Treni italiani sono terribili.

Alright, now to update you on getting to Italy.  First, the one sentence summary.  Then I’ll explain.

In order to get from Spain to our host in Italy we took: one bus, two subways, one plane, two trains, sleeping in a train station, another train, sleeping outside a train station, and a car ride.

The Italian train system frustrated me before, when we visited Torino, but I never thought that I could feel so frustrated that all I could think about was going home.

The day started early, with a 7:20 AM bus from our host’s village to Madrid.  We were exhausted from being up late packing, and spent most of the trip dozing off.  When we arrived to the bus station we took two subways to get to the airport, had to pay an extra fine even though we had a boarding pass (oh well, just a euro), and proceeded to figure out the RyanAir process.  Which by the way, I’ll be taking RyanAir out of my Travel Resources page, because it is not as wonderful as we thought.  Went through checking our bags, the visa check, and proceeded to our gate, still with two hours to spare.  Not a big deal, but with recent events we thought security would be heightened, so we had the mindset of “better more time than no time.”  We got on our plane, got lucky with two bulkhead seats, and was annoyed by RyanAir flight attendants constantly trying to sell the passengers food, perfume, lottery tickets, those scam “energy bracelets” and all sorts of things.  So much for napping.

When we arrived in Pisa, we bought a train ticket from the airport to Florence, with the plan of getting off at Empoli.  We forgot to validate our ticket, so we almost got busted and fined for not doing so, but the train guy decided to show some mercy and validated it for us for 5 euros.  Not a wonderful start.  It was also then that we found out that the train wouldn’t be stopping anywhere, it just goes straight to Florence.  Okay… Not the end of the world, we’ll just take a train from Florence to Siena.

Unfortunately, all the trains from Florence to Siena were cancelled due to an electrical problem on the route.  So Jon stood in line for over an hour to ask some one for advice on how to get to our final destination, and after them assuring us that the train to Chiusi would get there in time to get on a train to Siena (and then get off on the stop for our host), we ran to the platform and hopped on the train.

Well, in order for us to make it to Chiusi in time for us to train towards Siena, the Italian train system would have to actually run on schedule.  We got there, only to find that we were in a nothing town, and had just missed the last train by 5 minutes.  We called our host, and after finding out that she wouldn’t be able to pick us up from the first train back home, we had to wait until 9:30ish the next morning until we could have some place comfortable to sleep.  After spending nine hours in the Chiusi train station, failing to get any sleep and freezing our butts off, we decided to hop on the first train anyway, with hopes of the station in Rapolano having a better place to sit.

Wrong again.  The station was tiny, but worse, the building was closed.  Now we had about four and a half hours, most of which we spent freezing, to wait outside until our host could pick us up.  I felt like I was going to be cold for the rest of my life.

I will, never ever ever again, use the Italian train system, unless I can start at the crack of dawn and hopefully avoid the chance of getting stuck some place after missing the last train.  I had a very poor first impression of Italy; its people, its transportation and its organization.  All that being said though, our host is wonderful, there are tons of people here, and we’ve had a good time since we arrived.  I’ll fill you in on that bit later though.