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Between Trieste and Venicia, nobody ever asked me for a ticket. We arrived at Venicia somewhere around 10PM, and I was hungry – I grabbed some McDonalds. As I stumbled through ordering a Big Mac with only lettuce and cheese in Spanitalienglish, I had this weird “parallel universe” experience as I forked over €5,10, a little blue bill and a bronze coin, whereas I’d do the exact same thing in America for the exact same reason, only the $5.10 would be a regular green bill with a big portrait of Lincoln on it, and the coin would be this tiny little silver thing with ridged edges.

Otherwise, everything was the same, except for the placemat that described, in Italian, how it was all Italian beef, adorned with fresh, quality ingredients, accompanied by a picture of a Big Mac with an Italian flag sticking out of it.

I used to work at Burger King!
I used to have it my way!
Now I’ve got an M-16!
I kill Iraqis my way!

Airborne Ranger is what I want to be,
You get to shoot!
And kill!
And mutilate!

Ranger!

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Walking to the train station this morning, I spotted a street sign pointing towards the “Railway Museum” which the Tourist Information Center at the train station knew nothing about, when I dropped off my luggage. The railway information guy gave me a route to Lyon that departed Ljubljana at 1610, so I had several hours to kill. I studied my map and figured a promising position along the railway lines for a train museum to live, and headed over that way.

And I found it.

It was a roundhouse.

Filled with steam engines.

And guys in a work shop restoring steam engines.

Upstairs, I was greeted by the friendly curator, who explained that the TIC knew nothing about the train museum because it hadn’t opened yet – they were still putting the museum part of it together. I was, however, welcome to wander around, so long as I did so cautiously.

There were more than half a dozen steam engines that they had already restored, resting indoors, and at least a half dozen more rusting away outside, waiting for some TLC. And spare parts everywhere, and dozens of men working on projects. This “train museum” was no casual volunteer undertaking. Judging by the Curator’s business card, it seemed to be a funded project of the state railway.

Wandering back from my Nirvana, I spied a cafeteria, where I scored a plate of brown glop and steamed potatoes, a salad, and an iced tea with a picture of a lonely penguin on it for about $3.50. The brown glop contained cabbage and meat, the salad was lettuce, tomatoes, a couple human hairs, and a couple of tiny insects, for added protein. I picked out the hairs, added salt and pepper to the glop and potatoes, and oil and vinegar to the salad, which I figured was originally invented to kill tiny insects, and the meal was good. The sides of the ice tead box described the drink in several languages. One of them was English:

Refreshing non-carbonated soft drink made of vegetable extract based on hips.

Added natural flavour of passion fruit and peach.
Total dry solid: min. 8%.
Free from preservatives!
Energy value: 34kcal (145kJ)/100 ml
Ingredients: water, sugar, extract of hips, citric acid, flavour.
Serve cold.

Seen from this perspective, the brown glop and buggy salad weren’t nearly as exotic as the iced tea, which tasted kind of like peach jello.

Back at the train station I asked the price to Venicia, my first leg of the journey to Nice. It was more SIT than I had, and more than I wanted to spend, so I asked the price to Trieste instead, which was more SIT than I had, but I managed to fix this by giving a money changer €5. I figured that I could probably get away with using my train pass from Trieste, as it would be in Italy, after 7PM, counted against tomorrow, though it would be open to debate as to whether my patchwork itinerary counted as a “direct overnight train.” I could always ask ahead of time and see if there was enough time to purchase a proper ticket in euros from the ticket machine at Trieste. Changing money makes me crazy.

I then wandered over to the library to sit for a little while and do some data entry. The only part of the library that I could enter without being a member was the card catalog / Internet room. I sat at a broken terminal with my laptop for awhile, and worked on the log, then I stood in line to check e-mail, a free service, on a terminal that was pretty well locked down, but I was able to find a site with a working java SSH client that let me connect to pianosa to read my e-mail. It turns out that Dave, who runs pianosa, and is storing my stuff, is moving to Evanston, the suburb just north of Chicago, right near mom’s house. Rene had offered to store my belongings in Oakland, while Dave was willing to adopt the futon, though he needed to talk to Angel about baby-sitting the car. Exciting stuff …

I grabbed some super-tasty strawberry gelato on the way back, picked up my big red bag from the luggage storage, and blew another 170 SIT on a coffee topped with whipped cream, leaving me with just over 40 SIT, or about twenty American cents worth of souvenirs, before boarding the train for Venicia. My compartment was shared with a trio of Slovenian girls, one of whom cursed the train for resting an extra ten minutes in the station – though I recall sitting at border stations forever on my way in, on a train twenty-five minutes late. They later practiced English dialog on each other, while I worked some more on updating the log, sharing their giggles.

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This morning I was up at 6:30, greeted by the old lady en route to the bathroom. It was dark, cold, and rainy outside, and I didn’t have anything I really felt like doing, so I slept in. I left the room at around 11:00, at which hour it was sunny outside, though cold. I wandered toward center, casually shopping around for outer wear, which I could not find for less than twice the price of my nightly lodging.

I started feeling pretty euphoric about the weather, because it felt just like Chicago ought to feel like at this time of year – cold and rainy, with mushy, wet, golden leaves smooshing underfoot. The country feels less like a former communist republic on its surface, but more like one of the northern countries, filled with hot, blond and dark-haired women, and bike paths. Everyone waits for the walk signal before crossing the street.

I wandered around looking for lunch. I settled for a doner kebap, which is like gyros, only without so much meat. I wandered in to the edge of Tivoli Park via viaducts under the roadway and railway. The viaducts were decorated with some excellent graffiti. I had a brief conversation with a lonely reception clerk who was standing outside his museum of contemporary Slovenian history. I found a little stand selling good, greasy-smelling horse burgers, which I might have preferred for lunch. I pet a black cat who was looking forward to what seems to be a regular meal from the horse burger stand staff. I checked out the modern art museum, which sucked, though it was inexpensive.

I felt lonely and homesick, and found the adjacent American Embassy, guarded by some local cop. I asked did I need a reason to visit, or could I just drop in for the hell of it? “You’re an American citizen? Sure, just follow the walkway there – Route 66!” I walked up to the front, peered in the window, which had a small lobby and a teller window. It seemed uninviting. I went back to the steps and admired the Eagle, with its shield, and the head pointed towards the talon holding the olive branch. I considered taking a picture of the American Embassy sign, with its eagle, but then figured maybe they would just as soon not have people walking up to the embassy and taking pictures and leaving. On the way out, I remarked to the guide that however nice it was to step on American soil, for a moment, it was fantastically boring.

I dropped by the Cybercafe I had spotted the day before. The guy explained that the Internet had been broken there since yesterday, and I explained that maybe I’d brought bad luck to town, I’d leave tomorrow. I had a beer, instead, accompanied by the loud techno music the guy likes to play. I wrote in my journal, and then I drew a few pictures, concentrating on stuff like perspective and curved lines. The beer left me feeling really good – half a liter for about $1.50.

I decided that two things I needed to do were consult my Lonely Planet book to figure out my next move, and drop by the train station to figure out where I could go and when. The train station and my room were both North of the center area where I was. I picked a new route to wander that way, and ended up in narrow streets bordered by tall buildings and a construction project. I saw some guys sitting around on the corner, drinking beers, with a bull-dog. Another beer struck me as a good idea, so when I found a corner store a block away, I got one, and some breakfast / travel provisions. I’d met what amounted to a dead end on my route, so I headed back around. The dog saw my grocery bag and figured I’d make a good friend. I asked the guys was he hungry, but no, he was The People’s Dog, he gets fed all the time, and he eats any time he can.

I spent some time petting the dog, enjoying my beer, and talking to Tom, and his other friends, who were mostly named Tom, except for Matthew. They were all about my age. The story seemed to be that they were a crowd of unemployed, recovering drug addicts. One guy complained about his methadone addiction, another guy told me about the MBA he was wasting and the lovely girlfriend in France he had lost to his own dirty habits. Tom seemed surprised that I hadn’t had a joint since Amsterdam, and rolled a weak one that was passed around. Tom later bought two more beers, one for himself, and one for The People. I gave him some gum. It was a good way to spend the afternoon.

Around 1900 I walked over to the movie theater, where they were showing “Red Dragon” in English with Slovenian subtitles. Not bad. At one point Lecter mouths the words “thank you” and I totally understood the lip movements and the “Hvala” of the subtitles, as “hvala” and “dober dan” are the two Slovenian expressions I use whenever I get the chance.

It was dark and cold when the movie let out. I hustled home at a brisk pace to keep warm. Along the way I passed some giggly teenage boys who were casually vandalizing the antenna and windshield wipers of a Volkswagen Jetta.

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The ride to Ljubljana was beautiful, rolling gently back and forth through hilly terrain that put me in mind of Wisconsin. I got some SIT from an ATM, which told me that my balance was 971,604.27 SIT. So, even in Slovenia, I’m not a millionaire. I had become accustomed to calculating old lire prices by dividing by 2,000, so it was difficult to deal with the fact that prices were quoted to me with the decimal point slid once to the right, as SITs are valued about 230 to the dollar. It is also hard to deal with the locals talking about “tolars” which sound like “dollars” so that the price I can most readily grasp is “euros” which is essentially the same as the “dollars” that I am used to, though the Slovenians have to adjust from calling them “marks”.

I spent a lot of time walking around town comparing hotel prices. The best I could find was €42 at the “cheap” Park Hotel. The hostels are only open in the summer: right now they are student dorms. I could have gone 4km over to the “Bit Center” which is a hotel and sports complex. They evidently have dormitory beds as well. I settled for a room in a guest house for two nights at $20 per, courtesy of the Tourist Information Center.

The lady at the guest house had me trade my shoes for slippers, and set me up on the top floor, in a cozy attic room. It was a double that she was letting to me at the “single use” rate of 4,500 SIT. The cozy double made me long for Janet, which made me feel all the more lonely for travelling alone.

That evening I hiked back into the center of town for an unremarkable dinner, after which I retrieved my bag from the train station. The weather was bad, so I stayed in and drowned my loneliness by playing “Civilization 3” on the laptop for a couple of hours. It worked well, and seemed a decent solution given that I had finished _Catch 22_ and was otherwise out of reading material, alone in a single room in a house, without the socializing opportunities of a good youth hostel.

That night I slept beneath a solid roof that was battered by a wonderfully fierce thunderstorm.

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After breakfast this morning, I strode with an Italian and a German pre-school teacher over to Maximilian’s Castle, built on the Adriatic coast, a few meters from the Ostello. The castle was nice and luxurious, and the gardens were very pleasant. I could see why the guy on the bus had talked the castle up: you could very easily kill a morning or an afternoon just relaxing in the tranquil gardens.

I thought that it was interesting that during the whole of her trip, horticulturist Janet managed to miss every botanical garden she wanted to visit along the way, and the day after, I find myself standing amongst a wide variety of trees, and an Italian garden. Unfortunately, she was no longer at my side to rattle off horticultural trivia.

I missed the bus that would have gotten me to the train station on time to catch the train for Budapest that would have gotten me to Ljubljana. I actually saw the bus pull up, and decided that if I ran with my bags, I was unlikely to make it. Best to leave things to chance. I caught the next bus twenty minutes later.

At the station, I saw on the board that the 1036 for Budapest that could get me to Ljubljana was running twenty-five minutes late! It was still there! If only I could possibly purchased a ticket in an Italian train station in time! A mere twelve minutes later I ran down the hall with my €20 ticket and was seated in a train compartment. A moment later, the train rolled from the station.

I could swear that the first bus had lingered for me to catch it. I could swear that the Italian ticket line somehow managed to squeak me through just in a nick of time to catch the train that just happened to be sufficiently late to pick me up. So, I had to wonder, what awaited me in Ljubljana?

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We lingered in bed the next morning, our last morning together. I saw Janet off on her bus to Malpensa from the train station, where I was left with a desire to use the WC, which the station had, for a humble €,60. I scanned the entire facility, and concluded that I was definitely about to take my first dump in a pit toilet. I was intimidated, but found a nice big stall where I could crouch opposite my bag, slide my pants to my ankles, and hover over the hole, making sure everything was clear for the trip down. Aside from a slight leg cramp, the experience went well, and I left the toilet facility beaming the smile of a man who has just mastered some arcane secret. But, it wasn’t like I could brag to anyone in my foreign language as to how proud I was, as a grown man, to have mastered something as mundane as a toilet.

I decided to head for Trieste to get to Slovenia. Why not? I was accosted by two panhandlers the moment the machine issued my ticket and change. One spoke English, the other did not, both had googly eyes. 24€ via Venice.

On the train from Venezia Mestre to Trieste I considered my options. The Lonely Planet book Janet had left me omitted Trieste. A black hole. My Hostelling International guide listed a hostel 8km NNW of city center. That did not sound promising.

Upon arrival, it was pretty clear that I was at the End of Italy, a narrow strip of territory between Slovenia and the sea. The departure schedule at the station had about half or a third as many entries as any other Italian station I’d been at. Most trains were bound for Udine or Venezia, one or two Eurostars for Milan, Rome, trains for Bucharest, one or two overnight to Romania, Germany . . .

To Ljubljana, it was a bus. The bus left at 1730, and arrived after 2000. I considered my options, and decided that I’d rather not struggle around Ljubljana in the dark after the Tourist Information Center had closed. How to get to the Trieste hostel?

A tobaccanist told me which bus to take, and sold me a ticket. On the bus, I gave my seat up to an old lady, and considered whom would be best to ask for the right stop. A middle-aged man looking over my shoulder saw the address for the hostel, and explained that it was a nice place, right on the beach, near the castle. All of this was communicated with hand grestures. I answered his questions as to my origin, and the old lady and her old lady friend mavelled to each other all the more with each progressive answer, “America.” “California!” “Chicago!!”

They didn’t elaborate, though.

The guy then indicated that I should get off. The bus actually stopped right behind the hostel, but it was necessary to walk back down the road a piece to switchback to its front door, on a beautiful, rocky coast, with Trieste visible back where I’d come from, and a castle just a stone’s throw away in the other direction, which the guy on the bus had praised and explained that it was important to visit.

Upon checkin, the lady looked up at me and asked if I was related to the famous American movie director Ron Howard. No, but people have told me I remind them of Richard Cunningham plenty of times before.

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Head for Milan. Barely missed desired IR, but that’s okay, because we had to hit Padova anyway because I’d left my camera battery charger at the hostel there. Regional to Verona, IR to Milano. One-Star Venicia was nice, had a TV – CNN! $49 for the eve, no bath. Out to dinner at self-service Brek – fun, good, inexpensive, watch the guy cook.

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Kicked out of Padova hostel for college group. On to Venicia, finding a room, visiting Murano. Herded in to lame glass-blowing demonstrations. Saw neat artistic glassworks. Slept next to German father and son that I’d slept next to the night before in Padova.

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All the better one and two-star hotels were full. We stumbled on a $150 room in a four-star hotel, but opted instead for the $20 beds in the youth hostel, which was actually pretty cozy. Since we’d burnt most of the morning searching for lodging, we decided to forego a visit to Venicia, and stay in Padova, strolling through the markets, eating fruit. I spent some time reading the international versions of Time and Newsweek thanks to the Cafe in the middle of Padova that is always open, while Janet went window shopping and dropped by the train station to get the refund for our previously soppressed Eurostar.

That evening, in her dorm room, Janet ran into the trio of girls she’d spent time talking to on the train. They were exchange students studying in Bologne, visiting Venice for the weekend. One was Swedish, another Argentinian, and the third a Korean girl who had moved by herself to Toronto to finish high school when she was fifteen.

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As we left the hotel, the lady warned Janet that we might not make it to Venice, because the trains might be on strike today. The train station was pretty dead, and we saw young folks outside, one group with a hammer and sickle poster, another group across the way with a Palestinian flag. Janet and I concluded that maybe it was pretty much just a holiday to get out and protest, and go on strike, and I concurred that a protest just wasn’t a protest these days without a Palestinian flag.

Since we weren’t sure what “so” meant on the big board, and we weren’t about to stand in the one, very long line that everyone else was standing in to get the skinny, and since there were so few people around, especially ones who seemed to know anything, we went ahead and bought tickets from the nice, naive, machine for the first train we could get to Venice: a Eurostar that was on the board, scheduled to leave soon, with an “so” annotation.

We subsequently learned that “so” was another way of saying “sopp” which is another way of saying “soppresso” which apparently means “cancelled” although other trains were actually “cancelled” or routed “via soppresso” which confused us when we saw that a train was leaving for Milano “via” another station that was on my map, so I was able to convince Janet that that “via” did not meant cancelled, via soppresso, soppresso, sopp, or so.

We had actually woken up early, but since our 9:30 Eurostar wasn’t meant to be, and the IC for Milan via Bologne wasn’t until 10:36, I got in line to change the tickets, while Janet went looking for breakfast. At about 10:30, I was very very near the ticket window, but since lines are never single-file in Italy, I wasn’t sure when I’d actually see the ticket guy. From what I could tell, we had an IC ticket clear to Venicia, which was valid to get us to Bologna, as a connecting point. The Eurostar fare was billed as an IC plus a supplement that was on a seperate ticket, that we could get refunded. Janet was inclined to stick with the line and have the guy make sure everything was cool, but at 10:34, with maybe one or two people still ahead of me, and other anxious folks wishing very much to squeeze in to see the guy, I made an executive decision to ditch the ticket line and get on the train, which we managed to do shortly before it started rolling for Milan.

At Bologne we found ourselves in a line with other luggage-toting folks, running through the underground walkway between platforms to catch the Venicia train in time. Since it was late Friday we decided that finding a hotel in Venezia would be either impossible or insanely expensive. We stopped short in Padova instead. We found ourselves in a one-star hotel that charged more than what it said on the room’s door, so on our way out the next morning, we collected a receipt, with the intention of subsequently contacting the hotel licensing authority in Padova. But first, we wanted to find a better hotel.

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We took a ferry over to the island of Capri. Janet wanted to see the famous Blue Grotto, which is a bit of a ways from the port where the ferry comes in. We decided on exercise and hoofed it up and up and up and up these stairs carved in a cliff by some ancient peoples whose only means of getting to the other side of the island was to climb up those steps in the cliff. Well, it was good exercise, and back down and down and down again to the Blue Grotto.

The Blue Grotto is this little sea cave that, well, the sunlight shines in through the sea water and the place looks blue. You pay a few bucks to take your turn on one of the rowboats that is constantly being paddling into the grotto and back by strong Italian men who understand the tourist value in embodying a stereotype. As they row into and out of the grotto, they sing loudly that ladadadeeda that I know only from Tom and Jerry.

The Blue Grotto . . . is blue. Well, Janet liked it, which made me feel that the trip was worthwhile. We took a bus back up the hill, before taking the ancient steps down the cliff, and back to the ferry to Napoli. When we got off the ferry we stumbled across a pasta show, that was being held on Naples’ waterfront to encourage Italians to eat pasta. What we were told is that Italians were getting fat, and the government wanted them to stick to their healthy traditional foods. So, for dinner, we ate pasta at the pasta show.

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We rode on from Rome to Naples. As you travel North to South, Italy shows you two sides of Europe. The north, Milan, is like anywhere else in Western Europe, where wealthier people shop in fancy stores. As you move South to Naples the sun gets brighter, the mountains get more barren, and the people hang brightly colored laundry on clotheslines out of their homes. Rome represents the Southernmost outpost of Western Europeanosity, beyond which, to the South, lies a land that’s still wild. Sicily is where the mobsters came from, and Janet picked our hotel because the guidebook described it as “safe and affordable.”

We visited Pompeii, which is a bit of a train ride outside the city, but worth the trip. We wandered for hours through this ancient Roman city, frozen in time by a volcano. Walking along narrow, but sturdy streets, with raised sidewalks on either side to keep the pedestrians out of the filth. Columns, mosaic floors, painted walls, restaurant ovens . . . it felt very much as if we were in some special place where ancient Roman culture was still fresh.

Walking along modern Naples’ crowded streets was challenging, as sidewalks were narrow when they existed at all, and the cobblestone streets had guys on scooters racing whichever way they wanted. Napoli is home to Italy’s best pizza, and we picked our way over to Napoli’s best pizza place. It was a pilgrimmage, for me, because Chicago has the best pizza in the world. But as I learned in Rome, Italian pizza is an entirely different food, magnificent in an entirely different way. In Naples we experienced the penultimate pizza.

The pies are thin crust, and they come in margherita and marinara – which means with cheese, namely thick slices of fresh mozerella, or without. The pies come in medium size or large and even though the menu and the food is simple, it is a wonderful, delicious, filing meal. They offered water or coke. I had two pizzas and two cokes. It is unfortunate that Chicago Pizza and Neopolitan Pizza share the same name, because they are different foods, and they are each the best of what they are.

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