With Caroline, Hiep and Preston, I boarded our train in Mestre when it arrived 25 minutes late last Wednesday night. In my 1_ weeks in Europe I have not yet completed a journey by train without hitches. I’ve arrived after the last bus home, bought tickets leaving from the wrong station, seen a nightstick pulled by police officers during a stop made just for the police, and had countless delays for countless reasons. Barring a strike or accident, I’ve pretty much seen it all; and I don’t use the train very often. So all things considered, 25 minutes late was not so bad.
We were on our way to Vienna for our fall break: overnight train Wednesday night, hostel Thursday and Friday, and overnight train Saturday night. Italy has nationalized trains, so we found our routs online and walked to the train station Wednesday afternoon to buy tickets for the outbound journey leaving from Mestre at 1:30 AM and figured out when the best local train to Mestre would leave: 12:38 AM. After packing, dinner, and some ping pong on our dining room table, the four of us made the 25 minute walk to the train station. We bought tickets and had to run to the secondary tracks off the main platforms. The train left on time and we got off after crossing the bridge to Mestre.
Once the train finally did arrive from Rome, we boarded and found our seats had people sleeping in them. Luckily there were several open benches, so each of us found a bench and tried to sleep. I had the help of an article for class that even Professor Ammerman called excessively dense. For whatever reason, the carriage’s main lights were never turned off, and during the course of the night, we were awoken twice by the conductor for tickets and once by a trio of Austrian officials performing a passport check. Eventually we did arrive in Vienna somewhat less than rested, but excited for the coming weekend.
On Saturday afternoon, after an apple strudel cooking demonstration, we decided to visit one more museum before heading over to the train station to buy tickets home. We stayed at the Belvedere Museum until it closed at 6, and walked to the train station. This weekend was the first time I had been in a place where I had not idea about the language; I could even get by in France though I’d never taken a class, and the ticket office was no different than the rest of the city: German with a little bit of English. We asked for tickets for the 1:30 AM overnight train to Venice that we had seen on the Trenitalia website, and he answered with a time chart with two options circled: 7:20 or 8:40 PM. We decided to try a ticket machine, but could not find a line leaving the country, so we decided upon the 8:40 which would arrive in Venice at 8:30 the following morning.
We hustled back to the hostel to retrieve our bags and then hurried to the city’s other main train station which was under construction. When I had tried to ask the ticket agent about the station, he didn’t understand, so when we got off the tram with our bags and empty stomachs, we walked through a boarded up path that was eerily similar to the hedge maze we had just successfully completed in the Hapsburg gardens. With kabobs in our guts, we boarded the train which was again predictably late.
When I went for a walk to explore the train, I realized that our cubby was the only one on the whole train that was full, so I decided to find an empty bench to sleep on. When we arrived in Strasburg, I thought I would be free in my empty cubby for the rest of the trip to Venice, but after a two hour wait in the station, the new conductor kicked me out of his cubby and I returned to mine. Hiep had likewise left, and somehow the cubby he shared with a recently graduated girl who spoke English never gained another passenger. That is until the conductor woke everyone for tickets at which point I joined them.
When an Italian conductor woke us at what we thought was 7:30, we watched the sunrise and Laura, the graduate, told us that it might actually be 6:30. She had overheard people at her hostel mention daylight savings, so our train ride which was supposed to have been twelve hours, which would have been torture enough, was in fact a thirteen hour ordeal of momentary sleep and prolonged cramped boredom. I read Othello for fun.
Next Thursday the whole group takes an overnighter to Naples.
A piu tardi!
Ciao.
Andy
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