The theme of the past two days has been "get lost." No, that doesn't mean I've been talking to the Italian women, it means I figured this would be a good weekend to find my way around the area. So yesterday I drove around all afternoon making sure I could get to all the various bases (there are three of them in the area) to and from each other and to and from my apartment. Unfortunately, I don't know exactly where my apartment is. I know (sort of) what exits off the highway it's between, and I think I know the main street it's off, and kind of where it is, but driving around yesterday I couldn't quite get there after trying for about an hour. So being a good computer-age kind of guy, I got home yesterday evening and went online and found "via Monterusso" on a map (that's the name of my street) and drove there this morning. Must be a different via Monterusso, though, because while it seems to be in the right area, I just kept going up and up and up a hill until I got to the top where it dead-ended at some guy's front gate. He gave me a funny look as I reversed down the hill trying to find a place to turn around.
Anyway, with two consecutive failures under my belt, I was looking for a way to redeem my afternoon. So I thought, "what better way to revive one's spirits than a nice trip on public transportation?" Plus I wanted to wander around downtown Napoli, which I really haven't gotten to do yet besides the (in retrospect) fairly lame, very underdone and uninformative group tour the first Monday I was here. I parked at the NATO base (which is neither the base where I work nor the base on which I currently live in the hotel; I found it yesterday) which supposedly has a subway stop right outside the gate. So I walked down to the gate and asked the guard, who happened to be Italian (because they're in NATO, see how that works?). Well, you'd think working at a NATO base he'd know a little more English (if we're going to be imperialist capitalist running dogs, we have to work on that a little better), but he didn't. So I was left to my own devices. I thought, "hey, those cables over there look like something to which you'd attach a train and run it on electricity." Wandering over, I saw it was indeed the track for a subway (or whatever you call it when it's above ground; a train, I suppose). So I wandered through random Italian suburb streets until I found the station and got in it going in the direction of downtown Naples. So far so good.
I got off the train (which by that point had metamorphised into a subway) at the main train station downtown. Which also has trains and buses for the rest of Italy and Europe (but probably not much farther than that). I figured that was as good a place as any to start, and then I realized that I had no map of the city and only really a vague recollection of where anything was. Imagine the functional equivalent of never having been to New York city before and being air-dropped in the middle with no map and trying to find your way around. Except New York is a bad example. Because the streets are actually laid out in a grid, with some semblance of good sense and order. Oh yeah, and the streets in New York often have street signs. Oh, and I speak the same language as the people in New York.
Fortunately, I have a very good innate sense of direction, so even if I don't know where I'm going, I'm very good at finding my way back to wherever it was I came from. (Is that a marketable skill? Because I'm very good at it. Driving around yesterday and today I found like 5 different ways to get back to the same blue bridge.) So with that in mind, I set off in a random direction figuring I'd find the downtown main streets and piazzas and touristy stuff eventually. Turns out it was the wrong direction. Naturally. Luckily it only took me like 15 minutes of walking to figure that out. So I turned around and eventually made it to where I wanted to be. More or less. Spent an hour and a half wandering around dodging scooters and cars and what have you. You really take your life into your own hands when you cross the street, even if you have the light. I always waited until some Italian guy was crossing and went with him; I figured if he thought it was safe, I'd be fine as long as I kept up. The stupid little motorscooters are everywhere, including on the sidewalk. You'd see cars stopped at a traffic light, then the scooters would all zip up to the front, between and around the cars, on the sidewalks, everywhere, until there was a pack of like 20 little Vespas waiting for the light to change. And as soon as the light changed, they'd all zip off. It was like watching the most lame-ass motorcycle race ever.
I did get a couple chances to practice my tourist Italian today. Walking back to the train station I was parched, so I wandered into a convenience store and managed to croak out "agua...naturale...per..fevore...". At which point I paid e2 for the nastiest bottled water I've ever tasted. It was probably Naples tap water, but it was cold(-ish) and I was thirsty and didn't care. My other moment of bilingualism came when an Italian guy with his family tried to ask me for directions. I know he was asking me for directions because he said, "Scusi, dov'e il somethingsomething?" Which means, of course, "Excuse me, where is the somethingsomething?" Having read the guidebooks and studied maybe a week's worth of high school Italian, I looked him straight in the eye, shrugged my shoulders, and replied with a textbook-perfect, "non parlo l'Italiano."
Anyway, with two consecutive failures under my belt, I was looking for a way to redeem my afternoon. So I thought, "what better way to revive one's spirits than a nice trip on public transportation?" Plus I wanted to wander around downtown Napoli, which I really haven't gotten to do yet besides the (in retrospect) fairly lame, very underdone and uninformative group tour the first Monday I was here. I parked at the NATO base (which is neither the base where I work nor the base on which I currently live in the hotel; I found it yesterday) which supposedly has a subway stop right outside the gate. So I walked down to the gate and asked the guard, who happened to be Italian (because they're in NATO, see how that works?). Well, you'd think working at a NATO base he'd know a little more English (if we're going to be imperialist capitalist running dogs, we have to work on that a little better), but he didn't. So I was left to my own devices. I thought, "hey, those cables over there look like something to which you'd attach a train and run it on electricity." Wandering over, I saw it was indeed the track for a subway (or whatever you call it when it's above ground; a train, I suppose). So I wandered through random Italian suburb streets until I found the station and got in it going in the direction of downtown Naples. So far so good.
I got off the train (which by that point had metamorphised into a subway) at the main train station downtown. Which also has trains and buses for the rest of Italy and Europe (but probably not much farther than that). I figured that was as good a place as any to start, and then I realized that I had no map of the city and only really a vague recollection of where anything was. Imagine the functional equivalent of never having been to New York city before and being air-dropped in the middle with no map and trying to find your way around. Except New York is a bad example. Because the streets are actually laid out in a grid, with some semblance of good sense and order. Oh yeah, and the streets in New York often have street signs. Oh, and I speak the same language as the people in New York.
Fortunately, I have a very good innate sense of direction, so even if I don't know where I'm going, I'm very good at finding my way back to wherever it was I came from. (Is that a marketable skill? Because I'm very good at it. Driving around yesterday and today I found like 5 different ways to get back to the same blue bridge.) So with that in mind, I set off in a random direction figuring I'd find the downtown main streets and piazzas and touristy stuff eventually. Turns out it was the wrong direction. Naturally. Luckily it only took me like 15 minutes of walking to figure that out. So I turned around and eventually made it to where I wanted to be. More or less. Spent an hour and a half wandering around dodging scooters and cars and what have you. You really take your life into your own hands when you cross the street, even if you have the light. I always waited until some Italian guy was crossing and went with him; I figured if he thought it was safe, I'd be fine as long as I kept up. The stupid little motorscooters are everywhere, including on the sidewalk. You'd see cars stopped at a traffic light, then the scooters would all zip up to the front, between and around the cars, on the sidewalks, everywhere, until there was a pack of like 20 little Vespas waiting for the light to change. And as soon as the light changed, they'd all zip off. It was like watching the most lame-ass motorcycle race ever.
I did get a couple chances to practice my tourist Italian today. Walking back to the train station I was parched, so I wandered into a convenience store and managed to croak out "agua...naturale...per..fevore...". At which point I paid e2 for the nastiest bottled water I've ever tasted. It was probably Naples tap water, but it was cold(-ish) and I was thirsty and didn't care. My other moment of bilingualism came when an Italian guy with his family tried to ask me for directions. I know he was asking me for directions because he said, "Scusi, dov'e il somethingsomething?" Which means, of course, "Excuse me, where is the somethingsomething?" Having read the guidebooks and studied maybe a week's worth of high school Italian, I looked him straight in the eye, shrugged my shoulders, and replied with a textbook-perfect, "non parlo l'Italiano."
posted by Chris at 6:27 PM
1 Comments:
One night when I was in New York I drank 13 pints of Guinness and walked from the bar in SoHo to my hotel near Times Square. But like you said, New York is a grid. Although 13 pints of Guinness is quite a handicap...
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