Chakravada
Oct. 31st, 2007 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanticoHappy Halloween/Samhain/All Saints Day, everyone! Florence is a wonderful city for this time of year, seeing as it is almost entirely focused on the past, on reflection and dark stone and bone-white birch trees. Sadly, there is no such thing as Halloween over here: we have All Saint’s Day, but that’s completely different. One of my classmates got a package filled with Halloween candy from home, and I lamented. Candy corn and Reeses Cups, I miss you! Apple cider, I shall write you s longing ode!
I can’t believe it’s the end of October already. The early part of the month found me in unhappy places, culture shock fully setting in. I thought it wouldn’t happen to me; oh no, I said, I’m already used to enough strangeness, enough non-stereotypical American behavior. Culture shock? Bah!
Yeah, *right*. That attitude wore off pretty quick when I realized that I felt utterly helpless, essentially lost, flailing in a sea of dirty urban streets, perverted old men, gelato and traffic laws that make no sense whatsoever. I wanted to kill every person that laid eyes on me. I wanted to throttle them while screaming NO PARLO ITALIANO. I was, ah, a little stressed.
Then midterms! Nothing like a good bout of panic . . . or not so much panic as mild interest . . . to get me back in gear. Actually, I attribute my feeling better to two things, the first being that instead of studying I spent the weekend before midterms *writing again*. Man, when I get going, I don’t fool around. 40 pages of story later, I was feeling inspired and excised. Why did I *ever* stop writing, aside from lack of time/intimidation felt due to nearby presence of awesome writers?
Number 2 was fall break, in which I shopped (Calvin Klein feather down coat, check. Dark brown mid-forearm Italian leather gloves, check. Gorgeous blue and purple Pashmina scarf, check. Sweet hematite and gemstone swirly sparkly, check. Utilitarian but comfortable black sneakers so I can throw away my nasty ass old Sketchers, check), and more importantly went on vay-cay.
Guess where I went?
So follows a partially illustrated guide to my adventures in Sicily!
My original plan, unbeknownst to my mother in case of heart attack on her part, was to go alone, a sole American female in the most Italian of Italian places. This was (fortunately) derailed by the inclusion of probably the coolest girl I’ve met on my trip. This is Corri. Corri is awesome. Corri understands the Avery method of traveling in foreign countries: throw some shit in a bag, book a hostel, grab some train tickets and stop worrying, because it’s Italy and silly things like “Schedules”, “Organization” and “Time” really don’t exist and no one, especially he natives, are going to pay any attention at all.
After some shopping and a fun jaunt across the Ponte Vecchio, i.e. MECCA, HOME OF THE SHINIES—the place where, since the Renaissance, all of the best jewelers have kept shop with all of their gorgeous product, including my new lover (sorry Jason), a 39,000 euro light sea blue sapphire the size of an egg-- we grabbed dinner – any place where homemade pasta in a gorgonzola cream sauce with house-ground sausage is, you know, standard fair is all right in my book—and ran to grab our train, an overnighter that leaves at 9 at night and arrives at 10 AM the next morning. This monsterous trip was made slightly better by the inclusion of sleeper beds. I say slightly, because sleeping on the top bunk in a moving train with a dinky little piece of fluff I could dubiously name a pillow and no air conditioning is no picnic. Actually, it stands out in my mind as one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had. I suspect it’s kind of like being in bed when a medium sized earthquake hits, except, you know, it lasts for twelve hours and includes four strangers who speak nothing approximating a language you understand. I dreamed of trains (unsurprisingly) and gorillas (not that surprising when you realize that closest noise approximation to that train chugging along would be the screaming apes in Congo). I woke up not at all refreshed, but at least we had arrived, exausted but content, in Catania.
Oh, *Catania*. I could write you a love poem, but I suspect you’d yank it out of my hands, rip it into little pieces, pee on it and then yell at me in indecipherable Italian for a while before hitting me with a car. The city is the most absolutely foreign place I’ve ever been, but in such a strange, bizarre way. See, Sicilians love them some American culture. They have their own version of Mickey Mouse, they drive big cars, they wear tiny belly-peeking shirts, are far more overweight than most Italians and have Chinese take out places. However, it’s all through this filter of serious, old school Sicilian culture. So they pair those tee-shirts with stiletto boots and drive those big SUVs on four lane streets without any kind of comprehensive traffic laws. It’s all the bustle and commercialization of American, with none—and I mean *none*-- of the organization. The Mafia is very real and very present here, and pickpockets and theives assail the streets on Motos, zipping by and grabbing your bag right off your shoulder. And it’s DIRTY. I have a deep love for urban decay. It’s fascinating, beautiful, and emotional. Catania is an exemplary specimen. Human filth, garbage, graffiti and rotting food and meat from the markets mingle with stunning architecture and beautiful people in designer clothes, colorful tented markets and views of both the Ionic Sea and the Mountain.
The Mountain. Etna. My whole reason for coming to this place.
Etna is the biggest and most active volcano not only in Italy but all of Europe. 10,910 ft high and constantly active, with the last activity on September 4th, and the last major eruption in 2003, which spilled great rivers of lava over the entire landscape. Actually, most have you have seen these eruptions yourselves, though you might not know it: remember the Volcano planet and big jedi-fight in Revenge of the Sith? That was them in the background. Wiki has more of the facts right here, if you want.
Everything is affected by the mountain. Catania is actually built in large part from lava basalt—which means all of the buildings are either a dark grey/black, or plastered over. The plaster usually ends of dark grey too, of course, because of the years of soot build-up. I don’t actually have any pictures of Catania, though Corri took a bunch. I’ll post them when she does, but during our excursion into the city I thought it better to not tempt the thieves and instead save my memory card for the Mountain.
The rest of the day was spent settling into the place where we were actually staying: a sweet, small little town called Nicolosi where we shacked up at a wonderful bed and breakfast. We had a great room, and a great view, and of course a wonderful patroness. Like all things in Sicily, of course, it was a mixed bag—for all of their hospitality and beautiful set-up, Patrizia, the manager, didn’t *quite* use enough make-up to cover her black eye. That’s Sicily. Oh, and the roosters that lived in the back yard and crowed every five seconds.
Nicolosi is a typical small Italian town. Cute caffes, churches, and one long main street. I can’t decide if I was more charmed by the cadre of three police officers we saw every day at the same café gabbing with three old men, the stray dogs, or the view. I think the view wins, but it’s by a narrow margin. It actually wasn’t a very nice day—it wasn’t rainy, but it was very dark, cloudy and moody at times—but Etna was almost always clear. Snow-capped, steaming, she watches over her slopes with amused interest, wreathed in clouds and working away at her great art somewhere deep inside.
Day two was going to be our day for climbing the mountain, but we decided not to on account of wind, rain, and overall miserable weather, so we took our day trip into Catania to explore it a little more thoroughly. It’s nicer, or at leats more interesting, away form the bus station. Our first stop was the giant market the takes place in one of their piazza’s every day. People, if you think you’ve been to a market in America, you haven’t. REALLY. It’s only when you can buy leather shoes next to a stand of slimy, full sized squid being juggled by a man screaming in Italian to compete with the fresh vegetable sellers five feet away who are also screaming a language you can’t even begin to identify and throwing cabbage at some guy who’s trying to hawk ten dollar Louis Vuitton knock-offs while the crowd, like some great amoebic thing from a drive-in movie, pushes and presses you towards the butchers stand where a old bent woman argues over the price of a lamb bisected neatly in two laterally, like a diagram from a science textbook, a little puff of wool still left on the end of it’s flayed tail. We contemplated getting a horse-meat kebob, chose soda’s instead, and separated so I could do some drawing and she could take pictures.
That was really the highlight of the day, except for our discovery of Sicilian balls (actually called Arancini, but hush, our capacity for sophomoric humor was not to be diminished by silly things like *proper names*), lightly breaded rice balls filled with a variety of meats and cheeses. We looked around at the other architecture and grand places the city had to offer (stunning, of course . . . more gothic than renaissance, though most were constructed after the 166-something eruption) and headed home. At this point, I was alternating between giddy and morose contemplating the next day, because, OMG, VOLCANO, but that was only if the weather worked out, and only if we wanted to risk missing our train home. See, like all things in Catania, the public transit system works on no form of human logic. Here is how things were *supposed* to work: a bus would come at 9:05 to take us up the mountain to a station where we could hike/take a cablecar/take a jeep excursion from, and would come back at 4:30 to pick us up. 4:30 was THE ONLY time it would come back; the following trip back down would take and hour and a half, dropping us at the train station at 6:00. Our train leaves at 7:15.
If there is one thing, *one thing* that I have to keep stressing, it’s that schedules really, really don’t exist in any sort of official manner, and while a hour’s worth of buffer time might seem like a fair amount to catch a train, we knew better. Even Patrizia warned us when we first arrived that A. Buses are always late, if B. They ever come at all. In tw days we learned that this was more than true. Hence, our trepidation. Of course, since it was supposed to be *thunderstorming* the next day, we might not even have to worry about it. I went to sleep in our super soft bed resigned to wistfully waving good bye to the volcano and snapping lots of farewell pictures.
Oh, like the universe would really let *that* happen. The next day was bright, clear, warm, and the bus only came 45 minutes late to pick us up. You should have seen me in the bus. I had my camera out the whole time, photographing our approach; once in a while I would squeak. Quite literally. Think of my hiccups, only more excited.
We arrived at the station in due time. It was, uh . . . words. Words fail me. We were up high, in the clouds. Some snow. There was cooled lava, lots of it, hills of it, slicing through forests and leaving great swaths of red-black from which surviving trees huddled together in tiny pockets, and once in the while, a corner of a roof would poke up like a grasping hand. There were craters. There was a view that I really, like . . . pictures can’t do it justice, they just can’t, but I tried. Remember, we’re at 2000-2500 m here . . . and those views are probably a couple thousand feet down.
And then there was up.
I’ve tried to write this section about 5 times and I think I’ve given up. Here’s the facts: we went up to the main craters of the 2000, 2002 and 2003 eruptions in a jeep, about 2800 m up. It was not very good weather, in which I mean it wasn’t clear (though once in while, it did, and wow). We hiked in snow, freezing fog and a little bit of rain. I didn’t even feel it.
We went down. We shopped. I got a swank new Etna sweatshirt, took a lot of pictures in which we both look like Tubby McPuffinstuffs because we’re wearing like 50 layers of clothes, took more pictures, and caught the thankfully on time bus.
IT. WAS. AWESOME.
It was not what I expected. There weren’t nay grand spiritual awakenings. I do not feel like a wholly different person. Yet. But something moved, and something’s boiling in me, and I GOT TO SEE ME A VOLCANO EEHEHEHHE.
Like all good journeys, this one ends with a near disaster. Our bus wasn’t late getting there, but was arriving: we pull into the station at 6:30. We grab some quick eats, hop on the platform, and begin the lonely waiting thing, sitting on out luggage in an empty station, staring expectantly down dark lines through the haze of too-dim, too-orange lighting. I hear something over the speakers. It mentions our train. Unfortunately, I can’t catch the rest of it, so I go to see what’s up: ah, we’ve changed platforms. That’s okay, we’ve still got 15 minutes. We move, I go to the bathroom so I can avoid using the terrifying ones on the train as much as possible, and overhear someone angrily talking about our train, again. Now I am worried. We’re supposed to leave in 10 minutes. There are offices for customer service, but since customer service doesn’t exist here and is all in Italian anyway, I don’t find out what’s going on until 3 minutes before departure time what’s going on: THE TRAIN. IS NOT. COMING. We have exactly *one minute* to get our asses on a bus to Messina. What happens after we get on a bus to Messina? We don’t know! It’s a surprise! In fact, not only do we not know, but not a single passenger knows, either! Or the driver! Whee!
In Messina, we somehow decipher that there is another train. We find a platform full of people with our destination listed. There’s a train that can maybe fit 100 people max in front of us, probably a couple hundred Sicilians standing around, and they are all very, very angry. This is worrisome. If the *Sicilians* are worried, we should be *triple* worried. The departure time for this train rolls around and past, down the lines where we should be going. Our itty-bitty train stays black and locked. Some people that work for the railway come out and try to restore order; after about fifteen minutes one is screaming at the top of her lungs and the others has burst into tears and is ushered away by her coworkers.
About two hours past our projected leaving time, I find someone to ask about our ticket. Right train is about all I get, and then he’s swarmed by more shouting people. Corri and I give up at this point, deciding to wait and see. What happens. Eventually, we see a couple other cars coming down the line, which they hook to the train, and about a half hour after that, people begin boarding. In a stampede. By the way, if you expect your train cars to be laid out in a numerical manner, don’t. Car 6 was in the front, car 3 was after it, and then car 11. We were in car one. Not even the conductor knew where car one was, of course.
Our saving grace came when I was desperately trying to speak to the man and have him pint in the general vicinity of our train car when we hear the sweet, sweet sounds of heavenly English: “You are Americans?” We were quickly taken under the wing of a nice guy, only slightly creepy, who knew some English and regularly rode the trains without any sort of registered seats. He knew all the tricks. Perhaps it wasn’t the brightest idea to let a strange man watch over us and our stuff while we collapsed, exausted, into the uncomfortable seats and passed out, but we were desperate. He *was* nice, and aside from some vaugely sleazy flirting, a gentleman. This time, we didn’t even have the benefit of an overnight bed, so sleeping was more difficult than projected. Fifteen hours after leaving Catania, we arrive in Florence on Saturday morning, alive, unmolested, and successfully having climbed a mother-fucking volcano.
And that was my trip!
I can’t believe it’s the end of October already. The early part of the month found me in unhappy places, culture shock fully setting in. I thought it wouldn’t happen to me; oh no, I said, I’m already used to enough strangeness, enough non-stereotypical American behavior. Culture shock? Bah!
Yeah, *right*. That attitude wore off pretty quick when I realized that I felt utterly helpless, essentially lost, flailing in a sea of dirty urban streets, perverted old men, gelato and traffic laws that make no sense whatsoever. I wanted to kill every person that laid eyes on me. I wanted to throttle them while screaming NO PARLO ITALIANO. I was, ah, a little stressed.
Then midterms! Nothing like a good bout of panic . . . or not so much panic as mild interest . . . to get me back in gear. Actually, I attribute my feeling better to two things, the first being that instead of studying I spent the weekend before midterms *writing again*. Man, when I get going, I don’t fool around. 40 pages of story later, I was feeling inspired and excised. Why did I *ever* stop writing, aside from lack of time/intimidation felt due to nearby presence of awesome writers?
Number 2 was fall break, in which I shopped (Calvin Klein feather down coat, check. Dark brown mid-forearm Italian leather gloves, check. Gorgeous blue and purple Pashmina scarf, check. Sweet hematite and gemstone swirly sparkly, check. Utilitarian but comfortable black sneakers so I can throw away my nasty ass old Sketchers, check), and more importantly went on vay-cay.
Guess where I went?
So follows a partially illustrated guide to my adventures in Sicily!
My original plan, unbeknownst to my mother in case of heart attack on her part, was to go alone, a sole American female in the most Italian of Italian places. This was (fortunately) derailed by the inclusion of probably the coolest girl I’ve met on my trip. This is Corri. Corri is awesome. Corri understands the Avery method of traveling in foreign countries: throw some shit in a bag, book a hostel, grab some train tickets and stop worrying, because it’s Italy and silly things like “Schedules”, “Organization” and “Time” really don’t exist and no one, especially he natives, are going to pay any attention at all.
After some shopping and a fun jaunt across the Ponte Vecchio, i.e. MECCA, HOME OF THE SHINIES—the place where, since the Renaissance, all of the best jewelers have kept shop with all of their gorgeous product, including my new lover (sorry Jason), a 39,000 euro light sea blue sapphire the size of an egg-- we grabbed dinner – any place where homemade pasta in a gorgonzola cream sauce with house-ground sausage is, you know, standard fair is all right in my book—and ran to grab our train, an overnighter that leaves at 9 at night and arrives at 10 AM the next morning. This monsterous trip was made slightly better by the inclusion of sleeper beds. I say slightly, because sleeping on the top bunk in a moving train with a dinky little piece of fluff I could dubiously name a pillow and no air conditioning is no picnic. Actually, it stands out in my mind as one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had. I suspect it’s kind of like being in bed when a medium sized earthquake hits, except, you know, it lasts for twelve hours and includes four strangers who speak nothing approximating a language you understand. I dreamed of trains (unsurprisingly) and gorillas (not that surprising when you realize that closest noise approximation to that train chugging along would be the screaming apes in Congo). I woke up not at all refreshed, but at least we had arrived, exausted but content, in Catania.
Oh, *Catania*. I could write you a love poem, but I suspect you’d yank it out of my hands, rip it into little pieces, pee on it and then yell at me in indecipherable Italian for a while before hitting me with a car. The city is the most absolutely foreign place I’ve ever been, but in such a strange, bizarre way. See, Sicilians love them some American culture. They have their own version of Mickey Mouse, they drive big cars, they wear tiny belly-peeking shirts, are far more overweight than most Italians and have Chinese take out places. However, it’s all through this filter of serious, old school Sicilian culture. So they pair those tee-shirts with stiletto boots and drive those big SUVs on four lane streets without any kind of comprehensive traffic laws. It’s all the bustle and commercialization of American, with none—and I mean *none*-- of the organization. The Mafia is very real and very present here, and pickpockets and theives assail the streets on Motos, zipping by and grabbing your bag right off your shoulder. And it’s DIRTY. I have a deep love for urban decay. It’s fascinating, beautiful, and emotional. Catania is an exemplary specimen. Human filth, garbage, graffiti and rotting food and meat from the markets mingle with stunning architecture and beautiful people in designer clothes, colorful tented markets and views of both the Ionic Sea and the Mountain.
The Mountain. Etna. My whole reason for coming to this place.
Etna is the biggest and most active volcano not only in Italy but all of Europe. 10,910 ft high and constantly active, with the last activity on September 4th, and the last major eruption in 2003, which spilled great rivers of lava over the entire landscape. Actually, most have you have seen these eruptions yourselves, though you might not know it: remember the Volcano planet and big jedi-fight in Revenge of the Sith? That was them in the background. Wiki has more of the facts right here, if you want.
Everything is affected by the mountain. Catania is actually built in large part from lava basalt—which means all of the buildings are either a dark grey/black, or plastered over. The plaster usually ends of dark grey too, of course, because of the years of soot build-up. I don’t actually have any pictures of Catania, though Corri took a bunch. I’ll post them when she does, but during our excursion into the city I thought it better to not tempt the thieves and instead save my memory card for the Mountain.
The rest of the day was spent settling into the place where we were actually staying: a sweet, small little town called Nicolosi where we shacked up at a wonderful bed and breakfast. We had a great room, and a great view, and of course a wonderful patroness. Like all things in Sicily, of course, it was a mixed bag—for all of their hospitality and beautiful set-up, Patrizia, the manager, didn’t *quite* use enough make-up to cover her black eye. That’s Sicily. Oh, and the roosters that lived in the back yard and crowed every five seconds.
Nicolosi is a typical small Italian town. Cute caffes, churches, and one long main street. I can’t decide if I was more charmed by the cadre of three police officers we saw every day at the same café gabbing with three old men, the stray dogs, or the view. I think the view wins, but it’s by a narrow margin. It actually wasn’t a very nice day—it wasn’t rainy, but it was very dark, cloudy and moody at times—but Etna was almost always clear. Snow-capped, steaming, she watches over her slopes with amused interest, wreathed in clouds and working away at her great art somewhere deep inside.
Day two was going to be our day for climbing the mountain, but we decided not to on account of wind, rain, and overall miserable weather, so we took our day trip into Catania to explore it a little more thoroughly. It’s nicer, or at leats more interesting, away form the bus station. Our first stop was the giant market the takes place in one of their piazza’s every day. People, if you think you’ve been to a market in America, you haven’t. REALLY. It’s only when you can buy leather shoes next to a stand of slimy, full sized squid being juggled by a man screaming in Italian to compete with the fresh vegetable sellers five feet away who are also screaming a language you can’t even begin to identify and throwing cabbage at some guy who’s trying to hawk ten dollar Louis Vuitton knock-offs while the crowd, like some great amoebic thing from a drive-in movie, pushes and presses you towards the butchers stand where a old bent woman argues over the price of a lamb bisected neatly in two laterally, like a diagram from a science textbook, a little puff of wool still left on the end of it’s flayed tail. We contemplated getting a horse-meat kebob, chose soda’s instead, and separated so I could do some drawing and she could take pictures.
That was really the highlight of the day, except for our discovery of Sicilian balls (actually called Arancini, but hush, our capacity for sophomoric humor was not to be diminished by silly things like *proper names*), lightly breaded rice balls filled with a variety of meats and cheeses. We looked around at the other architecture and grand places the city had to offer (stunning, of course . . . more gothic than renaissance, though most were constructed after the 166-something eruption) and headed home. At this point, I was alternating between giddy and morose contemplating the next day, because, OMG, VOLCANO, but that was only if the weather worked out, and only if we wanted to risk missing our train home. See, like all things in Catania, the public transit system works on no form of human logic. Here is how things were *supposed* to work: a bus would come at 9:05 to take us up the mountain to a station where we could hike/take a cablecar/take a jeep excursion from, and would come back at 4:30 to pick us up. 4:30 was THE ONLY time it would come back; the following trip back down would take and hour and a half, dropping us at the train station at 6:00. Our train leaves at 7:15.
If there is one thing, *one thing* that I have to keep stressing, it’s that schedules really, really don’t exist in any sort of official manner, and while a hour’s worth of buffer time might seem like a fair amount to catch a train, we knew better. Even Patrizia warned us when we first arrived that A. Buses are always late, if B. They ever come at all. In tw days we learned that this was more than true. Hence, our trepidation. Of course, since it was supposed to be *thunderstorming* the next day, we might not even have to worry about it. I went to sleep in our super soft bed resigned to wistfully waving good bye to the volcano and snapping lots of farewell pictures.
Oh, like the universe would really let *that* happen. The next day was bright, clear, warm, and the bus only came 45 minutes late to pick us up. You should have seen me in the bus. I had my camera out the whole time, photographing our approach; once in a while I would squeak. Quite literally. Think of my hiccups, only more excited.
We arrived at the station in due time. It was, uh . . . words. Words fail me. We were up high, in the clouds. Some snow. There was cooled lava, lots of it, hills of it, slicing through forests and leaving great swaths of red-black from which surviving trees huddled together in tiny pockets, and once in the while, a corner of a roof would poke up like a grasping hand. There were craters. There was a view that I really, like . . . pictures can’t do it justice, they just can’t, but I tried. Remember, we’re at 2000-2500 m here . . . and those views are probably a couple thousand feet down.
And then there was up.
I’ve tried to write this section about 5 times and I think I’ve given up. Here’s the facts: we went up to the main craters of the 2000, 2002 and 2003 eruptions in a jeep, about 2800 m up. It was not very good weather, in which I mean it wasn’t clear (though once in while, it did, and wow). We hiked in snow, freezing fog and a little bit of rain. I didn’t even feel it.
We went down. We shopped. I got a swank new Etna sweatshirt, took a lot of pictures in which we both look like Tubby McPuffinstuffs because we’re wearing like 50 layers of clothes, took more pictures, and caught the thankfully on time bus.
IT. WAS. AWESOME.
It was not what I expected. There weren’t nay grand spiritual awakenings. I do not feel like a wholly different person. Yet. But something moved, and something’s boiling in me, and I GOT TO SEE ME A VOLCANO EEHEHEHHE.
Like all good journeys, this one ends with a near disaster. Our bus wasn’t late getting there, but was arriving: we pull into the station at 6:30. We grab some quick eats, hop on the platform, and begin the lonely waiting thing, sitting on out luggage in an empty station, staring expectantly down dark lines through the haze of too-dim, too-orange lighting. I hear something over the speakers. It mentions our train. Unfortunately, I can’t catch the rest of it, so I go to see what’s up: ah, we’ve changed platforms. That’s okay, we’ve still got 15 minutes. We move, I go to the bathroom so I can avoid using the terrifying ones on the train as much as possible, and overhear someone angrily talking about our train, again. Now I am worried. We’re supposed to leave in 10 minutes. There are offices for customer service, but since customer service doesn’t exist here and is all in Italian anyway, I don’t find out what’s going on until 3 minutes before departure time what’s going on: THE TRAIN. IS NOT. COMING. We have exactly *one minute* to get our asses on a bus to Messina. What happens after we get on a bus to Messina? We don’t know! It’s a surprise! In fact, not only do we not know, but not a single passenger knows, either! Or the driver! Whee!
In Messina, we somehow decipher that there is another train. We find a platform full of people with our destination listed. There’s a train that can maybe fit 100 people max in front of us, probably a couple hundred Sicilians standing around, and they are all very, very angry. This is worrisome. If the *Sicilians* are worried, we should be *triple* worried. The departure time for this train rolls around and past, down the lines where we should be going. Our itty-bitty train stays black and locked. Some people that work for the railway come out and try to restore order; after about fifteen minutes one is screaming at the top of her lungs and the others has burst into tears and is ushered away by her coworkers.
About two hours past our projected leaving time, I find someone to ask about our ticket. Right train is about all I get, and then he’s swarmed by more shouting people. Corri and I give up at this point, deciding to wait and see. What happens. Eventually, we see a couple other cars coming down the line, which they hook to the train, and about a half hour after that, people begin boarding. In a stampede. By the way, if you expect your train cars to be laid out in a numerical manner, don’t. Car 6 was in the front, car 3 was after it, and then car 11. We were in car one. Not even the conductor knew where car one was, of course.
Our saving grace came when I was desperately trying to speak to the man and have him pint in the general vicinity of our train car when we hear the sweet, sweet sounds of heavenly English: “You are Americans?” We were quickly taken under the wing of a nice guy, only slightly creepy, who knew some English and regularly rode the trains without any sort of registered seats. He knew all the tricks. Perhaps it wasn’t the brightest idea to let a strange man watch over us and our stuff while we collapsed, exausted, into the uncomfortable seats and passed out, but we were desperate. He *was* nice, and aside from some vaugely sleazy flirting, a gentleman. This time, we didn’t even have the benefit of an overnight bed, so sleeping was more difficult than projected. Fifteen hours after leaving Catania, we arrive in Florence on Saturday morning, alive, unmolested, and successfully having climbed a mother-fucking volcano.
And that was my trip!
