Travel Advisory

This will run counter to what many of you may hold dear about travel.

Travel in France and Italy is the worst thing ever.

Being in France and Italy is one of my favorite things to do, but travel in either is a cacking nightmare.

See, neither the French nor Italians have any sense of the Pauli Exclusion Principle which, according to my research on Wikipedia and Ask.com, is the source of our general belief that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time.

Kids, research on Wikipedia and/or Ask.com is not acceptable in an academic setting. It only works if you intend to fail your assignment or use it for the less credible venues of life.

And, by the way, full disclosure, if you are a boson, apparently, you actually can occupy the same space as another boson at the same time.

However, neither the French nor the Italians, though filled with bosons, are themselves bosons.

The proof for this is the past two weeks of my life, when I have had to inform a number of our European friends that I am neither permeable nor invisible. This, unfortunately, did not impede any of them from attempting to walk right through me. Nor did it prevent my rear end from being the recipient of a number of blessings from innumerable luggage handles.

Even worse is what happens when attempting to get on a flight. At the first available opportunity, whether French or Italian, everyone rushes to the front of the waiting zone, smashing themselves in like a herd of sardines looking to have a family reunion all in just one tin. It's preposterous. Forty minutes until takeoff, and they're crammed in like bosons in the same place at the same time.

Even worse still is when they have to drop off a loved one. I swear, just a few days ago in Tours, two Frenchies were dropping off their English friends at the airport. They waited at the end of the line. The end of the line. Not near the beginning of where you line up, but actually at the end of the line of people who were getting in line for the plane. A friend with whom I was traveling actually had to smoosh by them to get on the plane for which he had a ticket. Too bad he wasn't a boson.

Frenches. Italians. If any of you cares for your fellow man, and you both claim to have invented western civilization, I would humbly beseech thee to cut it out.

It's far more annoying than wearing white sneakers, visors, or fanny packs.

Trust me. I'm a boson.