at a friend's place, and all that jazz. Still, it's all manageable. I bought tickets for Saturday, with AirBaltic + KLM Cityhopper, to see how the latter differs from other low-cost airlines.
Black stripe, white stripe
I arrived in Riga on Friday. Before that, as per tradition, I nervously worked (on my day off), hurriedly collected a urine sample from the 🐈⬛, and dropped by my parents' place, since I wouldn't be seeing them for a month. Dad warned me he was sick, and I even took a 🚕 there so I wouldn't catch the bug. But then it was my pops who drove me to the vet clinic, where I hurriedly dropped off the sample twenty minutes before my train. Alas, even ten minutes was enough for me to catch a nasty cold from my dad. I only found out about this, however, when I arrived in Valencia the following evening. But I'm getting ahead of myself, my brain is always in such a rush.
My flight was on Saturday, but in the morning AirBaltic sent a text saying the flight to Amsterdam was delayed from 16:30 to 18:00. However, the text for some reason said I still needed to show up at the original time. Why? I didn't feel like sitting around at the airport, so I only got there at 16:29. Luckily, the flight did indeed take off around 18:00. As I was going through the gate, my ticket beeped, and I flinched for a second, but the news turned out to be good: they moved me to an emergency exit seat, where there's plenty of legroom. And for free! Sweet!
What's more, there was almost no one next to me, 🔥. Still, I didn't take out my laptop, reading Wikipedia about Spain and Valencia instead. Reading in English is a bit of a slog and gets boring fast, while in Russian there's less info. Nevertheless, a few things stuck in my memory. Like the fact that the root "val" in Latin means strength, but the word itself, besides meaning "fortress," also means "good omen." Nice and positive!
But what wasn't so positive was the flight delay. By my calculations, I only had half an hour to make it to the next one — from Amsterdam to Valencia. Here I have to admit I goofed up by buying a ticket through Amsterdam. I knew perfectly well that the security lines there stretch out of the airport for kilometers, like the game "Snake" on the final level. Getting through security takes hours. Luckily, I didn't have to leave the transfer zone, but the flight delay was clearly connected to the hell that's been reigning at Schiphol Airport lately. It's such a dumpster fire there that people have even jokingly started calling it by the similar-sounding English word "Shithole," meaning, well, a dump.
When I landed, I ran like a maniac looking for the departures board with my gate, even though technically the flight should have already taken off.
Did I make it?
All sweaty, I came running to the gate, thinking all was lost and I'd be spending the night in Amsterdam. People were sitting calmly at the gate, there was no employee at the turnstile, and the door to the jet bridge was closed. I was so antsy I actually tried scanning my boarding pass. The turnstile beeped at me in displeasure. A worker in a nearby booth noticed this and tutted at me. I went up to her, and she explained that "gate open" doesn't mean boarding has started, and that when it does, it will say so. Not very logical; what does "open" mean then? Okay, but why hadn't boarding even started yet? Was this flight delayed too?
Nope! The truth turned out to be completely mundane — I forgot about the time zone change. It's one hour earlier in Amsterdam, and the time on all tickets is always local time, which makes sense. Turns out, even though I came running at 20:30 Latvian time, when the plane should've been long gone, it was only 19:30 Dutch time. What a relief!
Every programmer (except me, apparently) knows that time is hard. In everyday life we rarely encounter this, but here we are.
I wandered around a bit, bought a Coke Zero from a vending machine to calm my nerves, and sat on the curb to wait for the flight.
Everything went off without a hitch here. We boarded a quite pleasant plane with a very polite crew. The surprise was that they offered us tea, ☕, and 🥪 for free! And the old lady next to me even knocked back some red wine on the house. At first I didn't want to take the sandwich, but curiosity prevailed. The bread was extremely health-conscious, with bran, while the 🧀, according to European custom, was skimped on. At least they smeared on some spicy sauce, some small consolation. I'll tell you more: an hour later they surprised me again — bringing more tea and a brownie.
So that's how KLM Cityhopper works, pretty cool. The only thing is — when we were just settling in, there was a heavy smell; the passengers had really breathed up the place. As we started taxiing, the ventilation kicked in and chased the funk away.
Unfortunately, already in the ✈️ I felt my throat start to hurt, and overall I wasn't feeling so hot. What can you do, we'll deal with problems as they come. At night I was at the Valencia airport, where I bought a ticket for the 🚇 to the city center with some difficulty. And for a whopping 8 euros, a bit pricey for nine kilometers! Not to mention that the machine has a confusing layout and doesn't let you permanently switch the language to English. A god-tier UI — everything flashes, and on every screen you have to select the language all over again! And even then half of it stays in Spanish!
On the importance of industrial designers
We left off with me flying into Valencia on the KLM Cityhopper. Interestingly, KLM owns another regional airline company. That's Transavia, which I'll be flying for my first segment home. KLM bought up a bunch of companies, yet is unprofitable itself!
I forgot to mention that the seatbacks also had a little fold-down stand for a mini-cup. I hadn't seen that specifically on planes before. Also — the buttons in the lavatory are a bit confusing, looking more like explanatory pictures, way too big and completely flat. I get that they're easier to wash, but I'm somehow against this infiltration of flat design from computer interfaces back into real life. I'd much rather have it like in Windows XP, eye-gouging skeuomorphism in all its glory, than a flat, monochromatic thing that the eye doesn't catch onto.
True, even flat interfaces aren't as bad as the nightmare of the Metrovalencia ticket machine, which I'll be having nightmares about now. Now there's a place for lovers of big letters, flashing lights, and resetting back to the main screen after exactly 1.3 seconds of inactivity. As well as lists with paginated scrolling without a search function, and other cute little details that I didn't memorize. On top of that, in theory the card you buy can be used on the 🚇, on the commuter 🚆, and on the 🚌. In reality, though
1. I couldn't get it to work on the train.
2. The cards can only be topped up with the same fare type you got when you bought them. Mine was for zones ABC (airport), and it made zero sense for me to top it up again for 8€. In zone А (the center and its surroundings) a trip costs 1.5€ or less.
3. I couldn't even top it up at all!
4. If you buy from a machine at the 🛤️ stations, it only gives you a card for the 🚆, not the universal SUMA one.
The Valencians still have a lot of work to do on convenience.
Nevertheless, I quite successfully made it with one transfer on the 🚇 to the Turia station, where my friend met me. Even back in the ✈️ I had read an amazing thing. Because of the flooding of the Turia river, which used to flood the entire city center, they moved it further south, and turned its former riverbed into a long park. Right next to such an unusual place was where I'd be spending the next few weeks. It looks and feels absolutely bomb, and that's not even everything that's in it!
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