At Last! Italy Trip journal . . . part one.

Finally I´m posting my adventures in Italy. I´ll try to keep this flowing quickly and reguarly so the whole thing is completed within a week or two. The trip was spun directly out of an AIFS trip to Madrid, so we´ll start from there. Now, without further ado:

ITALY part one.
Starting point: Madrid.
Destination: Barcelona.
We caught the night train for a eight hour trip that would take us from the heart of Spain to the coast. The idea was that we could sleep on the journey and arrive in Barcelona fresh and rested for more travel.
We ended up in a compartment like they have in the Harry Potter movies – a little room with four seats on each side facing each other. There were five of us traveling together, plus three girls from South America, who we chatted with for a while, appreciating their accents, which are actually clearer and less slurred than the Andalusian accents we have had to adjust to. Eventually, however, we were ready to sleep.
And we could not. The seats we were in allowed us very little leg room, did not recline and had no headrests. We tossed and turned for a long time, leaning on each other, resting legs here and there, trying to get comfortable in any way possible. The hours were long and restless. Eventually, someone kicked the bottom of my seat and it slid forward a little bit. This was a startling discovery. I found a lever, which I could pull and make my seat move in a way none of us had thought possible. In a sleepy staccato I managed to get the word out: “Seats . . . recline!”
Soon we were all a little more comfortable, but I also found two pairs of legs resting on either side of my seat. There was hardly enough room for me to sit much less rest comfortably. But other people were sleeping at last. I got up to walk around the train and call my girlfriend. When I returned, my seat had been completely taken over. I nudged people out of the way and collapsed stiffly. I may have gotten an hour of sleep before we arrived in Barcelona.
We stumbled into the station needing to find a bus to the airport, somehow we did. I don’t remember much except being exhausted and the fact that most of the signs weren’t in Spanish but in Catalan, the Northern Spanish dialect. It felt like we’d already stepped into another country. And then we stepped onto bus.

Destination: Gerona
We got extraordinarily cheap plane tickets to Italy thanks to a discount European airline called Ryan Air which operates out of airports close to, but not actually IN major cities. The trade off is that you have to spend more time and money on ground transportation – I have no idea how long it took us to get to the Gerona airport, but I know I was slightly more well rested when we arrived there. We may have had to take two busses, actually. All is a fuzzy fog in which I blink to stay awake. I do remember my eyelashes pretty well from this period of travel, but they didn’t look any different than they usually do.
I suppose we got through the security check at the airport without any real trouble. I just had my backpack and had not brought any swords with me. The only real danger was that the limited amount of clothes I was brining might start to smell after I wore them for a few days, but that was far from my mind at the time.
I do remember eating some sort of breakfast in the airport cafeteria. I think I just bought some immunity-enhancing yogurt, which did its job, and maybe ate a few cookies that someone else had.
Then we waited at the back of what could very liberally be called a “line” to board our plane. Apparently order and anti-mob devices are a luxury Ryan Air bypasses in order to pass the savings onto us.
Here are other things they skimp on:
Beverage services.
Honey roasted peanuts.
Reclining seats.
Seatback pockets.
Emergency cards (all information is printed on the seat in front of you).
Manners.

It didn’t matter. I slept instantly.

Destination: Venice
Oh, also skimped on were landing terminals. We just climbed down the stairs and walked into a converted warehouse which now served as our airport and first taste of Venice and Italy.
Of course we didn’t land in Venice exactly. We landed in some little town a few hours outside of Venice. So we had to catch another bus to actually get to the canal city.
But first there we had to claim our bags, use the restroom and make it through customs.
I had not checked a bag, so I didn’t worry about that.
I did worry that inside the men’s restroom was only a porcelain hole in the ground with a chain above to pull to flush. No seat. No toilet paper. Just a hole with food grips on the side. This seemed like a particularly ominous sign to me.
Others found more ominous the fact that customs basically was nothing more than a doorway leading through a hall leading to Italy. Nothing to stop us, no one to stamp our passports, no one to even check our passports, not even a warning sign or cardboard cut out of a security guard we could pretend to talk to and be hassled by. We just walked through confused and possibly carrying dangerous items, not that anyone would know.

I finally had gotten enough sleep on various modes of transportation that I remember some of the ride into Venice. If Spain at first seemed very brown to me, Italy seemed very green. We rumbled through past vineyards, orchards and houses overgrown with shrubbery through a countryside that looked no different than it must have when they first started putting pictures of the Italian countryside on the labels of wine bottles.

Venice, of course, is a completely constructed city that although ancient, feels as far removed from the countryside as you can get. In the middle of the bus station we tried to get our bearings . . . busses were everywhere momentarily, but once we ventured into the city proper all motor vehicles would be vanish’ed, replaced by boats and walkways hardly used for anything except tourism any more, and perhaps a few bicycles. But before we hit up the canals in earnest, we’d have to find out hostel, which would involve . . . surprise . . . a few more bus rides.

NEXT TIME: I promise only a short paragraph about busses.