Swiss, formerly Swiss Air, is an airline I like to fly with. As I was in charge of the booking of our trip to Wolverhampton, I chose not only Swiss to fly with but also the Novotel in Wolverhampton to stay at.
The reason for Swiss was that it is the closest to a direct flight to Birmingham that is reasonably cheap. Only an hour wait in Zurich, where the airport has the best ‘smoking areas’ I have ever seen in an airport. And, certainly this trip, on time!!! It must be the Swiss clocks that do it.
The Novotel was the only hotel that I could find in the area that had bedrooms in which you could smoke! Yay! After I had booked it, I found on Trip Advisor, that the hotel wasn’t supposed to be so good. Admittedly, the décor was a little ‘tired’ and the carpets on the bedroom floors were stained and appeared a little dirty but the room was clean and YOU COULD SMOKE, so it still gets my vote. OK, a tad more expensive but, hey, was I paying? No. It was also close to the centre of town and my colleagues wanted to go back to the Indian restaurant that we have been to before – Bilash. Bilash is not how I remember Indian restaurants in the UK. More like Indian meets Nigella Lawson. But exceptional food and, staying in the hotel we were in, about a 10 minute walk. Cool.
Also we had an hour or two the following morning to walk around town. A little retail therapy. My colleagues, watching what I was buying on the basis that anything I was buying might be good. This was particularly true for the food in the supermarket. In fact, on of my colleagues bought nearly everything that I did, including cheddar cheese, stilton and port!!
Obviously, having two flights each way meant two different types of aircraft. Between Milan and Zurich it was an Avro RJ85/100. I always pay attention to the hostesses when they go through the safety thing, not only because they are, sometimes, quite funny, but also as a mark of respect – after all, they have no choice and it seems rude not to.
I also, always, make a point of reading the safety card. This time, I found something that I found quite funny and I will, this evening, put up a picture of it as, inadvertently, the card must have slipped into one of my bags on leaving the plane. I shall have to post it back to Swiss to whom I would like to apologise.
The guy who scanned it in suggested that it was saying that this was not a position to be adopted in the event of a crash. However, I pointed out that, if that were the case then they should have put it on the other side, the side which showed the correct positions (and, therefore ,it would have made more sense). To me it just looks like a sign prohibiting sleeping on the floor! In any event, this is the first time I have ever seen this and it did amuse me.
