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Friday, October 2, 2009

On the way to Eurocup in Ohrid


Petroupoli Square in Athens where my simul on October 14 will take place

Hello all!

I'm writing to you from Thessaloniki, it's 2 AM here, what a day I had!

I started my journey from Miami on the flight of Alitalia Miami-Rome. I was supposed to get to Rome at 8AM and then to make a connection flight to Thessaloniki at 9-15AM. But the plane from Miami to Rome was 1 hour late and arrived to Rome only at 9AM. So I was at the boarding gate to the flight to Thessaloniki at 9-10 (for that I needed to run a marathon in the airport), despite everything, the gate was already closed and the plane was en-route to Thessaloniki. So I missed it and the problem was that I had to catch the train at 5pm from Thessaloniki to Skopje, from where I will need to drive 4 more hours to get to Ohrid, where the European Club Cup will take place from October 4 to October 10.

So I missed the flight to Thessaloniki and the next one from Rome to Thessaloniki was only at 9PM, so they suggested to try to fly through Athens and to get a flight to Thessaloniki from Athens that was scheduled for 2-30PM so I could be in Thessaloniki at 3-20PM and still be able to get to the train at 5PM. But since the flight to Athens was late I missed the flight to Thessaloniki again.

Luckily my friend Michael Taylor and his friends from Athens that are organizing a big chess festival on October 12-15 came to the airport. They showed me some plans and advertisements for my simul that will take place on October 14 at 6pm on the Petroupoli Square.

I even had some time to see a little bit of Athens and visited the Petroupoli chess club


and the Petroupoli Square where the simul on October 14 will take place.

So now I'm at the Thessaloniki airport, I have a train to Skopje tomorrow morning at 9AM and I hope I will get there in time and will catch the train that I need, because the tournament starts already on the 4th of October and I wonder will I be alive after such a long voyage? ;)

To be continued....

Posted by: Alexandra Kosteniuk
Women's World Chess Champion
at

4 comments:

  1. RobertOctober 2, 2009 at 7:17 PM

    Alexandra: Is the airlines going to do anything for you to make it right for you, because they should.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 2, 2009 at 11:03 PM

    "for that I needed to run a marathon in the airport"

    Aha! So this is why you run so many marathons :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousOctober 3, 2009 at 2:04 AM

    Will you get the money compensation from the airlines as they didn't do, what you paid for?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alexandra KosteniukOctober 3, 2009 at 2:39 PM

    I arrived 24 hours late... I doubt the airline Alitalia will do anything right. Going to sleep now, hope to sleep 24 hours and to wake up in time for the second round :-)

    ReplyDelete

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