The Weekend Without Trains, Pt. I

Well, in case you weren't aware, public transportation in Italy is not very...reliable. Schedules change without notice, machinery breaks down, strikes occur, bus drivers take smoke breaks in the middle of a route...you get the idea. This will become a problem later in this post.

View from The Hill

For now, we're going to celebrate my birthday. This past Saturday my Golden Year finally came to a close and I turned two dozen years old. Huzzah.  I'd really wanted to celebrate by taking a large group of friends (hopefully all willing to buy me drinks) out to Trastaccio, apparently Rome's hottest clubbing neighborhood. However, with most of my most club-happy classmates in Croatia for the weekend, I finally gave up the stay-out-all-night-partying idea around 1:30 am Friday night and just hit up a local bar instead, where I treated myself to my second tiramisu` of the evening (it was delicious). 

I also trekked up to the top of Gianicolo Hill above our section of Trastevere, which offers a large statue of G. Garibaldi, apparently the main general in the reunification of Italy in the mid-19th century; as well as a bar, an incredible view of Rome, and a LOT of those guys that kindly offer everyone roses every 3 minutes, a service for which they happily charge 1 euro. Add in the DuPree family and three bottles of cheap-ish wine (well, minus the skunked one) and it made for quite the outing.

The Castle

Saturday proved even better: we found a terrific beach in the small town of Santa Severa on the coast of Lazio about an hour north of Rome. We took a train out for the afternoon, hung out for a few hours, built a sand castle, sustained jellyfish stings (that fun was all Erik's), jumped around in the [huge!] waves and generally had a good time for only the cost of the 3,20 train ticket. It was a perfect day, until the real fun began.  

The Other Castle

We headed back to the train station from whence we came, intending to catch the train departing for Roma Trastevere station sometime between 6-7 pm. Being the smart traveler that I am, I had looked up return trains before we left and discovered that there was, in fact, such a train running roughly hourly from 5-11 pm (excluding the 8 o'clock hour for some unfathomable Italian reason). Unfortunately, as is so common, someone on the Internet (not to name names, but: *trenitalia.com*) was WRONG.

Our first problem was that we didn't have return tickets, and the station was too small even for an automated ticket machine, much less a ticket counter. Luckily, (or maybe not-so-luckily) there was a nice old man there who cheerfully told us in largely-unintelligible Italian that we couldn't buy tickets there and it didn't matter anyway because the station was closed, there was no train, and that for both tickets and the train we'd have to go to the other station, which was very far away and that there was no other way of getting there besides walking. All of this information I, being the most proficient--that is to say, not-very-proficient--speaker of the group, had cobbled together from the select phrases that I'd understood: "non c'e` biglietti," "non c'e` treno," "chiuso," "l'altra stazione," "lontano," and "a piedi."

Marc stopped to gather some wild black
raspberries, just in case we starved to death.

Well. Okay. We started walking. We walked about 2 km (passing 2 bus stops, I might add...a piedi my ass) before asking some people on the street corner where we could find the other train station that did, in fact, have a train that would take us back to Rome. To our dismay, they pointed directly back the way we came and told us there was a station on the left about 2 km that way with a train to Termini at 7:10 pm. When we protested and explained as best we could about the old man and the no train and the no tickets and the far away station, they patiently let us know that he was right, we couldn't buy tickets there, we'd have to buy them at the market, which was now closed. We should just go back to the station and get on the train, which would arrive around 7. By this point, I'm feeling pretty foolish. Obviously there'd been some serious mistranslation on my part when talking to the old man, and as a result our entire group--already tired, sun burned and (in some cases) with jellyfish-scourged armpits--got to go on an extra 2.5 mile trek for no reason. Whoops.

There was nothing to do but go back. Which we did. We even found a small bar across the street from the station selling tickets (it was open). At this point I was severely doubting my ever-developing (or not) language skills that I'd recently been so proud of; obviously that guy meant that the ticket thing was closed, not the station, and "lontano" probably meant "behind" (as in, you can buy tickets at that little place across the street behind the station) instead of "far away," etc., etc. Whatever. At any rate, we'd be on the train and on our way home by 7:15. Or not.

Stazione S. Severa

Not long after we'd arrived at the platform, a young man about our age accompanied by a man who I can only assume was his father politely asked us if this was the correct platform for the 7:10 train to Rome, because according to the departures/arrivals screen no such train existed.

Well, shit.

After a lot of confusion, consulting of timetables and discussion with the other three people waiting for the same imaginary train, we understood the situation from the following snippets of conversation: "non c'e` treno!," "sabato," and a long string of something very angry that was most likely too impolite to translate. Our new friend explained (much more calmly) what we'd known all along, thanks to the Wise Old Man of Santa Severa whom we'd met earlier: that there was no train.

Apparently, they'd recently changed the schedule, and the only train running to Rome all evening on Saturdays left at 9:13 pm. It was currently 7:00, at a tiny little station with not even a ticket counter. We asked if there was somewhere good to eat to kill time; of course, killing time was only a pretext: at this point we hadn't eaten lunch, we'd run out of Marc's roadside wild berries and were on the brink of going Donner party. He informed us that there were some very good pizza places along the beach in "downtown" Santa Severa....about a 2 km walk down the road. -_-....

Investigating the local wares

Luckily, they offered us a ride. Despite the setbacks, the detour was actually rather nice. The restaurant on the beach was closed (many places in Italy don't even open for dinner until 8 pm), but we ate at a nice little pizza joint right off of what appeared to be the main square. We befriended a stray cat that looked a little bit like Hitler (for an illustration, go here), found a local open-air artisans' market and enjoyed a gorgeous sunset from the beach before trekking that same damn 2 km back to the station.

We did, eventually, make it home, and even made it out for a mojito pitcher or two at our new favorite, Scala 27, before bed.

It was a grand birthday.