An amusing incident

Holla,


So, yesterday was one heck of a day. After a long overnight train from Munich – Florence – La Spezia (where I lost my toothpaste and couldn’t shower in the evening or morning, though I was already soaked in hours worth of sweat) I met Meritt and her nice friend Nichole in La Spezia, just outside of the Cinque Terre. They both greeted me with huge hugs even though I was clearly not appealing.

Now, if you’ve never heard of the Cinque Terre, you need to go google image it. Right now. I’m not gonna spend much time explaining them, because that won’t do either of us any good, but once you google image it, you’ll have a good idea. I’ll just say that they’re so amazingly beautiful, I went back to them (as I went to them with Jason last year) after being in Europe only 2 days.

So anyway, I meet Meritt and Nichole, and we’re like ‘well, let’s do it.’ To experience the Cinque Terre (which you’ve presumably already googled), you walk the 7ish miles that make up the trails connecting them. They’re rugged, breathtaking and exhausting. There was no time to go back to our hostel, because our hostel might as well have been in Romania, so we went looking for luggage storage. We found it, they took it, but they said we must be back by 7:00 PM, because then they close. No one’s there to help, no lost and found, it’s closed. So, I’m thinking, no problem. It’s only 9 AM!

So we’re on the trails, busting our asses to complete the immense endeavor, and it’s fuckin hot right? On top of this, Meritt’s wearing sandals that have a bottle opener built into the bottom of them. So eventually we all want to get in the water, which is beckoning to us and is absolutely gorgeous. One problem: the girls aren’t in their swimsuits, they’re in hiking attire. We find a cove of some sort, but it’s not a public beach, so there aren’t locker rooms or whatever. There are people all around, and we happen to find a little walkway…where there aren’t too many people. But it’s fuckin hot. So, Meritt and Nichole decide to just change.

At first I was like, wow, ummmm nipple show. But then I was like, well if you’re not a guy, and you don’t have junk everywhere, it’s probably no big deal. You just stand sideways to oncoming traffic and no one’s gonna get any kind of peepshow. And then Meritt taught me how you can put a bathing suit top over a t-shirt, then take out the bra and voila! Time to swim!n So, me standing there was somewhat awkward, and I didn’t want anyone to get arrested for indecency, so I go up to this kind of lookout point above some rocks, and anytime I see someone coming, I say ‘Lasagna!’ Before I can even get up to the lookout point though, a family of four walks right by. Luckily, no one’s fully undressed yet, but there is definite unlayering of clothes and nervous glances going around. Anyway, so I get to my post. People start coming, but they’re all women. So it seems to me there’s not really any point in freaking out about this, b/c I’m sure most women on holiday at beaches are familiar with doing what ya gotta do, so I start yelling ‘Female lasagna!’ as a way to let them know they’re not gonna get raped. I don’t really know if they understood.

So anyway, we swim, and by this time it’s probably like 5:45. This was unbeknownst to me however, because the day has flown by and even though we had walked about 6 miles and explored 5 villages, it felt like 2:30. But we are thoroughly exhausted and ready to just sit. Meritt wanted to relax so badly, that she didn’t even put her bra back on after we swam (wait for it). So it’s like, “Ya know what? Let’s be super-cute and just have a great sit down meal at a nice restaurant.” We find a good place to eat, with an intriguing but affordable menu and somewhat go all out. We order a seafood appetizer plate, and all of us get a pasta entrée. Though I’m covered in 2 days worth of sweat and grime, with what I’m sure had developed into gingivitis in my mouth, AND covered in residual salt and dirt from the ocean AND wearing drippingly wet shorts I had swam in (I didn’t have my swimming suit either) and Meritt is nipping out all over the place, it’s looking like it’s gonna be a good meal. I even shell out 3 euro for a soft drink. We were considering desert and discussing gelato.

After ordering, we proceed to begin figuring out when to get back. Since our hostel is in Romania, there are only busses once every 3 days. Or a few hours. So, it comes down to 7:30, 8:50 or 10:30. My first reaction: 10:30? Last summer I don’t think Jason and I stayed up after 9:00 until our last night in Paris, before we flew out. We were so exhausted we tended to be asleep by 8:00. So I’m like, there’s no reason we can’t catch the 7:30 right? Until I remember my luggage. AKA, all my stuff, including my computer, textbooks, clothes, travel documents, everything.

J: What time is it??

N: 6:45.

Fuck. Luggage office closes at 7:00, and it’s in the next town over. So Meritt, being the super-nice hippie she is, offers to go (run) with me over to the next town, which is only like a 20 minute walk. Apparently they remembered the office being open til 7:30. I would have bet my life and my mother’s that it was 7:00, but I had no choice, so I was like ok let’s do it. Meritt also apparently forgot she wasn’t wearing a bra. Nicole stayed behind to man down the huge impending plate of seafood antipasti.

So we run over to the next village (in pretty good time, I’d say around 10 minutes, considering that every 30 seconds, I had to stop to look back and Meritt, and try my best to not laugh at her trying to hold her rack with one arm, while holding onto her handbag with the other), track down the woman at the luggage office, who is luckily still there and, though I’m the last person to get my luggage from the previously packed room, is very gracious. I’m thinking, great. I got all my shit, if we hop onto the next train (which come about every 15 minutes), we’ll be back to dinner and won’t have been gone more than 25 minutes. My pasta will probably be cold, but I’ll deal. If dinner takes too long, we’ll skip the obligatory Gelato, and catch the 8:50 bus.

So we walk to the train station. We look up at the departure board and can’t really understand. We ask the female attendant when the next train to Manarola is (Manarola is the next village over, where we needed to go). She said there are 2: 7:11 and 7:19. Looking around, there are two clocks. One says 7:09, one says 7:15. Whatever, we just stand at the only platform going in the direction Manarola and we hop in the first one that comes. We’re sitting down, and we can’t stop talking about Nichole. We’re hoping she’s ok, not bored, that the waiter isn’t being rude to her, etc. The train’s moving along, and all of a sudden, we get to Manarola. But it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t even slow down. The last thing I remember happening before this was Meritt staring at another woman, also without a bra, and asking me “How do you think she does it?” I assume she had huge boobs.

So as it turns out, some nice Italian man informed us that we failed to realize that the train we were on wasn’t actually stopping in Manarola. It was actually only heading in the direction of Manarola, and was a high-speed direct train to Levanto, which isn’t even a part of the Cinque Terre. Yeah. You see, the Cinque Terre is comprised of 5 villages: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Vernazza, Corniglia and Monterosso. Do you see Levanto anywhere in this list? No, because it’s out in the middle of nowhere on the far side and that woman who told us that either train would be fine didn’t understand us or was just a bitch. Or both.

So, now we’re really worried about Nichole. This super small part of me is secretly hoping that when we left, the waiter came out, asked Nichole if we’d be back, and then offered to hold up on the food until we return. I was too embarrassed to even mention this, because I knew there was zero chance of it happening. And I knew that the real issue would be Nichole. What would she do if they kicked her out? What would she do if it took us an hour to get back? We didn’t know when the next train from Levanto would be back, and hell, we didn’t know if it’d also be a direct high-speed town all the way to the OTHER side of the villages. Would she leave? Demand the table? Wait around the restaurant? Hate me forever? I knew she had a book with her, but it was just a Frommer’s Italy book, and I’m sure she had already read it cover to cover.

Meritt’s looking stressed (but also really funny holding in her boobs), and I don’t know what to do or say. I knew we’d probably have to take the 10:30 bus back and that I’d probably have to get some food somewhere else, because I’d never seen a restaurant in Europe with doggy bags, so that’d be like 15 euros wasted, which is like $100 USD. It wasn’t very good, especially considering that the first few days had gone so well!

So anyway, we’re preparing to be in this for the long haul, when, thank god, the train stops in the final village of the Cinque Terre, Monterosso. So the nice Italian guy didn’t know what he was talking about either. So we get off, and walk across the train station to the opposite side, and wait. And wait. I don’t know how long we waited but it was long enough to be like Ugh Nichole, fuck. And when the train finally comes, it’s of course not a direct train, so we have to stop in the two villages between Monterosso and Manarola.

We finally get back a little before 8:00. We had been gone for an hour and fifteen minutes. Of course, as soon as I see Nichole, I’m like ‘I’m soooo sorry! I’m soooo sorry!” and she’s like ‘Oh it’s fine!” ha. Apparently, she had time to think about what she would wear tomorrow and DID read some of the book and she people-watched. As I get close to the table, my dreams come true. The only food on the plate is the seafood appetizer, which, as it turns out, is served cold! The waiters actually did come out to ask if we were leaving and Nichole asked them to hold off on the food. I did not see that coming. I literally expected to come back to find Nichole sitting on the steps outside the restaurant, hungry and sad.

We finished eating, and, of course, had to take the 10:30 bus back, but it ended up being a pretty great stay in the Cinque Terre. Well, it was pretty good until this morning, when we woke up at 5 AM to be able to stop in this little town called Lucca for a few hours before heading to Venice, only to be woken up at 4:50 by THE LOUDEST thunder I’ve ever heard, and then drowning in what might as well have been a flash flood. It was the 2008 floods all over again in La Spezia. So anyway, the time-travelling storm kept following us all the way to Lucca, and we were just like fuck this so now we’re on the way to Venice! My shoes are still soaked, at 12:04 PM.

I didn’t even know it rained in Italy. And Nichole is sitting by Sinead O’Connor.

Love you all,

Josh A