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Week 275: From Athens back to London
Our journey back home started well. We reversed our steps: train to Kiato; bus to Patras; taxi to the port; overnight ferry to Bari. This time, we were on the Superfast I, the twin sister of the vessel of the we’d taken on our outbound voyage, and we even had the same room, identical except for tiny things like the placement of a few electrical sockets.
In Bari, the weather was nicer than it had been last time. We walked a different route past the castle and through the old town, stopped to pick up lunch for the journey, and caught our train to Bologna.
The train made good progress as far as Foggia, where it paused. A landslip further up the Adriatic line half an hour earlier had blocked traffic (and would do so for a couple of days). This was the first misfortune. We were to be rerouted via Rome, skipping Pescara and Ancona but stopping at Bologna and Milan as intended. No problem; we were going to Bologna.
But we didn’t leave Foggia, and although the display on the train and the automated announcement kept repeating the same information, nothing was happening. I went in search of information. I don’t really speak Italian, but it’s basically just another Romance language with fairly reasonable pronunciation (unlike, say, Portuguese, which is only comprehensible to me when written) so I was able to grasp most of what was going on by listening to other passengers talking to the staff, and occasionally asking for some clarification.
Our train had broken down while waiting in the station. This was the second misfortune.
Unfortunately, as they don’t let you take a train without a seat reservation, we couldn’t just take the next train, and because it was Easter week all the trains were already full. The Trenitalia staff said that we’d be taken to our destination either on buses or on a replacement train, but they didn’t know which.
Foggia is a backwater of a station to be stuck in. Much as I sometimes despair at the shopping mall-ification of stations, at least you can get stuff there. Foggia has not received these capitalist blessings. It has one bar and some vending machines.
After a few more hours, there was more news, although I had to find it out by asking, because if there’s one thing Trenitalia is absolutely dreadful at, it’s telling passengers what’s going on. A replacement train set was being sent from Rome, a few hours away.
Then a third misfortune befell us. A car had crashed on a level crossing, and the train from Rome couldn’t reach us until that blockage was cleared.
Stuck in Foggia, over ten hours late
The replacement train eventually rolled into the station a little after half past ten, ten hours after we should originally have left. It was greeted with clapping and cheering from the exhausted passengers.
Even then it wasn’t entirely smooth: between Rome and Florence we took the old, slow, winding route instead of the high speed track.
We finally made it to Bologna at 06:00, nearly twelve hours later than planned. At least it was still before dawn, and our hotel was only a couple of streets away. We checked in and slept for a few hours before getting up in time for the tail end of breakfast (until 10:00).
Between some low quality sleep on the train and some better quality sleep in the hotel bed, we both felt rested enough to wander around Bologna. The sun helped.
Bologna. Everywhere should have these colonnades: they’re good in rain and shine
We walked around the city, saw the Piazza Maggiore and the Moline Canal, ate lunch at Miss Fagiola, visited the international museum and library of music, and had some al fresco beer at a bar near our hotel.
The last stop on our way home was Basel. The next morning, after a short journey from Bologna to Milan, we boarded a Swiss train for the rest of the journey. This was the most spacious and comfortable train of the trip.
Switzerland, as seen from the train window, definitely looks like Switzerland
We were only in Basel for one night, but we arrived at 15:26, our hotel was right next to the station, and we still had plenty of time to explore. We walked around the old town, looked inside the Münster, took a rope ferry across the river, and stopped at a bar on the river for a drink in the sun.
A street in Basel. The elaborate illustrations on the building include a number of racial caricatures of the kind that wouldn’t be made today.
We walked along the Rhine, where people were relaxing in the evening sun and they even have a little artificial beach, until we reached the restaurant we’d booked for dinner: Cantina Don Camillo in the old Warteck brewery.
It’s a slightly odd concept for a restaurant: vegan starters, vegan mains, vegan desserts, vegan wines, but they also serve meat main courses (but only main courses). Is it so that you can take your non-vegan friends for a meal and they won’t die from having to go through an entire meal without eating meat?
In any case, the vegan food was delicious, I had a glass of one of the best red wines I’ve ever tasted, and it came to an amount that reminds you that the median salary in Switzerland is nearly twice that of the UK. It was a good way to end our trip.
The next morning, we walked the two minutes to the station and caught our French TGV Lyria service to Paris. The travel agent hadn’t been able to book us onto the earlier Eurostar that would have been a more reasonable connection, so we ended up with a couple of hours to kill before we needed to check in. There’s not a lot to recommend a visit around Gare du Nord, but one exception is Café Tranquille a block south. We drank coffee and did a cryptic crossword before heading to the Eurostar terminal.
The previous train – the one we would have taken if we could – was running late, and left about an hour late. Our train left about five minutes later than scheduled. If we’d been able to take the earlier train, we’d just have spent an extra hour in the unlovely environment of Gare du Nord departures.
And then we were back in London, walking through Saint Pancras, and it almost seemed as if we’d only been there the day before, even though it was eleven days earlier.
When I looked at our itinerary before we left, I was a bit worried that it would feel as if we were spending the whole time on trains. In fact, it wasn’t like that at all. Even in the places that we were in only for one night, it seemed as if we saw a representative sample of what the city had to offer. Furthermore, when you’re on the train, you see so much of the country between the cities. We saw snow in the Alps, and abandoned houses – so many abandoned houses – in the Italian countryside, and mountains and lakes everywhere. We saw ancient ruins and mediaeval cities and four different countries and heard multiple languages.
I’d definitely do it again. Even with the horrible delay on the way to Bologna, I enjoyed the trip.
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Week 274: London to Athens via Rome (and a few other places)
The London Okinawa Sanshinkai was invited to perform at Japan Festival Greece in Athens on the Easter weekend – our Easter, that is; Orthodox Easter as celebrated in Greece falls a week later this year – and I decided to take part. L— and I chose to make a proper holiday of it: rather than flying to Athens, we’d take the long route by train and ferry, and stop off at some other places along the way. The itinerary, travel, and hotels were all organised by Byway, who we used to arrange our trip to the Basque country last year, using their concierge service. It wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t all that expensive either, considering that it included travel, hotels, and first class upgrades on most of the train journeys. It was also very easy and almost certainly cheaper than the nightmare of administration that booking it ourselves would have been.
Week 273: Ill communication
I spent the whole week with a horrible cold. My nose kept running. My throat hurt. But the worst part was the lack of sleep: I slept fitfully and not very much. Four hours on Wednesday night felt like a luxury by comparison to the preceding days, and it wasn’t until about Friday that I felt actually rested.
Week 272: It’s a long way to Heilongjiang
I’m writing this sleep-deprived, having come down with a nasty cold at the weekend that has kept me awake for the past two nights. I hope it won’t be too incoherent as a result.
Week 271: Dislocation
I’m exceptionally late to write this up. Even though I was assiduous about writing my notes on paper last week, I’ve had too many busy evenings to sit down and transcribe them. I’m finally doing it, more than halfway to next week.
Older entries can be found in the archive.