My longest journey, pretty sure it’s Mika’s longest as well, to date: 30 hours.
Let me pick up where I left off. Nacho and Pax sent us off with our bento boxes. We said our goodbyes then into a bus we went. It took us to our boat, ship, cruise, whatever you want to call it. The hardware was fantastic, but there was one problem: aboard the ship with us was an entire grade of Italian high school students taking their school trip. It’s not enough that they wore tight jeans, high top sneakers and sported glittery stuff all over their jackets, they were LOUD, and they sang school anthems! The worst yet, our room must’ve been right next to the most popular girls’ room, because all throughout the night these Italian boys would come and knock on their door and beg, coax, bribe and threaten them to open the door. Minor annoyances aside, our room was the shit. It was better than our room at Hostal Absolut Centro. After settling in and unpacking, we ate our bentos, went to explore, then to the top deck to have a drink, finally came back and passed out. To be honest, I was so tired that the Italian kids really didn’t keep me up that much at all. I just enjoy making fun of them.
The next morning I woke up to an announcement. I ate half of a pastry I picked up from Rambla 31 the day before, and it was the most awesome pastry I’ve ever had. It’s a quarter of a giant circle that, before being quartered, must’ve had a 20 inch diameter. The texture was flaky, half like a croissant half like phyllo, and filled with a dark chocolate filling. At one point Mika and I looked at each other and we both knew it was the halfway point of our trip and something very exciting should be happening right around now: Sardinia! We headed up to the top deck and sure enough, there the ship was, sailing in between Sardinia and Corsica. I’ve never had a better view while I sipped cappuccino. After coffee we broke up; Mika went to check the casino while I went to the gym / steam room. Running on the elliptical that’s installed in a ship is fun, you feel this sideways gravity (that’s really velocity I guess). It feels really good and slightly disorienting. I was thoroughly rejuvenated and emerged from the spa fresh-faced after an hour and a half.
Mika and I went to top deck again to have lunch, pizza and veal burger be on the menu. We found this very sweet spot in the bow, where there’s no wind and super sunny, and decided to enjoy our food there. All of a sudden this Arabic woman with a mustache showed up with a small Pekingese. She asked if she could sit next to us, and we welcomed her. All this is going on in body language and a conglomerate of all the languages we know of course. We learned that the dog’s name is Clara. And Clara is super smart. When the woman sang in her native tongue, Clara would “dance” by lying on her back and wiggling back and forth on the floor. Then the woman sat her purse on the bench then got up and walked two feet away. Mika exclaimed “Oh you want me to steal your purse!” and when she reached for the bag, Clara bared her tiny teeth and barked her head off. Hands off, barking stops. Hands on purse, barking resumes. What a nice dog! Our secret spot soon got found out by the high schoolers. We snuck downstairs as fedora hats and glittery high tops swarmed in.
The female announcer who spoke Italian, English, Spanish all with a Russian accent. She had this sweet voice and sing-song dynamic, but truth be told neither of us understood a word that came out of her mouth. Imagine how surprised we were when, with more than three hours still before scheduled arrival, a cruise employer entered our room with a key without knocking. Turned out that the previous announcement notified passengers to pack up and head to either the top deck of the restaurants because the crew needed to do housekeeping before arriving in Civitavecchia. “We couldn’t understand a word she said.” Mika said. “Yes, her English is very bad.” The cruise employer nodded in agreement as he kicked us out. Not exactly, he left us ample time to pack. Just as well. We needed to catch a train from Civitavecchia to Roma Termini as soon as possible in order to make the last train going from Roma Termini to Firenze, so we didn’t mind being the first in line for disembarkation, even if it meant hanging out in a staircase for almost three hours. This is when things started going awry.
The cruise got to Civitavecchia slightly late, but it took almost another hour for them to unload the cars. By the time our feet touched land, we had only twenty minutes to get the the train station and get on the train to Roma Termini, but we had to take a bus in order to get to the train station. And the bus driver won’t take off until she has loaded the bus! What a mess. After a few minutes of fidgeting a light bulb appeared above Mika’s head “Let’s send the bus driver subliminal messages, you want to to leave now…. you want to drive off now….. ” We both focused and after a minute the driver said “Let’s go.” We got to the train station with another ten minutes to spare, so we waited at the designated platform. However, a minute before the train to Roma Termini was supposed to arrive another train pulled in and the conductor in that train told one person who told another that the Roma train was going to platform 5 instead of platform 1. So everybody started running. I had my eyes on a guy who seemed to know his way, and started to follow him into an under path which made sense because you had to cross tracks to get to platform 5. But this Peruvian couple kept saying “No go straight and follow the other people,” who convinced Mika to go in their direction so then I was convinced too. When it became apparent that they were following the people who had just gotten off the train and were headed to the parking lot, we busted a u-ey and ran into the under path only to emerge on platform 5 to see a train pulling away. “That’s our train guys, say bye-bye.” “No it can’t be!” The Peruvian couple said. Oh you bet your sweet it was. Mika and I caught the next train that came half an hour later. As we had already missed the last AVE train from Roma Termini to Firenze, we’re left with a slow train that went from Estazione Tiburtina to Firenze. To get to Tiburtina, we had to hop off the train and catch a subway at this station Pyramide. It blew me away! Everything was graffiti’d up, in the most vivid and ‘80’s colors. In fact I thought I was inside a music video for a second. There were trash everywhere in the station, and as a train approached they started flying. I call this look “urban tumbleweeds,” can almost hear the theme song to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I thought of Dario Argento too.
We finally got on the train to Firenze from Estazione Tiburtina, due to arrive in Firenze at 1:30am. Mika and I got an empty compartment so we could spread out; we thought it was finally time to chill. Then this young Italian guy came over and offered to help with our luggage. Mika said “Okay! Sure!” and then he turned around, disappeared, then returned with his own luggage in tow. We both looked at each other, knowing now he was asking us if he could join us in the compartment. Following him was a Bangladesh couple (who actually came from Bangladesh that very morning) with a small child. What a party! Our young Italian friend Josef was very kind at heart but “he’s got a few screws loose” as Mika would say. He talked to everybody and eventually drove the Bangladesh family away after he repeatedly asked the man to swap phone sim cards with him because Josef ran out of battery. Now that it’s just the three of us, Josef became noticeably happier. He pulled out a big bottle of a coffee drink and proceeded to share with us. He handed me a lighter to open the bottle, so I did and little did I know it was CARBONATED coffee drink loaded with sugar! It exploded and we all got sticky; the floor was drenched in coffee, so were we. I decided reading a book and shutting myself out was, at this point, the best option. But then drips of coffee fell on my page, and as I looked up to see what was going on, lo and behold there’s a huge puddle of coffee on the ceiling just dripping down like brown sugar rain. So we grabbed our bags and moved to a different compartment, and naturally Josef followed us. He and Mika seemed to hit it off, despite the language barrier. He got really excited when Mika started to eat the flan that Nacho packed for us the night before. He kept saying “Flan!” periodically to make us laugh. It became the all purpose word. Mika pretend punched him while Josef pretend stabbed her. At one point some detectives got on board and started photographing and taking finger prints of the train’s compartments. I guess they were in the middle of an investigation and needed to collect evidence. They were on the train with us for quite a ways, and came by to tell us to be quiet “Pasabahce!” more the three times. The last time they came and told Josef that he better keep his feet off the seat or they were going to write him a ticket. This is when I noticed that Josef would shield his face with his hand when the cops talked to him. “This guy’s using us as a cover! See, the police are actually looking for him, but no one suspects a group of American tourists. And he’s from Napoli.” Mika started freaking out, “Oh my god he is doing that! Stef Dawg you’re scaring me!” Regardless of how intimidating these SS-lookalike cops were we felt better having them around; we have an overly active imagination.
Finally we got to Firenze. The train stopped a little before reaching the actual station, and Josef got scolded by the cops again as he tried to be helpful and opened the door too early. At the end, Josef hugged us goodbye, helped us with our luggage, and even asked the cops how we could get to the main train station. All suspicions erased. Of course, this difficult journey couldn’t end like this. The station we arrived at was not Estazione di Firenze Santa Maria Novella, but something small in the middle of nowhere. The conductor said get on Bus Line 1, but after waiting for 20 minutes in the cold at 2am we ended up getting on a Bus Line 70 that went to the same place. After getting to Santa Maria Novella our hotel was supposed to be an easy ten minute walk, but it took us forty minutes because we were tired and half blind. It absolutely blew me away when all of a sudden the black and white Duomo just popped into my field of vision though. I think that was in that moment I realized I was in a different land. After walking in a huge circle and window shopping while lost, we finally found our spot, Hotel California, where we got a warm welcome from Mika’s mom Patricia. It was past 5am when we finally crawled in bed and fell asleep. What a day…. it was more like three.
