13.04.14
I’m writing this a day late because yesterday was meant to be the simplest day travelling and turned in to a nightmare. The Italians had a public train strike which was a joke. One second we were looking at a board full of trains and platform numbers, the next thing we know everything was CANCELLATO. It was a joke.
We were told by a man who was supposedly giving ‘advice’ that there was no way of getting to Cinque Terre that day whilst the trains were cancelled and so not knowing what to do we… sat in Florence train station for 9 hours, when in fact there were replacement buses all day to Pisa to then catch a connection to La Spezia. So at 7pm we got on that bus to catch that connection and eventually arrived at 11.30pm, shower, sleep.
Before that and whilst being stuck we played eye-spy, tick-tack-toe, tennis elbow foot, the drawing man game, had 2 McDonald’s each and spent most of our day watching an obnoxious, crazy woman, from Bologna, who was incessantly arguing with every person in her vicinity, wouldn’t move when asked (as she was hoarding 3 seats) and had the so much food hidden in her Mary Poppin’s bag that she constantly ate.
Our games were hilarious and once we were on the bus to Pisa we just laughed about the whole situation saying that ‘only British people would sit in a train station for 9 hours and not ask for information to find out what we could do instead’ - now in hindsight I realise that was just our naivety about travel at the time - however to every cloud there is a silver lining, we did make acquaintances with a beautiful Italian man who found us very amusing and was taking control of the situation in the station when no-one knew what the frickle-frackle to do.
Once we had arrived to Riomaggiore we navigated to the hostel and entered to find two American girls stuck in the stairwell at a locked door that just needed pulling really hard to open. They were hilarious and cheered us on after our long and tiring day, that they to had experienced having been stuck in the train strike themselves.
Anyway now i’m going to write for 14.04.14, today, so catch you next time!
