Apr 10, 2007 10:29 AM
3422 Views
(Updated Apr 10, 2007 11:37 AM)
Traveling from Mumbai to Sao Paulo with a transit wait at Malpensa for 16 hours, made me terribly anxious. Especially so, because this was my first trip abroad all by myself.
I landed at Malpensa at about 05.00 am on a chill November morning and my next flight was as late as 10 in the night.
I did not expect transit passengers to have to go through security check. That took about an hour and the check was pretty meticulous. What impressed me was the order. The process of removing all metallic objects including watches, belts, cigarette lighters, rings, chains, pen etc. and placing it on a tray to pass through the x-ray check while the people themselves went through the metal detector was new, but was clearly illustrated on a big screen TV. And the beauty of it was, queues were maintained and processes followed without fuss. The security personnel were very helpful and congenial. And if some patriot tries to argue that population is so high in India that there is no time for niceties, I beg to disagree because Malpensa I understand is a major transit airport in Europe and handles millions of passengers everyday.
Having gone through this ritual, I was all by myself in an ocean of an airport. In about an hour's time, the entire place was bustling with people and looked more like a shopping mall than an airport. There were endless corridors of food courts, duty paid shops, leather goods shops, jewelery stores, electronics( were sparse), exclusive liquor and tobacco shops, airline business lounges, forex counters and what not.
The airport despite its size & traffic was spotlessly clean with spacious corridors, seating lounges, escalators and assistance counters. The only delta being that one could rarely find English speakers. For folks who could not speak Italian, communication was limited to gestures and monosyllables.
I was traveling economy and did not have free access to the airlines lounge. There was one private lounge in but did not accept anything but a visa card. The tariff was pretty affordable though at Euros 25. So I'd to settle for the public waiting area. I was lucky to find a recliner after a few hours of wait in a regular seat & managed to hold on to it for quite some time. I might have explored the length and breadth of the airport at least a dozen times in those 16 hours.
The fact that entire airport was a non-smoking zone made the wait even more torture some. My attempt at getting a transit visa was futile as the airport did not offer this facility unlike the Changi Airport in Singapore.
I compensated for this by freaking out on varieties of pizzas, coffee and Italian ice creams.
There were more than ample large screen displays indicating the flight schedules, boarding and security check information. One did not have to really ask for information as everything you possibly wanted to know was made available through conspicuous signs and displays.
All commercial aircraft boarding I presume happened only through aero-bridges because there were close to a hundred of them. I could only see some some small aircrafts parked away from the terminal building and I guess those were mostly chartered / private aircrafts.
Wonder when airports in India are gonna get there!
