Recently I read this interesting article about the “American Stonehenge”. Apart from being a great, and considering today’s press, surprisingly informative article, it made me think about how we treat the monuments from the old days… Well obviously I mean civilized people, that do not trash and destroy something because it’s from this or that religion.

We kind of subconsciously assign more value to it as opposed to modern pieces. In a way the less we know about a structure, the more mysterious it is and the wilder the theories that surround it. I look at things today and am amazed at things like the pyramids. But then again is it maybe that I am assigning knowledge available to few people to a whole society? Just because modern day humans have the technology that can build structures even greater than the pyramids or Stonehenge, it does not mean a random person in the street could build as much as a simple watch or a car… In similar sense it was probably just very select few who had the skills and knowledge to orchestrate such a great undertaking.

Also at first I was taken aback with the negative attitude of some of the people. Doesn’t matter what the intention is of the builders, it’s not like they are putting some nuclear weapon out there. But when I thought about it for a longer while I remembered something.

My home town Gniezno is located near a bigger city called Poznan, and there near the town centre one can find the Castle. For many years it looked like any castle. The stereotypical grayish-green walls looking old and gloomy. That’s how old castles look, at least all that I have seen up till then, that’s how they looked in the stories etc…

Until one day I went to Poznan and they were in the process of restoring the Castle and a part of it was cleaning the walls - washing of all the dirt and stuff that has accumulated over the centuries. I was in fact lucky enough to get there when the process was half-way done, which meant you could see half of the wall clean and half  with the dirt still on. Not to drag it out much more the restored stones were of a nearly light sandy colour, not really something you associate with old castles.

But the point of this is that it made me realize that when the Castle was built it in a way looked completely differently. And in similar way we will never know whether there were the equivalents of graffiti painters trashing monuments like Stonehenge or commoners whining about what a waste of money the pyramids are. Probably not to the degree that democracy allows us today to voice our opinions, however still the perception at the time of their building might have been just as controversial as of our modern attempts at great architecture.

I don’t fly often, but on the rare occasions that I do unfortunatelly my airline choice is very limited. My quite common route is London (UK) - Poznań (Poland) and to my despair the choice in basically between Wizzair and Ryanair. There used to be a British Airways direct connection, though it seems it isn’t available anymore, and admittedly it was more pricey than the first two.

There are two reasons for this topic today. Firstly Easter is coming so I had to book my flights recently to not end up with some ridiculous rates. Secondly I found an interesting article on the Guardian’s website about one of the two cheap lines. If it wasn’t so outrageous, it might have actually been funny… here is a quote:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”

This was the official response from Ryanair after a small affair has been started online by the airline’s employee’s inappropriate blog pots comments. Admittedly Ryanair as well as its owner are know to be less than polite on many occasions, and not really fussed about customer service, often using their “strive to have the lowest fares” as a facade for rudeness and lack of comforts and amenities.

Since the whole luggage fees thing started I usually opted for Wizzair over Ryanair even if it meant spending a few more pounds. Because at the end of the day I got a higher baggage limit and their “extra fees” on top of the ticket price have been more reasonable. However as we have found out last Christmas there is one flaw on the route I take - the return flights all depart at 6am…

This means leaving my parents house at 3am, which maybe wouldn’t be such a big thing for my partner and I, if it wasn’t for the fact that this is only possible if my parents drive us there… In the end it means everyone gets no sleep.

So in order to make the journey slightly more reasonable this time we went with Ryanair. And it quickly reminded me why I was choosing Wizzair before. Just to start with the hideous booking process which seems to do everything to discourage you from choosing an optimum date and time. With all the hyped claims of doing everything to lower the prices and cut costs “for the customer” the booking does quite the opposite.

You need quite some willpower and determination to click through the dates one by one to compare prices. In our case we take holiday according to our flights, so we have some flexibility when it comes to what day we will be departing. And very often a day sooner or later can mean significant savings. I always liked Wizzair’s weekly preview, it definitely helps you judge prices easily, no need to memorise all your possible departure and arrival combinations just to make a choice. Not to mention that if you click next or previous day to many times in a row the website will just happily throw an error at you, that most of the time means starting the whole booking process all over again.

However in the end this time with a difference in prices and convenient flight times, I crawled through the booking process on Ryanair’s website. Just to be shocked by the luggage prices! Both cheap lines had these extra costs before, but it was just a couple of quid. This time Ryanair was asking  £14 per bag per passenger. Well, with this surcharge, the tickets would no longer be that cheap especially considering there’s also a Visa charge…

In the end we decided to fly with just hand luggage, however ever since I have been wondering about loads of things, whether we can take them in the bag or not. I might actually need to send Easter presents in the post - not a big deal considering the package cost will be less than the baggage charge…

I didn’t like Ryanair before reading the article, but I think that little bit of unnecessary rudeness is too much for me. Looks like we will be joining the “say no to Ryanair” bunch after our farewell flight during Easter.