I was pretty excited about my first European train ride. Alberto got us on the train and saw us off. As the train left Lecce, I realized just how lucky I was. I had just had a fabulous vacation week in a gorgeous Italian city surrounded by the most beautiful beaches I'd ever seen. For most people, if they're lucky, that's it - that's their vacation - but I still had over a month to go!! It's still pretty awesome to think about. I'm really fortunate I had this opportunity. These are pictures I took on the train ride to Rome.
We had pretty good seats when we first got on the train. But I think the train started out in Lecce so we were literally first on the train. We got pretty settled in and kept ourselves busy reading, taking pictures, etc. The trains are non-smoking so we got pretty good at having a cigarette and lighter ready to jump off and smoke a quicky in the few minutes the train stopped in various towns. We met lots of different people that way, too. I know smoking is bad, blah, blah, blah and I have since quit smoking, however, I do have a lot of friends and have met a lot of people I would never have met, had it not been for smoking. Just had to mention that. Anyway, there were always train employees who would step off the train at every stop to keep things moving, and rush us all back on when it was time to go. We learned that when we heard the "ding", we'd better be on the train because it was leaving. We found that some places were much shorter stops than others. The very short stops consisted of all of us smokers literally holding on to the train with one hand in the event we heard the "ding" and needed to hoist ourselves and each other onto the train Indiana Jones style or something. I will say that I would have no problem hanging on for dear life and being drug alongside the train until someone pulled me in because I knew if I got left behind I would be lost forever. Traveling got easier the further along we got in the trip, but I'll admit it was intimidating realizing we were on our own in a foreign country.
So later we decided to go to the restaurant car for some breakfast and coffee. We sat in a booth, drank our coffee, reminisced on our travels thus far, and when we went back to our cozy little seats, we found that a couple had decided we were in THEIR seats. All of our stuff they hadn't thrown aside, they were sitting on, and they were extremely rude about it. This was our first of many experiences of incredibly rude/mean/yelling people on trains. So we loudly and gruffly gathered up our things and found two empty crappy seats further down the car. It helped a little that we could say shockingly horrible things about these mean people and they had no idea what we were saying. We knew they weren't saying anything about us because they were too busy pretending we didn't exist.
I suppose we had our share of being less than pleasant on the train. I can't remember if it was on this train ride to Rome or a later one, but the train stopped in a city, and there were also trains stopped on either side of ours. Emily and I were sitting at a table facing each other. We looked over and there was a family standing at the window of their train (a couple and their curly haired little girl), but they were staring at us. We smiled at them and kept talking to each other, but these people kept staring at us. The trains had these electric blinds that slide up and down by pushing a button at the base of the windowsill. So we thought it would be funny to close the blinds as we were talking. We had a little laugh about it, then later when I went to the restroom, the woman and the little curly haired girl were standing in line in front of me so I felt like a really big ass. Apparently they had changed trains at the last stop.
We arrived in Rome early afternoon and Paolo met us at the train station with flowers. I think our few days with Paolo was the only part of the whole trip that Emily actually enjoyed.
Emily and I had been talking about taking a trip to France together since we met. When the opportunity finally presented itself, I worked really hard to be able to take this trip, and a lot of people went out of their way to make sure we had a memorable time. All I wanted to do was enjoy every possible moment. I felt like I owed that to myself, to Josh, to my family, my friends, my job.... because they all made sacrifices for me, and the only thing I cared about was making the most of my once in a lifetime trip. I'll admit I had plenty of homesick moments, but I never let it keep me from appreciating where I was.
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