Porco Miseria...
May 14, 2019, 10:04 pm
#17
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: SFO
Posts: 273
Very bad title for a new thread, in Italian is a strong vulgar blaspheme oath, definitely against the forum rules. I do not know how you get the impression that this sentence can be used colloquially in a daily life, it is not. Could be maximum tolerated during a verbal altercation went emotional, not in any other context, even more in a script.
Since f**k is more and more accepted in public life in the US, I'd rate the strength of "porco dio" somewhere above there, but perhaps below c**t. (Unless, of course, you're in Australia.)
May 15, 2019, 2:58 am
#19
Join Date: Feb 2016
Location: Moscow, Russia
Programs: AR, LA, A3, UT, 6R, U6, PS, SU, and many more
Posts: 136
Please, eightblack, do continue. I've taken the day off from work to read you. The introduction so far is painful. Buying your children a car, are you insane? Is a weapon, and you can be liable. After all, you are an Aussie!
Thanks for being back!
Thanks for being back!
May 15, 2019, 6:39 pm
#20
Moderator, Trip Reports
Original Poster
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Denver, CO
Programs: UA GS-2MM, Marriott Ambassador
Posts: 3,708
There’s a few things that strikes fear into parents of teenagers. One is teaching the small humans we made how to drive.
Not far from where I live, there are a lot of those typical American office complexes. Large, boring, nondescript buildings with huge parking lots.
On the weekends, when the offices are empty, these parking lots turn into the practice area for 15 year olds and their terrified parents. It’s a sight to behold. Even the local police department give these places a wide berth.
When I taught my son how to drive – we went to a deserted area of one these office parks and I calmly explained to him that while he only has 2 feet, there are 3 pedals in his car and he can only use 2 of them at a time.
Unless of course…
Nevermind.
So, I gently and calmly explained to him how to change gears. He nodded in the same way an Indian woman at a market nods when you ask her if she can add a shot of Vodka to your orange juice.
I provided firm instructions like this…
“Gently press down on the gas and ease your foot off the clutch”
“Like this…”
Which to a teenage boy means mashing the throttle into the floor, dumping the clutch and launching the car into the yonder.
On any given Saturday (or Sunday) you’d see witless parents tossing their cookies into the bushes, screaming at their sons and daughters that they are in fact homicidal maniacs and that they are catching an Uber home. Anything but being in the same car again with their children.
But not long after we both got used to the sound of my sons rev limiter on his little car – he finally got the hang of it and started to drive with some sense of normalcy.
When it came time to teach our daughter, the stakes were somewhat different. For one, she is one of those rare females who refused to take instruction from anyone, let alone her own father.
She let me take her driving maybe 2-3 times. Annoyingly, when you tell a female to follow instructions, like letting a clutch out gently and then gently squeezing the throttle, they actually listen and because they are female, their rather odd brains can actually multi-task and can handle more than one computation at a time.
To my surprise, she picked up changing gears in no time and her little mini was singing away happily.
“Dad, I got this now. Were going home”
“We are?”
“Yes”
“But we’ve only been out for 20 minutes…”
“But it’s easy”
“It’s not that easy”
“Well, you drive don’t you?”
“Yes”
“Then how hard can it be?”
And with that she spun the car with the checkerboard roof out onto the main road and we took off home. From that day forward, she would load up her dog, jam my unhappy wife into the back seat of her bambini mobile and proceed to drive to and from school every day for a year.
She wouldn’t care if it was 100 degrees out or 10. She drove in blizzards, pelting rain, and everything else in between. She was completely unfazed about any conditions. The only thing that would tip her right over was when her idiotic brother would borrow her car and proceed to thrash the rings off it.
So how did we get here then?
Well because we did. You should know by now that I have no idea what to write about half the time, and that all I am simply doing is documenting my somewhat insane life for my overworked therapist.
Let's be clear. Teaching your kids is nerve wracking. No point in denying that. You shouldn’t do it.
The other nerve wracking thing is taking a 16 year old and two 18 year olds to a slightly unhinged country in Europe where the drinking age is all of 16 and the place is controlled chaos at best.
But given that this is supposed to be about travel and I am supposed to write stuff that is somewhat relevant to how we got there, why we got arrested (kidding), and how we finally managed to get home, I will as they say in the movies, get on with it.
To be honest, I am well and truly over planning travel of any sort. I think I am more than rusty. I don’t know about you, but my Gmail account is full to the bream with emails from some petulant kid called “Lucky”, another semi creepy bald dude called Matthew J. Bennett and then an old woman from Croatia who keeps trying to poke me on Facebook trying to sell me an erectile dysfunction cure, which involves a goat and a lot of Vodka. Maybe it was the other way around. I forget.
Anyway
Like the last trip, I enlisted the services of one very savvy frequent flyer guru. Jasper2009. The poor man has been working his fingers to the bone trying to piece together an itinerary that would suit all of us. We have been pulling miles and points from what seems like a million different accounts, looking at air routings that would make Christopher Columbus proud, and generally yelling violently at Siri about why Aeroplan and Avios wouldn’t release the bloomin’ seats we needed. Until that is, that they did.
It wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t pretty. And at times, I didn’t think we’d make it.
Meanwhile, my useless family would casually remark…
“Dad, have you sorted out the tickets yet?”
“Yes honey, what’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on. What’s going on is the flaming airlines have become tighter than a fishes bottom and it isn’t what it used to be”
A sigh of contempt all around
Unlike most holidays we’ve ever gone on as a family, this little jaunt to Italy was more than a few weeks in the making.
Because we were taking my sons best friend, we had to get him a passport. Or rather he had to apply for one. In order to do so, we had to give him a semi valid itinerary. So I decided to work on the boys itinerary first.
Jasper2009 would send me a couple of options and the next morning, when I finally looked at his email and got around to kicking my Macbook into gear, the damn inventory management system on whatever program I was trying to redeem on scoffed at me and told me too bad, so sad, bye bye.
We ended up booking the boys using something called Avios. Silly program. Requires about 11 million points to go from Flint Michigan to Grand Rapids. Avios are about as valuable as the Iranian Rial.
Now don’t faint when I tell you this. I decided to book both 18 year olds in something called “economy” Apparently its somewhere down towards the rear of an aircraft. I have no idea. And sadly, neither does my own son.
Their routing is DEN-CLT-FCO on American. Dreadful. At least I think that’s what their routing it is. We have told the boys that they are to find their own way from FCO to FLR. That is sure to end in tears but hey, they have to learn sometime. I haven’t quite summonsed the courage to tell Number One Son that he is flying with the real people, but he will quickly learn. Expect much profanity in a couple of posts.
So that’s 2 down, 3 to go.
I then thought the now humorless Jasper2009 and I should work on the girls itinerary. Which is what he did. I decided that the only thing I could do was drink heavily and support him from a distance.
He would send one option after the other via Aeroplan. When I went to book, the silly French run program would show me something that looked valid, but when I went to book the tickets, it was like Inspector Clouseau was running things and the booking engine would laugh at me with gusto and tell me to kiss my squishy backside in French. It was infuriating.
But I finally managed to pry an itinerary out of their frugal hands and came up with this routing.
IAH-YUL-ZUR
I thought perfect. Denver to somewhere in Canada, and then a very orderly flight on Swiss to Zurich. I figured the girls could get to Florence on their own. I mean how hard could it be. It was after all in J.
I would even throw in the domestic DEN to IAH leg on the house. I was sure to be knee deep in sex credits after this herculean effort.
Feeling quite pleased with myself I sent the suggested itinerary to my current wife.
Because this is a family show, I wont tell you what she said. But it went something like this.
“Honey, I sent you the itinerary to Italy and if I’m honest, I did a terrific job”
“You did, did you?”
“And how are we getting to Houston”
“Oh I will buy you a ticket on UA”
“And then how are we getting to Florence from Zurich?”
“Oh there are many wonderful options. You could catch the train, you could fly, you could do, many, many wonderful different things”
By this time, my better half had stopped emailing me because someone from Gmail tech support had called for back up due to the hideous language flooding a entire bank of servers.
Lets just say I was sent back to the drawing board.
Jasper2009 heaved another heavy digital sigh and we started again. This time, the award seat Gods were smiling down on me and I finally found a cracker of an itinerary
DEN-YUL-FRA-MXP
What brilliance. And 2 seats in J. Jackpot. I’ll take them. And the YUL-FRA was in Air Canada’s new 787. Am I not a frequent flyer God or what?
I had to call someone in moose country to get them to cancel the old tickets and then rebook the new seats.
If you’ve ever had to call them, brace yourself. They want you to set up a PIN (god knows why). They ask you tell them where you live and what your phone number is and if you put ketchup on poutine. If you get that answer wrong, they re-route your call to Bangalore and you will, most assuredly, want to shove your head in the microwave after they have finished with you.
I finally managed to yell loudly enough down the phone to get a human to answer.
Wait until you hear this.
The taxes on the first set of business class tickets were a very modest $15 Canadian. So about $3 dollars in real money.
But when the billing system came to recalculate the taxes on the new and improved itinerary, the call center agent all of a sudden stopped talking and gasped.
“What?”
“Umm, there are some additional taxes to collect, plus the $100 change fee per ticket”
“No problems, I have my credit card ready”
“Do you want to know the amount?”
“Not really, I mean how much are they now, $20 Canadian dollars?”
“Umm no. Just a whisker more if I’m honest”
“Well how much then?”
The lovely young woman then proceeded to tell me that I would need to fork over $800 Canadian per ticket plus the change fee. So something north of $1800 Canadian. I politely told the now confused agent that I didn’t want to pay for the entire cabin, just cash in some of these useless points.
You can guess what words came out of my mouth next.
I decided to text my wife and let her know of these horrendous charges, thinking that surely she wouldn’t want to pay this Kings Ransom
“Honey, Aeroplan are wanting to charge drug money for these tickets to Italy”
“If you think your daughter and I are going on a Russian Airline you have another thing coming”
“No not Aeroflot, Aeroplan. They are Canadian”
“Oh ok”
“These morons want $1800 to change the tickets”
“What’s the itinerary now then?”
“You fly direct from Denver to Montreal to Frankfurt and then to Milan”
“Oh I like Milan”
“But its $1800!”
“So!”
And that was it then. A bazillion Avios for the boys economy tickets. And a scandalous amount of Canadian currency to get the girls sorted out.
The boys were leaving one day earlier than the girls. No real problems. They are big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves.
Now what to do about my itinerary.
You might find this hard to believe but I had no trouble pulling an F award on LH from Houston to Frankfurt, with a wonderful 8hr layover in the FCT and then a very brief flight on a Lufthansa puddle jumper direct to FLR.
See – good things happen to people with patience.
Domani...
Not far from where I live, there are a lot of those typical American office complexes. Large, boring, nondescript buildings with huge parking lots.
On the weekends, when the offices are empty, these parking lots turn into the practice area for 15 year olds and their terrified parents. It’s a sight to behold. Even the local police department give these places a wide berth.
When I taught my son how to drive – we went to a deserted area of one these office parks and I calmly explained to him that while he only has 2 feet, there are 3 pedals in his car and he can only use 2 of them at a time.
Unless of course…
Nevermind.
So, I gently and calmly explained to him how to change gears. He nodded in the same way an Indian woman at a market nods when you ask her if she can add a shot of Vodka to your orange juice.
I provided firm instructions like this…
“Gently press down on the gas and ease your foot off the clutch”
“Like this…”
Which to a teenage boy means mashing the throttle into the floor, dumping the clutch and launching the car into the yonder.
On any given Saturday (or Sunday) you’d see witless parents tossing their cookies into the bushes, screaming at their sons and daughters that they are in fact homicidal maniacs and that they are catching an Uber home. Anything but being in the same car again with their children.
But not long after we both got used to the sound of my sons rev limiter on his little car – he finally got the hang of it and started to drive with some sense of normalcy.
When it came time to teach our daughter, the stakes were somewhat different. For one, she is one of those rare females who refused to take instruction from anyone, let alone her own father.
She let me take her driving maybe 2-3 times. Annoyingly, when you tell a female to follow instructions, like letting a clutch out gently and then gently squeezing the throttle, they actually listen and because they are female, their rather odd brains can actually multi-task and can handle more than one computation at a time.
To my surprise, she picked up changing gears in no time and her little mini was singing away happily.
“Dad, I got this now. Were going home”
“We are?”
“Yes”
“But we’ve only been out for 20 minutes…”
“But it’s easy”
“It’s not that easy”
“Well, you drive don’t you?”
“Yes”
“Then how hard can it be?”
And with that she spun the car with the checkerboard roof out onto the main road and we took off home. From that day forward, she would load up her dog, jam my unhappy wife into the back seat of her bambini mobile and proceed to drive to and from school every day for a year.
She wouldn’t care if it was 100 degrees out or 10. She drove in blizzards, pelting rain, and everything else in between. She was completely unfazed about any conditions. The only thing that would tip her right over was when her idiotic brother would borrow her car and proceed to thrash the rings off it.
So how did we get here then?
Well because we did. You should know by now that I have no idea what to write about half the time, and that all I am simply doing is documenting my somewhat insane life for my overworked therapist.
Let's be clear. Teaching your kids is nerve wracking. No point in denying that. You shouldn’t do it.
The other nerve wracking thing is taking a 16 year old and two 18 year olds to a slightly unhinged country in Europe where the drinking age is all of 16 and the place is controlled chaos at best.
But given that this is supposed to be about travel and I am supposed to write stuff that is somewhat relevant to how we got there, why we got arrested (kidding), and how we finally managed to get home, I will as they say in the movies, get on with it.
To be honest, I am well and truly over planning travel of any sort. I think I am more than rusty. I don’t know about you, but my Gmail account is full to the bream with emails from some petulant kid called “Lucky”, another semi creepy bald dude called Matthew J. Bennett and then an old woman from Croatia who keeps trying to poke me on Facebook trying to sell me an erectile dysfunction cure, which involves a goat and a lot of Vodka. Maybe it was the other way around. I forget.
Anyway
Like the last trip, I enlisted the services of one very savvy frequent flyer guru. Jasper2009. The poor man has been working his fingers to the bone trying to piece together an itinerary that would suit all of us. We have been pulling miles and points from what seems like a million different accounts, looking at air routings that would make Christopher Columbus proud, and generally yelling violently at Siri about why Aeroplan and Avios wouldn’t release the bloomin’ seats we needed. Until that is, that they did.
It wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t pretty. And at times, I didn’t think we’d make it.
Meanwhile, my useless family would casually remark…
“Dad, have you sorted out the tickets yet?”
“Yes honey, what’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on. What’s going on is the flaming airlines have become tighter than a fishes bottom and it isn’t what it used to be”
A sigh of contempt all around
Unlike most holidays we’ve ever gone on as a family, this little jaunt to Italy was more than a few weeks in the making.
Because we were taking my sons best friend, we had to get him a passport. Or rather he had to apply for one. In order to do so, we had to give him a semi valid itinerary. So I decided to work on the boys itinerary first.
Jasper2009 would send me a couple of options and the next morning, when I finally looked at his email and got around to kicking my Macbook into gear, the damn inventory management system on whatever program I was trying to redeem on scoffed at me and told me too bad, so sad, bye bye.
We ended up booking the boys using something called Avios. Silly program. Requires about 11 million points to go from Flint Michigan to Grand Rapids. Avios are about as valuable as the Iranian Rial.
Now don’t faint when I tell you this. I decided to book both 18 year olds in something called “economy” Apparently its somewhere down towards the rear of an aircraft. I have no idea. And sadly, neither does my own son.
Their routing is DEN-CLT-FCO on American. Dreadful. At least I think that’s what their routing it is. We have told the boys that they are to find their own way from FCO to FLR. That is sure to end in tears but hey, they have to learn sometime. I haven’t quite summonsed the courage to tell Number One Son that he is flying with the real people, but he will quickly learn. Expect much profanity in a couple of posts.
So that’s 2 down, 3 to go.
I then thought the now humorless Jasper2009 and I should work on the girls itinerary. Which is what he did. I decided that the only thing I could do was drink heavily and support him from a distance.
He would send one option after the other via Aeroplan. When I went to book, the silly French run program would show me something that looked valid, but when I went to book the tickets, it was like Inspector Clouseau was running things and the booking engine would laugh at me with gusto and tell me to kiss my squishy backside in French. It was infuriating.
But I finally managed to pry an itinerary out of their frugal hands and came up with this routing.
IAH-YUL-ZUR
I thought perfect. Denver to somewhere in Canada, and then a very orderly flight on Swiss to Zurich. I figured the girls could get to Florence on their own. I mean how hard could it be. It was after all in J.
I would even throw in the domestic DEN to IAH leg on the house. I was sure to be knee deep in sex credits after this herculean effort.
Feeling quite pleased with myself I sent the suggested itinerary to my current wife.
Because this is a family show, I wont tell you what she said. But it went something like this.
“Honey, I sent you the itinerary to Italy and if I’m honest, I did a terrific job”
“You did, did you?”
“And how are we getting to Houston”
“Oh I will buy you a ticket on UA”
“And then how are we getting to Florence from Zurich?”
“Oh there are many wonderful options. You could catch the train, you could fly, you could do, many, many wonderful different things”
By this time, my better half had stopped emailing me because someone from Gmail tech support had called for back up due to the hideous language flooding a entire bank of servers.
Lets just say I was sent back to the drawing board.
Jasper2009 heaved another heavy digital sigh and we started again. This time, the award seat Gods were smiling down on me and I finally found a cracker of an itinerary
DEN-YUL-FRA-MXP
What brilliance. And 2 seats in J. Jackpot. I’ll take them. And the YUL-FRA was in Air Canada’s new 787. Am I not a frequent flyer God or what?
I had to call someone in moose country to get them to cancel the old tickets and then rebook the new seats.
If you’ve ever had to call them, brace yourself. They want you to set up a PIN (god knows why). They ask you tell them where you live and what your phone number is and if you put ketchup on poutine. If you get that answer wrong, they re-route your call to Bangalore and you will, most assuredly, want to shove your head in the microwave after they have finished with you.
I finally managed to yell loudly enough down the phone to get a human to answer.
Wait until you hear this.
The taxes on the first set of business class tickets were a very modest $15 Canadian. So about $3 dollars in real money.
But when the billing system came to recalculate the taxes on the new and improved itinerary, the call center agent all of a sudden stopped talking and gasped.
“What?”
“Umm, there are some additional taxes to collect, plus the $100 change fee per ticket”
“No problems, I have my credit card ready”
“Do you want to know the amount?”
“Not really, I mean how much are they now, $20 Canadian dollars?”
“Umm no. Just a whisker more if I’m honest”
“Well how much then?”
The lovely young woman then proceeded to tell me that I would need to fork over $800 Canadian per ticket plus the change fee. So something north of $1800 Canadian. I politely told the now confused agent that I didn’t want to pay for the entire cabin, just cash in some of these useless points.
You can guess what words came out of my mouth next.
I decided to text my wife and let her know of these horrendous charges, thinking that surely she wouldn’t want to pay this Kings Ransom
“Honey, Aeroplan are wanting to charge drug money for these tickets to Italy”
“If you think your daughter and I are going on a Russian Airline you have another thing coming”
“No not Aeroflot, Aeroplan. They are Canadian”
“Oh ok”
“These morons want $1800 to change the tickets”
“What’s the itinerary now then?”
“You fly direct from Denver to Montreal to Frankfurt and then to Milan”
“Oh I like Milan”
“But its $1800!”
“So!”
And that was it then. A bazillion Avios for the boys economy tickets. And a scandalous amount of Canadian currency to get the girls sorted out.
The boys were leaving one day earlier than the girls. No real problems. They are big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves.
Now what to do about my itinerary.
You might find this hard to believe but I had no trouble pulling an F award on LH from Houston to Frankfurt, with a wonderful 8hr layover in the FCT and then a very brief flight on a Lufthansa puddle jumper direct to FLR.
See – good things happen to people with patience.
Domani...
May 16, 2019, 6:47 am
#22
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: SYD
Programs: OZ*G, VA Plat, NZ*G (Elite), QF Gold and PC+, Hyatt Explorist, HH Gold, Bonvoyed ("Gold")
Posts: 5,350
Great stuff. Keeping with the Italian theme, if the monsters get too much, you're in the land of fava beans and Chianti...
May 20, 2019, 9:30 am
#24
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: East Ester, Alaska
Programs: Alaska Million Miler, United Million Miler, Wyndham Rewards Diamond, Choice Hotels Diamond
Posts: 12,145
Welcome back, eightblack ^ When it comes to both literary entertainment and overall excellence, You Da Man!!
May 22, 2019, 9:49 pm
#26
Join Date: Nov 2015
Location: LST
Programs: HH, VA, QF, SQ, Air NZ
Posts: 169
@eightblack - this is just not cricket.
You started the innings really strong and then went in for stmps on the first day and never came back.
Fair shake of the sauce bottle, maaaate.
We dont want to thumbsuck what happens next.
Come back, please...
You started the innings really strong and then went in for stmps on the first day and never came back.
Fair shake of the sauce bottle, maaaate.
We dont want to thumbsuck what happens next.
Come back, please...
May 25, 2019, 1:36 am
#27
Join Date: May 2014
Posts: 7,206
Very bad title for a new thread, in Italian is a strong vulgar blaspheme oath, definitely against the forum rules. I do not know how you get the impression that this sentence can be used colloquially in a daily life, it is not. Could be maximum tolerated during a verbal altercation went emotional, not in any other context, even more in a script.
Miseria = misery as in "extreme poverty" which is not a deity. In Italian it's common to associate swines or other domestic animals to all but everything; true indeed, deities can be called in and are routinely (if you think they're extremely vulgar, do pass some time in most Northern regions, especially Veneto, where blasphemy is used almost as frequent as "and") but porca miseria (miseria is feminine, so porco becomes porca) absolutely isn't.
Italians, especially in the North, can be incredibly vulgar in their common day parlance. In this contest, "porca miseria" isn't even registered as a swearword. And I say that as an indigenous.
May 27, 2019, 4:31 am
#30
Join Date: Jul 2017
Location: CGK, BDO, MXP
Programs: QR Gold, WY Gold, TK Elite, EY Silver,
Posts: 461
Not at all.
Miseria = misery as in "extreme poverty" which is not a deity. In Italian it's common to associate swines or other domestic animals to all but everything; true indeed, deities can be called in and are routinely (if you think they're extremely vulgar, do pass some time in most Northern regions, especially Veneto, where blasphemy is used almost as frequent as "and") but porca miseria (miseria is feminine, so porco becomes porca) absolutely isn't.
Italians, especially in the North, can be incredibly vulgar in their common day parlance. In this contest, "porca miseria" isn't even registered as a swearword. And I say that as an indigenous.
Miseria = misery as in "extreme poverty" which is not a deity. In Italian it's common to associate swines or other domestic animals to all but everything; true indeed, deities can be called in and are routinely (if you think they're extremely vulgar, do pass some time in most Northern regions, especially Veneto, where blasphemy is used almost as frequent as "and") but porca miseria (miseria is feminine, so porco becomes porca) absolutely isn't.
Italians, especially in the North, can be incredibly vulgar in their common day parlance. In this contest, "porca miseria" isn't even registered as a swearword. And I say that as an indigenous.
