Jacques Fortier

The return to France wasn’t bad, with a few exceptions. I took the Eurostar (Italian high speed train) from Rome to Milan. While the other Italian trains are pretty sucky, the Eurostars are nice. A lot nicer than the TGV, but then the supplement is 12 euros instead of 3. While I was waiting for the train to leave, a guy came up to me and asked if this was second class. I said yes, then asked if he had a reservation (reservations are always required on high-speed trains, while on most trains your ticket kets you just get on any train you want). He said no, so I tried to explain that he needed one because it was a Eurostar. He started saying no that couldn’t be right, at which point I reached the end of my Italian. So the other people tried to explain it to him too, but he still wouldn’t believe them. They managed to convince him to go talk to the conductor (the train had left at this point), so thanks to us he avoided a big fine, but he was still pissed off he had to pay the supplement (a whopping 13.50 euros), and he never thanked us for saving him the fine. Jerk.

Anyway, I got into Milan, and promptly got crapped on by a pigeon, for the fourth time. The pigeons definitely saved the best for last. I was walking along, when I all of a sudden felt something wet hit my hair. I thought "Goddam, that’d better be water," then stuck my hand into my hair. "Fucking shit," I mumbled, followed by "Literally!" I went to find something to wipe it off, but for some reason when there’s pigeon shit in your hair and you suddenly feel it start to ooze onto your forehead and towards your eyes, it suddenly becomes very hard to remember the Italian word for napkin. So, I ended up just saying "Scusi!!" at a sandwich stand and pointing at my head like an idiot until the woman got a horried look on her face, shoved some napkins at me, and pointed me to the bathroom. I swear, the next time I come to Europe, I’ll be buying some arsenic and mixing it with some pigeon feed.

My train was 45 minutes late leaving Milan, and I had a 30 minute connection to make once it got to Karslruhe. Fortunately, the Germans made up a bunch of time once they took it over, because I ran out of credit on my cell-phone while trying to call Dan to figure out what I was going to have to do to make to Metz before noon if I missed my connection (I needed to get there before noon to take my suitcase back from the office in my dorm).

I made it Metz early Friday morning, got my suitcase, rented a room for a night, and promptly passed out (I think I had slept two hours the night before). I ended up just hanging out, catching up on the news, and writing in my travelogue all day because my feet were incredibly sore and I really didn’t feel like going anywhere else.

On Saturday, I headed to Strasbourg, and basically did more of the same. Everyone had been telling me to read The Da Vinci code, and since I didn’t have anything better to do, I went to the bookstore to buy it. I couldn’t find it except in large-print, so I ended up buying Angels and Demons, the book that came before it. I also got myself my last cheap trappist beer (some Chimay blue… quality stuff). The book turned out to be incredibly good. It had a good plot, and it was really cool because it was set mostly in Rome, so I had just been to a whole bunch of the places it described a few days earlier.

And now here I am, in the Paris airport, waiting for my flight to Atlanta. The airport actually has little desks with power outlets, so people with laptops can use them before getting on their flight without draining their batteries. I thought I was going to have to find an outlet somewhere and sit on the ground, and here I am with a desk and padded stool. Anyway, that’s pretty much everything. I have to go back and fill a bunch of holes in my travelogue, some of which I’ll do now and some of which I’ll probably do back in Atlanta. After I’ve let thing percolate in my head a bit, maybe there’ll even be some deep thoughts that no one cares about except for me.

Wow. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting in Naples, but I don’t think it was anything like what I found there.

The first day (Sunday) started in Perugia. I was on the way out of the hostel when I held the door for a guy and he said “Appreciate it”. Having lived in the South for four years now, I immediately replied “Uh-huh,” took a few steps and then thought “Wait a minute, that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say that this trip.” So I talked to the guy, who turned out to be from Alabama. While we were talking a girl came up to us and asked him about Assisi. It turned out we were both on our way to Rome, her to head home and me to connect to Naples. So we hung out for a while in Perugia and then got on the train to Rome.

In Rome, I had about a 40 minute connection, so I went and got myself some food from the massive supermarket (called, for some reason, “Drug Store”) under the station and then got on the train. The train ride was pretty interesting. There was an Italian guy practically molesting an Italian girl he had just met on the train. She was saying no, but in a way that it was obvious he just had to wait until they got off the train. There were the southern Italian teenagers trying to hit on a group of Asian girls who didn’t want anything to do with them and probably wouldn’t have even if they had spoken any English. So, I had some good entertainment and didn’t even have to get out my iPod.

Once I got to Naples, it was what I had been told to expect. The street outside of the train station was really dirty and after a few minutes of trying the normal way, I figured out that the best way to cross the street in Naples is to cross at the middle of the block by waiting for a slight break in traffic and then going across frogger-style, hoping the cars will slow down enough to avoid hitting you. I think you’re more likely to be killed by a scooter on the sidewalk while waiting for the walk sign than by a car while jay-walking. Getting to the hotel was quite an adventure, because I had to cross about 10 lanes of traffic (not all at once) to get there from the train station.

When I got to the street with my hostel, I found out it was extremely dirty. Like, unbelievable amounts of trash in the street. It turns out that there’s a market in that street every day, that the mess gets cleaned up every night, and that no one bothers to try to make the people with stalls at the market clean up after themselves. I’m actually not sure if the market is at all official, since I’m pretty sure the Dolce & Gabbana jeans on sale weren’t real.

So I went into my room, where I found a girl and a guy. I introduced myself and the whole "where’s everyone from thing" started. When I said I was from Canada, the guy started celebrating, so I asked if he was Canadian too. He said "No, I’m just glad I’m not and you two are." It turned out the girl was called Bonnie and that she was from a farm north of Grand Prairie, Alberta (which for you non-Canadians means she’s from a place that’s even colder than where I’m from, and Winnipeg is cold by Canadian standards) and that the guy was from somewhere in Normandy and claimed to be half Swedish and half French. Within less than two minutes he had declared Bonnie and me to be married. This was even before I had a chance to find out his name (which turned out to be Jean-Guillaume). He was travelling with a friend, except that they weren’t friends anymore, who was off seeing some Roman ruins somewhere.

The three of us headed out to eat pizza (what else would we eat in Naples?). The place had really good pizza (and really cheap too… like 4 euros for Margherita con funghi) and really shitty wine. We ate pizza and just chatted for a while and then headed back to the hostel. By that time Jean-Guy’s travel buddy (David) had shown up, so I got introduced to him. That was pretty much it for day one in Naples.

On Monday, Bonnie was going to Amalfi. Since I had wanted to go, I tagged along. It turned out that to get there it took an hour and twenty minute ride on the Circumvesuviano railroad to Sorrento, folled by a over one and a half hour bus ride to Amalfi. To make things worse, there were so many people waiting for the bus that we had to wait for the second one to come before we got a seat. So, we ended up deciding not to go to Amalfi, and instead got off the bus at Positano to save the extra half hour ride to Amalfi.

Positano itself was beautiful. It was your typical Italian Mediterranean coast town: incredibly blue water, pastel-colored houses rising up steep mountainsides, and hordes of tourists. There wasn’t much in the way of a public beach (just a tiny little bit between the private one and the harbor) but it was all good because it actually had sand and the water was a perfect temperature. So we picked a spot and did the beach thing for a while. Bonnie stayed for around two hours and then had to head back to Naples to catch a train to Belgium. I stayed for another hour and then headed to the bus stop. On my way I spotted a granita stand. They had freshly-prepared granite made with real lemons–incredibly good stuff after a few hours at the beach.

The ride back to Naples was pretty much like the one to Positano, just in reserve, and with no shade in which to wait. There was a giant group of Asian tourists at the front of the line, but both times the bus came, everyone suddenly crowded in front of them and they wouldn’t push the people back, so they didn’t get on. I got on the second bus, but who knows… they might still be there trying to get on the bus.

I got back to the room to find Jean-Guy and David. We were sitting around chatting, when a girl came in, did a double-take, and said "Oh, c’est mixte?" (Oh, it’s mixed-sex?) Her name was Stephanie and she was French was well, so I suddenly found myself switching gears back into French. She asked if anyone had had dinner. I hadn’t, so we decided to grab some pizza, and the other two decided to come along. There were three Brazilians in the hostel who also needed dinner, so we all went to the same pizza place as last night again.

At dinner, we found out that everyone except for David spoke English, and everyone except Liege (one of the Brazilians) spoke French. Most of the people at the table spoke three or four languages, and it seemed at any given moment during dinner at least three of them were being spoken at once. The French people were off in their French world with one of the Brazilians. Since I didn’t want to the other two Brazilians to feel cut off, I ended up speaking English with them. I kind of pissed me off that David didn’t speak English. He was busy trying to learn Italian when he didn’t know the single most important language in the world. I think it’s much more excusable for a Brazilian to not know French than for a French person to not know English (pretty much every French twenty-something I’ve met has spoken English). It was just annoying getting cut out of half of the conversation because I didn’t want the one Brazilian to be completely isolated. But, aside from that, it was really fun and interesting talking to such a diverse group.

After dinner, Jean-Guy, Stephanie, David, and I went to a nearby bar to have some Guinesses. I quickly started to realize why Jean-Guy was really regretting travelling with David. The guy was so French it hurt. He seemed to be trying to fulfill every single bad French stereotype in existance. First, there was his insistence that English was a useless language. Then, I was pretty sure he made a conscious effort to make his French as French as possible (it’s hard to describe, but Stephanie laughed at him for his word choice a few times, so I wasn’t the only one). The guy was also incredibly arrogant. He kept on going on about how being a teacher was an incredibly noble and respected profession (he was about to take some exams to become a teacher). He insisted on dominating the conversation, and kept on dragging it around to whatever popped into his head. Since I think a lot more slowly in French, it basically meant I had to sit there and listen, because whenever I came up with something to say, he’d always moved the conversation to something else. One of the times that I actually got a chance to make a comment, he actually said it was wrong and then explained what I must have meant! Fortunately, Stephanie and Jean-Guy were both really funny people, so there’d usually be good banter going back and forth between them, and I picked up a whole bunch of new words. Too bad my French still isn’t good enough to be able to make jokes that quickly.

Tuesday morning, I decided to go to Pompeii and Herculaneum, two Roman cities preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. They were both incredibly cool. Pompeii had a really good audioguide with lots of good descriptions, so that by the end of my four hours there, I could usually walk into a house and pick out all of the typical components. I think I’d be pretty at home if I ever time-travelled back to Ancient Rome. "Hey Marcus, how’s it going? I see your impluvium is bone-dry too. Crazy weather we’ve having having lately, eh?" I guess I’d have to learn a few more words of Latin first though. A few of the highlights (like the Colosseum and the brothel) were closed, but there was so much to see it didn’t really matter. Some of the coolest things were plaster-of-paris casts of the cavities left by bodies that were made during the excavation. You could actually see the expression of terror on their faces from when they were buried alive by the volcano. It was kind of unsettling to look at them, but it really connected you with the inhabitants of the city. After I saw those, it suddenly became a lot easier to visualize Romans wandering around the town, going about their everyday business.

Herculaneum was also pretty cool. The guying running the audioguide booth for some reason told me they were closed, even though ten minutes later, I saw people coming into the site with audioguides. It turned out Herculaneum was a lot better preserved than Pompeii, so you didn’t need the audioguide quite as much. It was also smaller and shadier, which was nice. I’d brought a lot of water, and it was about the same temperature as but less humid than Atlanta, but the heat still got to me after a while. After all, I usually don’t make a habit of spending hours at a time outdoors in Atlanta during the hottest hours of the day.

When I got back to the hostel, they were just in the process of kicking some random guy out of my room and putting an extra bed in. Stephanie had been planning on moving to another hostel, but changed her mind (she obviously couldn’t get enough of us). An Italian friend of hers was coming to spend time in Naples with her, and since her friend was in a wheelchair, they decided to stick the two of them back in our room because it was the first one and the hallway was very narrow. After she and her friend got settled, we headed out to check out Naples. The random guy had apparently wanted to come with us, but everyone had forgotten. But, as I pointed out, he only spoke English, so he wouldn’t have fit in anyway. "Yeah," Jean-Guy agreed, "he’s not a polyglot–screw him."

So we wandered around Naples. We made our way to Fantasia Gelateria, which probably had the best gelato in Naples. It was so good, I ended up having two cones in a row. After that, we just sat around on some benches, people-watching and drinking some shitty Italian beer (Jean-Guy said it was "Top" for Italian beer, but it was still shitty). Once we got hungry, David wanted to go back to the same pizzeria as the last two nights (among other things, he was really cheap). I put my foot down and said I wasn’t eating at the same place three nights in a row, so we found another place.

Dinner was interesting, because Stephanie’s friend Lucia spoke about as much French as I spoke Italian. We managed to have a conversation, but I was really sweating at the end of it. I don’t think I’ve ever pushed my language skills that far before. Not only was I trying to have a real conversation in Italian (instead of just buying train tickets or something), but whenever I got stuck, I would have to puzzle things out in French with the help of Stephanie and David. After one particularly long burst, where I someone managed to explain some engineering and marketing concepts in Italian, everyone burst into applause and Lucia wiped my brow for me I was sweating so hard. I really need to have that kind of conversation on a regular basis to really improve my Italian, but it can be so frustrating and humbling.

David continued to show himself to me more French than the French by insisting on accenting the last syllable of every word in Italian. In Italian, the syllable that’s stressed is important and can actually change the meaning of the word. It’s usually on the second or third-last syllable, but sometimes an accent is used to show the stress is on the last syllable. In French, the placement of the stress is less important, but it’s almost always on the last syllable. Anyway, not only would David put the accent on the wrong syllable, he would actually correct everyone else. For example, if I were to say "E’ vieTAto" ("It’s forbidden," said correctly), he would look puzzled for a half-second and then say "Ah, é viataTO!" So basically, the same treatment that some particularly stuck up French people had been giving me for my accent all summer, but this time I knew I was really right. I really wanted to smack the guy.

So that was pretty much it for Naples. I didn’t see a huge number of sites, but I met for really awesome people (and one annoying but sometimes unintentionally funny one) and ended having an incredibly good time. On the way back to the hostel, Stephanie asked me if I’d enjoyed my trip in Italy and I said yeah, definitely. It’s so much easier to meet people like that when you’re travelling (especially alone, because if you don’t reach out, you end up eating by youtself and being incredibly bored) and the nice thing about Italy is, if you don’t find friends for the day, there’s still lots of great scenery and cool sites to see.