Waiting by any other name is still annoying

One of the feelings that I always seems to carry around with me when I travel internationally is anxiety. The emotion is partly due to my not knowing the language but more because I am so often ignorant of the simple mechanics of travel.

Take yesterday, for example. We — my wife, my friend Leslie, and I — decided to take the ferry to the Uruguayan town of Colonia . It was advertised as a 45-minute trip on the fast ferry, though it ended up being more like an hour and 15 minutes.

But the process of buying tickets should have clued us in right away. First we stood in the ticket line, only to be told at the window that we had to stand in another line to get passes that would allow us to buy the tickets. So we stood in the pass line, then returned to the ticket line, then went to the embarcation line, then security, then immigration (where we got out passports stamped) and then, finally, they took our tickets, which allowed us to board .

Ah, sweet bureaucrary. And in castellano, no less.