Playing Blog Catch-Up & Italia Julia & Nicole Style

It has been 3 weeks since I have blogged and I miss writing about my adventures so much! And…as you can imagine, SO much has happened in my Italy story… many new characters, journeys and funny adventures.

I just returned to Siena from a 2-week guided tour through Italy (none of the hotels had internet access!) and just before that, my loveable, huggable friends Julia and Nicole visited me for 2 weeks (I think they are probably still recovering!). So much to tell about! Now, I am staying in a small apartment in the center of Siena, walking distance to everything and this is where I will be for the remainder of my stay.

I have been so antsy to write about each little crazy, fun and sad happening and was so frustrated that I could not find time or internet to type a blog update, but today I realize that I am glad that I have had almost a month to process all that has happened. With that, I would like to start my catch up with my adventures with Julia and Nicole…

Julia and Nicole’s travel started much like mine – they flew from LA to London and then to Rome where they then got a bus to Siena and arrived on Easter Sunday. Well…instead of hunting for Easter eggs, I hunted for Julia and Nicole… here’s what happened, they got off the bus at the wrong stop in Siena. When they called me, it was sort of a “We got off at the wrong stop and we don’t know where we are…can you pick us up?” One of the funniest things is that Julia looked for signs to let me know where they were – “I think we are at a train station called ‘Fermata’.” ”Fermata” means “stop” in Italian…so basically the signs just referred to a stop. Oh boy… here’s me, in a Tobacco shop, trying to ask…in Italian…where the Fermata Train Station was…Italians were looking at me like I had just fallen off the train. Poor Julia and Nicole…after all of their travels just to get to Siena…they were tired and stressed and the trip had just begun. I knew from experience exactly what they were feeling. Needless to say, we found each other and then we headed to my cute little apartment in the village of Tocchi to rest for the evening. I was SO happy to see them…I realized the moment I saw them, how homesick I was.

The plan was to head to Northern Italy via train to visit Julia and Nicole’s Italian family for 4 days and then come back to Tuscany to venture to the surrounding villages.
Confused about a “simple” task like getting train tickets…well, at one point I just blurted out “Standard!” to the person behind the glass window. I was so weary and tired of trying to find the Italian words and finally just wanted to say “Just give me a fucking standard ticket!” because I remembered my Italian teacher in Santa Barbara saying “just ask for Standard.” When trying to purchase train tickets online, we went to an internet café which is managed by a man from Bangladesh; I have gotten to know him since I use the phones and internet often and indeed he is a bit…well…strange (he asked me if I had a husband the first day I met him right after I asked if I could use the computer)…but I think harmless. However, when we were looking for tickets online, he was flirting with Nicole and trying to teach her Italian (I wish you could have heard this hilarious-beyond-words interaction!). It was SO funny; we left and Nicole, very upset and tired said, “I did not come to Italy to learn Italian from a Bangladesh man!” I couldn’t argue with that one!

After troubles and frustrations with getting our train tickets, we were then headed to Levico, a small town near Trento in Northern Italy, to visit Julia and Nicole’s Italian family. Before leaving on the train though, we needed to find parking for Blu…well, we were running late for the bus, so at a stop light headed to the bus station, I literally peeled out…aka burned rubber (both of these expressions I had to explain to my Italian friends when relaying this story to them and that took a bloody hour)….anyway…this burning rubber, to get to the bus station in time caused me to have my second laughing attack in the car (I get these in HIGH times of stress and it’s uncontrollable laughter for about 10 minutes). We found illegal parking for Blu, but it would have to do for us to make the train. So…once on the train, there we are sitting in our seats…all of us a bit dazed and crazed and I all of a sudden feel a cry coming on…tears flowing, I weeped “I shouldn’t be going to Northern Italy.” It was pathetic and hilarious. After getting that out of my system, we headed North and were on the train for 5 hours with a short train change in Florence, just time enough to spend 70 cents to take a whiz in the public restroom.