Best and Worst: How's your week been?

Ciao, friends.

Welcome to Mamamia’s Best and Worst, where we come together every Friday to discuss the good, the bad and the ugly bits of the week gone by.

Please excuse my unforgivably wanky European greeting, but I’m flying to Italy on Monday for a long-awaited holiday and I need to brush up on my high school Italian.

The best part of my week was planning for the trip, including reviewing my Italian vocab and preparing my stomach for the ingestion of a significantly increased pasta load.

In fact, I’ve spent the whole week feeling pretty inadequate, thinking about the European children who speak two or three languages fluently by the age of six as I struggle through my feminine and masculine verbs. I wish we had an option like that for our younger generation – it seems like Australia is falling behind in that respect.

The worst part of my week began yesterday when I read about a pilot who switched off a commercial plane’s only working engine while airborne. The captain of TransAsia flight 235 was heard to say, “Wow, pulled back the wrong side throttle” before the plane plummeted to the ground, killing 43 passengers.

As you can imagine, this was not the news I needed before boarding a 24-hour intercontinental flight.

I’ve spent the last few days freaking out about the risks of flying. I’ll be on the plane alone, and I keep imagining being forced to hold a stranger’s hand as our plane crashes into the ocean.

I know the risks of flying are significantly lower than the risks of driving, which I do every day without batting an eyelid. It’s not helping much, though, so if you have any tips, they would be very much appreciated.

Over to you – what have the best and worst parts of your week been? 

Planning your own European travels? Check out some ideas below: 

An Aussie girl’s guide to Paris.

Rich history, incredible food, spectacular scenery: A traveller’s guide to Turkey.

Planning to travel to Spain? Make this your itinerary…