Galley Gossip: Packing Light – Rome, Italy

by Heather Poole on

“Okay,” said the husband, shoving his cell phone into the back pocket of his blue jeans. People, all of them very fashionably dressed, whizzed by us while we stood on the cobblestone street outside a large glass window displaying freshly baked pizza. We had just exited the train station in Rome and were looking for our hotel, The Gregoriana. “The guy said to walk up the Spanish Steps, turn right, and the hotel is at the end of the block.”

“At least we’re close,” I said, eyeing a slice of pizza. It looked amazing. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one.

Sighing, the husband grabbed his black rolling bag, slung a backpack over his shoulder, and said. “So…any idea how many steps there are?”

“A lot,” I said with a laugh. Though I did not know the exact amount of steps (I do now), I had an idea there would be more than we’d like.

We turned a corner, walked a good ten feet, all the while taking in the history and beauty that surrounded us, and five seconds later found ourselves standing at the foot of the steps. “Oh. My. God,” said the husband.

“Good thing we packed light,” I said, and meant it, because we had, in fact, packed light, very very light for a ten day trip to Italy. And then I laughed, because all I could do was laugh, as I took in ALL THOSE steps, as well as all those people sitting on the steps. There were well over a hundred – People and steps! I’m not sure which frightened me more -the people or the steps!

One thing a flight attendant knows how to do is pack light. We do it every day. My secret to packing light, wearing only black, white, and brown, along with a couple colorful accessories. That way everything goes with everything else, creating several mix and match outfits from just a couple basic pieces. Of course, the other secret is to roll your clothes, not fold.

“Roll them military style,” advised Dee, a flight attendant I worked with from Dallas to La Guardia a few months ago after I told her I was going to Italy for ten days and would only be taking along my flight bag. “You can get more in the bag that way.”

I’m not sure what she meant by military style, but I figured it had something to do with rolling my clothes tight, really tight, which is exactly what I did, getting way more than I anticipated into my crew bag.

“You are not going to need all that,” said the husband, as he watched me on the floor from the bed.

“You don’t know that,” I said, as I proudly zipped up my bag – one bag. And a tote.

That was not the first time I had uttered that particular phrase, “Good thing we packed light.” Nor would it be the last. The first time I said it was in Venice. We had just arrived at our hotel in Cannaregio after walking the winding cobblestone streets for a good twenty minutes, going over bridges and across canals and through narrow alleyways, too many times to count, making our way from San Marco Plaza to Cannaregio, also known as the Jewish Ghetto. The last time I had mumbled that one particular phrase had been that very morning as we lugged our bags up the steep flight of stairs on-board the Eurostar train that would take us from Naples to Rome, after having visited Positano for a couple days, which is now one of my top five favorite places to go in the world. I do hope to make it back soon.

“Give me your bag,” ordered the husband, his eye on the prize as he wiped the sweat from his brow. We were still standing at the bottom of the Spanish Steps.

“I’ve got it!” I said, grabbing the black plastic handle of my Travelpro bag a little tighter, because I did, indeed, have it. Though at that moment I must admit that I kind of wished I did not have it, even though all I had was just a rollaboard and a small tote bag. But since I was the one who had packed it (okay fine, over-packed it!) I’d been prepared to carry it. That was only the fair thing to do.

“Give it to me!” demanded the husband, who had become, upon arriving in Italy eight days prior, very macho in the bag carrying department. Before I could resist he grabbed my bag, and with a rollaboard in each hand and a backpack over his shoulder, he began his long journey to the top of the stairs.

Behind him I followed, huffing and puffing the entire way up as I carried that one little tote-bag, which, as I took each step, began to feel not so little, along with a beautiful black leather briefcase the husband had found in a quaint little shop under a bridge in Amalfi. Together we zigzagged between all those tourists sitting on all those steps. For sure there were well over one hundred steps. I never thought we were going to make it to the top.

Finally, we dropped our bags and took a break, looking down from where we had just come, before continuing on to the hotel which was just a short block away. I’ll never forget the look on my husband’s sweaty face when the desk clerk greeted us with a curt glance and said, as his fingers typed away on a keyboard, “I forgot to tell you, there’s an elevator in the train station.”

Forgot to tell us? Yeah right.

Nor will I forget the sight of my husband as he stood, panting for air, behind a junky souvenir cart at the top of the Spanish Steps trying to catch his breath. For a good ten minutes. Maybe longer. Or course I took a picture. I’d love to share it with you, but he’d probably kill me, so you’ll just have to settle for these….

(Been to Rome? Share your favorite places to go and things to do here by posting a comment below)

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Galley Gossip: Flight Attendant Pet Peeve #4 – Turn around, go that way!

by Heather Poole on

“Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard,” I say, and I say this as I’m standing between first class and coach while passengers board the airplane and slowly make their way down the aisle. That’s when I spot you standing at your row with your bag sitting on an aisle seat as you stare up at the overhead bin, a full overhead bin, and shake your head.

“Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard,” I say, as you continue staring into the full overhead bin above your seat, and as you stare, still shaking your head, I already know what you’re going to say before you even say it, and while I wait for you to say it, I continue to greet the passengers during the boarding process. “Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard.”

Though I can’t make out the words, I see you’re talking to those seated around you, pointing aggressively at your seat, at the overhead bin, back at your seat again, and as you begin to make a scene, a very loud one, you turn and look at me.

“Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard,” I say, and as I say this, I’m thinking to myself, here we go, and I’m wondering, as I’ve wondered thousands of times before, why you can’t just turn around and put the bag inside the empty overhead bin behind you, the one located three rows back. You see it. I see it. We all see it. So why don’t you use it? You can use it, ya know.

Waving your hands in the air at me, you say, “Excuse me, Miss! Can you help me!”

Of course. I slide in behind a passenger and slowly make my way down the aisle. You look very concerned, so I smile at you, but you don’t smile back. You never do. Now this is about to go one of three ways, depending on how often you fly…

YOU RARELY FLY: “There are bags in MY overhead bin!”

YOU FLY A COUPLE TIMES A YEAR: “Can you help me find a place for my bag?”

YOU’RE A FREQUENT FLIER: “Can I put my bag up there?” (pointing to first class)

ME: “I’m sorry,” I always say, no matter how often you fly, because I am, truly, sorry – sorry I have to say sorry all day long! “But you’re going to have to use the bin three rows back.” I point at the bin. “I’d grab it quick before someone else does.” Now the next thing I’m going to say depends on how often you fly, and usually goes something like this..

YOU RARELY FLY: Look, I know it’s frustrating when the overhead bin above your seat is full, but the overhead bin space is shared space. That means anyone can use it. You. Him. Her. Everyone. Yes, you bought the seat below the bin, but you did not buy the bin.

YOU FLY A COUPLE TIMES A YEAR: If I could move some things around I would, but the bin is completely full already and there’s no way your bag is going to fit. I know it’s not fair! Particularly if you’ve only brought on-board one small bag, which I see is the case, but I can’t go POOF and make all the other bags disappear now can I?

YOU’RE A FREQUENT FLIER: There’s no need to show me your frequent flier card. Trust me, I already know you’re a VIP, which is why you’re sitting in the bulkhead row in the first place. You know as well as I do that first class is full (or else you’d be sitting there) and I can’t let you use that empty bin, not when we’re still waiting for a few first class passengers to board. Now I’m pretty sure you already know why, but since you’re still arguing with me I’ll spell it out. Because when you spend that kind of money to sit in first class, like you normally do, you expect to find an empty bin when you come on-board, too.

Ridiculous, my least favorite word a passenger can say, has just been used, and as that word is spat at me I see something happen that I knew was going to happen. Someone has just thrown their bags, two of them, into the empty overhead bin three rows back.

Now it is I who shakes my head, because you, dear passenger, will have to walk five rows back to get your bag into a bin, and as I tell you this, I continue shaking my head, and of course I add the word, “Sorry.” I’m always sorry.

“I’ll hold up the airplane when we land in order to get my bag out of the overhead bin five rows back!” exclaimed a passenger, a passenger who is also MY HUSBAND, a frequent flier I met on an airplane, after I had told him about what I was writing.

Completely appalled, I visualized the man I would NOT have married if I’d have seen him acting like that. “You’re kidding, right?”

Nope. He, the husband, a frequent flier I met in business class on a flight from Los Angeles to New York somewhere over Illinois, assured me he was not joking. And here I agreed to go out with the guy in the first place because I thought he was a nice passenger. Just when you think you know a person, they have to go and freak out over an overhead bin.

And so…after discussing the sensitive overhead bin topic quite thoroughly with the not so nice passenger / husband, I have concluded that if he had not been able to get his bag into a bin near his seat I probably would not agreed to meet him at the Starbucks located across the street from our layover hotel seven years ago. Which means we would not have had our beautiful baby boy a little over two years ago. Which means that my life, as I know it, would have turned out totally different.

“And I love my life,” I read out loud. It was the very last line of this post, and I wanted to know what the husband, who was now looking at me funny, thought.

“I never said I’d hold up the airplane!” he exclaimed, even though he most certainly did say that and I remember exactly when and where he said it – on the couch, during a commercial break at 9:15pm, two nights ago.

Okay so perhaps the man was hallucinating when I first read him this post. Or maybe he was just having a bad day. Taking it out on me and my overhead bin post. Who knows? All I know is I’m glad to he wouldn’t hold up the deplaning process in order to get his precious bag. He travels a lot. Over 100,000 miles a year. And flight attendants know he’s mine! Which means I can now go back to work and not worry about what the husband is doing on the airplane while I’m working another flight, standing between coach and first class saying, “Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard.”

Now that you’re curious about the other flight attendant pet peeves, click the following links:

Six too many: Flight attendant fined for being six times over legal alcohol limit

by Anna Brones on

About a month ago I wrote about the flight attendant that showed up too work a little too intoxicated for her own good. The flight which she was scheduled to work on August 3 was headed from Aberdeen, Scotland to Faro, Portugal but was delayed for almost seven hours while a replacement was found for the tipsy flight attendant.

Turns out she was more than just tipsy; she was six times over the legal limit. So this Tuesday the flight attendant was forced to resign from her job as well as tacking on a £400 fine. Thanks to the hearing we have learned some of the juicy details of the incident. According to the Press and Journal the woman had arrived in Aberdeen in the early hours of Saturday August 2. She proceeded to go out with the rest of the crew and went to bed somewhere around breakfast time. Later that day she went into town with four colleagues. Two cocktails and two shared bottles of wine later, the woman said she went to bed around 11pm.

Doesn’t sound all too crazy, but somehow the following morning something was just a little off… to the tune of six times over the legal limit for her job and three times over the legal limit for driving a car. So she was removed from the plane by police officers… But who knows, maybe a tipsy flight attendant would have made the flight just a little more entertaining… except for the fact they they are there for our safety! Don’t drink and fly.

Galley Gossip: Barbie boot camp (recurrent flight attendant training)

by Heather Poole on

“I feel sick,” I said to my mother, also a flight attendant, as we sped down the highway. Each mile brought us closer and closer to the training facility.

“Relax,” said my mother, a woman who does not know how to relax, especially when it comes to flight attendant training. Trust me. You should have heard her three months ago. “You’re going to do just fine.”

I always do just fine. I’ve had thirteen years of just fine. Even so, I still felt sick.

“Think you can slow down!” I exclaimed as I glanced at the speedometer. We were going way too fast! Okay fine, so we were only ten, maybe five, miles over the speed limit, but that’s too fast for a person who doesn’t want to be where they have to be any sooner than they have to be there.

Did I happen to mention I felt sick? It was that bad.

I don’t know what it is about recurrent training that makes me feel this way, but every month of August is spent dreading these two inevitable days. In fact, I don’t know a flight attendant out there who doesn’t get all worked up before entering the big building where it all began. Which makes me wonder, what the heck did they do to us during those initial seven and a half weeks of training thirteen years ago? Seriously.

My mother slowed the car and stopped beside a yellow curb. “‘You’re going to do great.”

I looked out the window at the the big building looming before us. “I don’t know about great,’ I said, and as I said this I could feel my heart beating, and my palms were sweating, as I kissed my sleeping son goodbye, grabbed my flight manual, and slowly walked up the stairs. One. Step. At. A. Time. Class didn’t start for another ten minutes, so there was no rush to get inside now was there?

When I walked through the double glass doors and stood in front of the giant swimming pool containing a bright yellow floating raft, a smiling training instructor greeted me by asking to see my three pound flight manual. She flipped through the pages, checking to see if thing was up to date, scratched my name off a long list, and then told me we’d be meeting in Room # 1.

“Up the stairs and down the hall,” the instructor said, still smiling, as she eyed another flight attendant walking through the glass doors.

I walked into the “Welcome to recurrent training” class and sat near the front of room (it was the only place left unoccupied), next to a very calm looking woman wearing spectacles and reading a paperback Grisham novel. Who can read at a time like this, I remember thinking to myself, as I looked around the room for someone, anyone, I knew, but I did not recognize a face. There were about forty of us in total. That’s when I heard the woman sitting directly behind me mumble, “I feel sick.”

Me, too!” I turned around to take a look at the woman who would become my new best friend for the next two days. There’s nothing like bonding over feelings of anxiety and stress.

“I used to know a girl who’d throw up right before training every year,” she added matter of fact.

The flight attendant reading the novel continued to read the novel (must have been a REALLY good book), as I turned all the way around in my plastic chair and introduced myself to Cynthia. Cynthia, like me, was a college graduate, only her major was in marketing, not psychology. Later on I would find out that Cynthia, like me, is also a writer, only she writes for a well known home and design magazine, not a blog.

Cynthia laughed as she said, “I never even got this worked up in college. Or with the magazine.”

“Tell me about it! My regular non-flying friends totally don’t understand.” Then I went on to tell her about my father, who, the night before, had the nerve to say half jokingly “What’s so stressful about making chocolate chip cookies?”

Chocolate chips cookies. He actually said that. My mother and I just glared at him and didn’t say a word.

“I’m joking!” said my dad, even though I’m not so sure he meant it.

The sad part is I’m pretty sure my father is not alone. I have a feeling a lot of people think all we do at “Barbie boot camp” is make chocolate chip cookies and serve drinks. Man oh man, I only wish it were that easy. Because if it were, I wouldn’t be freaking out now would I!

And so Cynthia and I began our two day “cookie making class” with a refresher course in fighting a fire at the fire pit by donning what looked like astronaut headgear and then we ended the day several exhausting hours later after evacuating passengers out window and door exits on six different aircraft, yelling and screaming our commands, popping open doors and inflating slides. Sorry, but I can’t tell you what, exactly, came in-between those two classes, but I can tell you it was intense, and at times stressful, and all of it highly classified, which involved airline safety and security. I can also tell you that Cynthia and I were more than happy when it finally came to an end. Together we left the training center, after exchanging email addresses, feeling relieved, yet confident and secure in the knowledge we had gained from our two days of training. Trust me when I tell you we, flight attendants, are prepared to handle just about anything. Even chocolate chip cookies.

In thirteen years of flying, I’ve only had a few medical emergencies on-board my flights, and thankfully each situation had a positive outcome. That’s because of the training the airline provided. So the next time you’re on a flight, crammed in the middle seat, take a look at the one working the drink cart in coach, or the one serving you freshly baked cookies and milk in first class, and remember they’re not just there to serve you, they’re actually there to save your life.

Galley Gossip: Ask a flight attendant – Positano, Italy

by Heather Poole on

While on a flight to Stansted, England, on our way to Venice, the New York based international flight attendant working on my side of the cabin eyed the book, Frommer’s Italy 2008, in my hands as she poured a little cream into my coffee. “Are you going to Italy?”

“We are,” I said, nodding my head at the husband who was asleep beside me. When she placed the cup of coffee on my tray table, I said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. So where exactly are you going in Italy?”

“Venice, Positano and Rome. Have you been?”

The flight attendant laughed, “Have I been? Too many times to count!” Click went the break of the cart. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m done with the service.” And like that she was gone, off to the next row where she offered the passengers behind us coffee, tea, cordials and dessert.

Want to know good, yet affordable, places to go, and eat, on your next vacation? Ask a flight attendant. Flight attendants are much like cops in respect to knowing great places to visit. Yet unlike cops, flight attendants aren’t just familiar with one city, they know the ins and outs of many different cities. Don’t believe me? Just ask the flight attendant on your next trip. You’ll see.

Ten minutes later the flight attendant was back at my row, a pen in hand. She placed a piece of paper on my tray table, a customs and immigrations form, and flipped it over. On the back she wrote the word POSITANO, and then began to draw as she said, “I go to Positano two to three times a year. Here’s what you need to do…”

“What?” said the husband who was now leaning over my shoulder.

“Positano,” I said. “She’s giving us the scoop on Positano.”

“My favorite place in the whole world,” said the flight attendant.

What I didn’t know at the time was Positano would soon become my favorite place in the whole world, too. It’s that amazing. That beautiful. And the food…absolutely delish! It’s the kind of place where you can just relax, sitting on your ocean view balcony, and let Italy come to you.

“Now this is the Doma.” She placed her finger on a sketchy looking arch. Then she marked a spot with an X. “Right here is a ceramics store. You’ve got to go here. This is where I bought the most beautiful set of ceramic plates. They’re gorgeous. Brown with red in the center and white around the edge, they’re perfect for the Valentine’s day dinner I host every year at my house.”

‘We’ll have to look for those,” I told the husband, and meant it. I wanted Valentine’s day plates, too!

And look over there – we found them, the beautiful Valentine’s day plates! At the store. Just like she said. But for some reason we didn’t buy them. Now I wish we had. Next time. Trust me, there will be a next time.

Three X’s marked the spots of good places to eat. “This is where you want to get your morning coffee. It’s right on the beach.” A box was drawn. “This is the gas station where you can buy bus tickets that will take you to Ravello and the Amalfi Coast.”

“We’re definitely doing that,” I told the husband.

And we did. Though we did it by scooter, not bus. What an amazing and unforgettable ride.

More X’s and boxes were drawn, as suggestions and recommendations were made. We only had three nights in Positano, so I was starting to wonder if we’d even have time for all of the things she wanted us to do, things we just had to do! Honestly, I think she was just as excited about our trip, if not more so, than we were! And this was our honeymoon trip – five years late.

Our trip to Italy in May was fantastic, and Positano, without a doubt, was the highlight. Heavenly is the only word to describe it. I can’t wait to go back. So if you’re reading this, Miss New York international business class flight attendant, thanks for the advice. And if you, dear reader, are thinking about going to Positano, here are my suggestions to you…

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